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Maya Fernández Allende was appointed Minister of Defense by future President Gabriel Boric
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Granddaughter of the late president, her mother committed suicide in Havana in 1977
“I admire my grandfather’s loyalty and my mother with Chile”, has repeated Maya Alejandra Fernandez Allende. She is 50 years old, a present full of promises and a past that connects her with a lineage, not just any. the future president Gabriel Boric has appointed her to none other than head of the Ministry of Defence. More than a paradox of history, his appointment speaks of how society has elaborated over the years the 1973 coup and the experience of the democratic transition, with its achievements and pending issues. The face of Fernández Allende gained greater visibility in the heat of the profound changes that went through that country after the social outbreak of 2019 and the launch of the Constituent Assembly that will eradicate the matrix inherited from the military dictatorship. The arrival in the Government of a new generation of leftists is one of the immediate effects of the so-called “reventón”. In a few weeks, starting on March 11, Maya will have to articulate the relations between a 36-year-old president and the Armed Forces.
Collective and family tragedies reverberate in his surname. Salvador Allende took his own life on September 11 because he did not want to surrender to the military who betrayed him. He was with him in those dark hours Beatrice Allende, the most politicized daughter, also married to the Cuban diplomat Luis Fernández de Oña. That morning, the father put on a helmet. He took the machine gun that I had given him Fidel Castro and ordered him to leave the Palacio de la Moneda. Along with her mother, Hortensia Bussi and little Maya, her daughter, went into exile. Four years later, Beatriz Allende would also commit suicide with a shot to the head.
The reasons for his death always had a halo of incognito. In Cuba he had had another son, Alejandro Salvador Fernández. By decree, Castro ordered that he take his mother’s surname first, to carry, as a man, with all his historical burden. But it was Maya, upon returning to Chile at the end of the dictatorship in 1990, who finally decided to follow the family tradition, as did her aunt, Senator Isabel Allende. “At least I can bring a flower to my grandfather and my mother. I think of all those people who cannot put a flower on their husband, son, sister or brother. There is a lot of pain.”
I want to thank the president @gabrielboric the trust placed in me to be part of the #cabinet in the Ministry of Defense. Now it is up to all of us to work to make life in our country more and more just. pic.twitter.com/8HPfmoZE8i
— Maya Fernandez Allende (@Mayafernandeza) January 21, 2022
In addition to starting a university career, he joined the Socialist party. She was a volunteer firefighter and was part of the Directorate of International Economic Relations. Maya was elected a socialist senator in 2013 and 2017. Some fellow supporters believed she was a budding leader, to the point that, two years ago, the head of the socialist caucus, Luis Rocafull, considered that she had “presidential” conditions.
decisive support
Fernández Allende has stood out in his training for early support for Boric’s candidacy. He did it in the primaries that made him a candidate for the presidency, last July. That determination unnerved part of the sectors most inclined to the center of his party. José Miguel Insulza, a former Allendista who, over the years, abandoned youthful anger, asked the illustrious granddaughter to “freeze your membership“if he joined the ranks of the new left. Many, however, pondered his courage. “Being phenomenal includes making decisions that have costs,” feminist political scientist Javiera Ulloa said at the time. Finally, socialism unambiguously backed Boric, among other reasons because it was necessary to prevent the victory of the extreme right Jose Antonio Kast.
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Along Bachelet’s path
Fernández Allende will be part of a government where 14 of the 24 ministries will be headed by women. “Now it is up to all of us to work to make life in our country more and more just,” Fernández Allende said upon being appointed. His presence in such a sensitive portfolio is not related to a political provocation. He has chaired the Defense Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, from where he promoted an approach towards the uniformed men. In this way, Maya is preparing to walk a path analogous to that of Michelle Bachelet. Also the daughter of victims of the dictatorship – her father, an Air Force general, died in prison after being tortured, her mother also suffered torture – Bachelet held the same position as Maya in 2002 under the Government of Ricardo Lagos and became the first female minister of that branch in Latin America. History, again, finds in both cases affinities that are far from random.
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