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14 décembre. Jour d'élection, en direct du Chili
- Jean-Marc Adolphe
- 10 hours ago
- 9 min read
Gael Yeomans, porte-parole de Jeannette Jara, candidate de gauche à l'élection présidentielle au Chili. Photo DR
With Victoria Luz, our young new correspondent in Latin America, and in exclusive partnership with a Chilean media outlet that shares our values, Les Humanités is travelling to Chile for the day and evening to cover the presidential election. As an appetiser to this continuous feed (first results at 11 p.m., and until then, news briefs, articles, exclusive analyses, surveys, interviews, etc.): a portrait of Gael Yeomans, the young campaign manager for Jeannette Jara, the left-wing candidate; and an exclusive interview in French with Isabel Allende.
PICTURE OF THE DAY
Top of publication. Gael Yeomans, 37, is the spokesperson and campaign manager for Jeannette Jara, the left-wing candidate in the Chilean presidential election.
Born in 1988 in Rancagua (a Chilean city in the central zone, capital of the province of Cachapoal and the Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins region, located about 100 kilometres south of Santiago, it now forms a conurbation with Machalí, in the heart of an agricultural and wine-growing area also marked by copper mining), Gael Yeomans belongs to a generation that burst onto the political scene through street activism rather than traditional parties. A lawyer trained at the University of Chile, specialising in social security, she has established herself as one of the most prominent figures on the left, emerging from student and feminist movements. Having been involved in the Communist Youth and then in libertarian collectives, Gael Yeomans helped found the Frente Amplio before becoming the first president of Convergencia Social, Gabriel Boric's party. Elected as a Member of Parliament in 2017 in a district of Santiago, she represents the working-class communities in the south of the capital and saw her vote share increase significantly when she was re-elected in 2021. In Parliament, she heads the Labour and Finance committees, where she advocates for reforms in pensions, workers' rights and gender equality. In 2025, she reached a milestone by becoming campaign manager for Gonzalo Winter, the Frente Amplio's presidential candidate, confirming her role as a key strategist for the progressive camp. An outspoken feminist and heir to the ‘estallido social’ protests, Gael Yeomans embodies a left that is both institutional and grassroots, seeking to transform the momentum of the streets of Santiago into a lasting majority at the ballot box.
NEWS OF THE DAY
In the aftermath of the first round of the presidential election in Chile, the entire French press repeated it in every possible and imaginable way (based on an AFP dispatch that lazy editors did not deem necessary to verify?): the far right is ‘at the gates of power’. Bucking this tremendous media tsunami, we were the only ones in the French press to take a closer look and offer a different perspective: ‘In Chile, Jeannette is holding on’ (HERE) and ‘In Chile, it's over, but not yet’ (HERE). The news has already confirmed what we suspected: as we wrote on 17 November, Franco Parisi, the ‘populist’ candidate who came third with 19.71% of the vote, did not succumb to the siren calls of José Kast, the son of a Nazi (and Pinochet nostalgic). In an interview with the Argentine daily La Nación, the leader of the ‘Partido de la Gente’ (People's Party) believes that Kast ‘has no credible plan’ and that Jeannette Jara is ‘a good candidate’. Some of his voters will follow his instruction to cast a blank ballot, but many will vote for Jeannette Jara, even though she is a communist...
The outcome is far from certain, as the two major Kast-Jara debates have seriously damaged the image of the far-right candidate as the favourite, who now appears to be on the defensive rather than presenting a solid programme. During their last televised face-off, Kast failed to reverse the momentum: the duel was deemed bitter and confusing, and many analysts believe that no decisive ‘Kast effect’ has occurred in the days leading up to the vote.
Mirroring this, Jara spent much of the end of the campaign making promises on security, a favourite theme of the right. She has taken a much firmer stance on crime, the ‘overoles blancos’ (1) and trafficking, while relying on measures already put in place by the Boric government: the ‘Calles sin Violencia’ (Streets without Violence) plan, increased police presence in working-class neighbourhoods, and, above all, a new municipal security law that formalises the role of cities in prevention, joint patrols with the police, control of public spaces and support for victims. In other words, far from arriving unarmed on this terrain, the left-wing candidate can claim very concrete tools already signed and financed by the executive, while Kast continues to promise an authoritarian restoration that is more incantatory than quantified.
(1). The ‘overoles blancos’ are groups of hooded high school students who cover themselves in white protective suits to carry out violent actions in certain iconic high schools in Santiago: these groups are clearly organised by the far right to create a sense of fear. According to information from humanités, this movement was conceived by Alexis López Tapia, leader of the neo-Nazi movement ‘Patria Nueva Sociedad’ in the 2000s and mastermind of a nebulous international constellation called ‘Nationalism and Socialism’, which borrowed the notion of ‘molecular revolution’ from Deleuze and Guattari to create panic, with the help of Catholic and conservative media, based on violent pseudo-insurrectionary movements aimed at destabilising the state.
TODAY'S THREAD
To closely follow the day and night in Santiago, Chile, we had planned to send Victoria Luz, our new young correspondent in Latin America (outside Colombia, where we have other correspondents). The problem is that she is a student (studying journalism) in Mexico, and a return trip from Mexico City to Santiago costs around €550 (plus incidental expenses while there), which is well beyond our financial means. So we will do open-source journalism as we have learned to do, but also relying on an exclusive partnership with a Chilean media outlet that is similar to us: The Clinic. This newspaper was founded in 1998 as an anti-Pinochet satirical weekly, mocking Pinochet's arrest in London, hence its name, taken from the London Clinic where the dictator was being treated. Today, it has become a pure player in political and social news with a strong tradition of biting humour and investigative journalism. Its tone remains marked by irreverence, caricature and derision, but the site also publishes more traditional investigations, political analyses, columns and reports, particularly on politics, social movements and human rights. The director of The Clinic is now journalist Pamela Castro (photo opposite), and the editor-in-chief is Maximiliano Chávez, under the editorial responsibility of Rodrigo Munizaga.
Live news feed from Chile: the first results will be announced and analysed from 11 p.m. Until then, continuous coverage: news briefs, articles, exclusive analyses, surveys, interviews, and more.
Isabel Allende. Photo Sipa Press
QUOTE OF THE DAY
ISABEL ALLENDE, ‘For love, we do things we wouldn't do out of fear.’
"Women are in danger. There is a return to the far right, and also to fascism, which places women in a submissive role and wants to keep them at home. There is a lot of talk about the traditional woman. In the United States, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a ceremony was held in a stadium, where politics and religion were mixed. People were on their knees, arms raised, comparing Charlie to a prophet, a martyr, Christ. Women must therefore be very careful, because all religions are patriarchal and want women to remain submissive. It is very easy to lose the rights that we have acquired over years of struggle – those of our grandmothers, our mothers – to obtain what we have, which is not yet the end of patriarchy. We continue to live in a patriarchy. But we can lose what we have. In the United States, the right to abortion, which was a federal right, has been lost. It is now up to the state, and there are attempts to remove contraceptives. The goal is for women to be pregnant, ignorant and kept at home as much as possible. (...) Chile is a democracy with very strong institutions. It has a constitution, good or bad, but people comply with it. There are clear rules. And I have enormous confidence in Chile. I think we are a country of the centre, and that whenever we go to extremes, things go wrong. We are always trying to get the pendulum to stop swinging so much and settle in the middle, because that is who we are. And I think that after what we have been through historically, we take great care of our democracy. (...) I write constantly about Chile or about people who come to Chile. I have been away from my country for more than 50 years, but people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ “From Chile,” I reply. Why am I Chilean? I don't know, I wasn't even born here. I was born in Peru. And I spent a few years here when I was little, in my grandfather's house. Then my mother married a diplomat and I started travelling everywhere. I then spent a few years here, married, but very few. Then came the military coup in 1973. I left Chile and became an immigrant in the United States. So why am I Chilean? I have no idea. And why does this land attract me? I don't know. And the land that attracts me most is the south, where I've been the most. When I was little, my grandfather had sheep on a farm in Argentine Patagonia. And once a year, for shearing season, he would take the train south to the end of the line, then trucks, then he would cross the mountains on muleback, and on the other side, Argentine gauchos would welcome him and take him to the farms. These were two-month trips. One year when I was suffering from anaemia, I must have been nine years old, my grandfather took me with him. And that journey through the mountains, forests and volcanoes was unforgettable. It has stayed with me to this day and is my landscape. (...) When I was little, we lived in my grandfather's house, where there was an invisible line separating the part where the family lived and where visitors were received, and the back courtyards, which were like another planet. This division, this social injustice, has marked me throughout my life and disturbs me greatly. (...) I cannot give hope, because hope cannot be given. But I can talk about my experience. I was born in the middle of the Second World War. At the time of the Holocaust, of atomic bombs. Human rights did not exist, the United Nations did not exist. There were 50 million displaced people in Europe alone. After all the horror of that period, those terrible years that saw the emergence of fascism, communism and Nazism, many good things happened. Many good things happened after that; humanity reacted. (...) While it is true that there are times like the one we are currently experiencing and like the one we experienced then, which are very serious, very difficult, causing many deaths, much pain and much violence, history tends towards more progress, more inclusion, more democracy. We are not going backwards. It may seem like we are moving in circles, but we are moving in spirals. (...) In De amor y de sombra, I wrote a sentence that I have often regretted: that fear is the strongest emotion, the most powerful feeling. In fact, I believe it is love. Out of love, we do things we would not do out of fear. And the most impressive love for me, since always, is that of mothers, of all species. We would not exist as a species without this incredible capacity for love that mothers have." (Isabel Allende, excerpts from an interview with Rocío Montes and Andrea Moletto, El País, 24 September 2025)
At 83, Isabel Allende, a distant relative of Salvador Allende (her father, diplomat Tomás Allende Pesce, was a first cousin of the Chilean president assassinated in 1973), is now the most widely read Spanish-language writer in the world, with tens of millions of copies sold and translations into more than forty languages. Born in Lima in 1942 into a family of Chilean diplomats, she grew up in Peru, Chile and various Latin American countries, an experience of uprooting that would become one of the recurring themes of her work.
A journalist and columnist before devoting herself to novel writing, she was brutally forced into exile after the 1973 coup d'état, first to Venezuela, then to the United States, where she settled in the late 1980s. It was in Caracas that she began The House of the Spirits, born from a long letter to her dying grandfather, which became a worldwide success, blending family saga, Chilean political history and a touch of magical realism. Since then, she has continued to write: from De amor y de sombra to Eva Luna, from historical novels such as Inés del alma mía to the memoirs of Paula, where the illness and death of her daughter transform writing into an act of mourning and survival. Her work explores memory, exile, the status of women and the Latin American imagination, in a rich, narrative language that appeals to both popular readers and academic audiences.
Based in California, Isabel Allende claims a dual Chilean and North American identity, and an unapologetic feminism that also informs her foundation dedicated to the rights of women and girls. At over 80 years of age, she continues to publish, travel and comment on Latin American current affairs, revisiting history – from the civil war of 1891 to the coup d'état of 1973 – to shed light on the fears and authoritarian excesses of the present.
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