Jeannette Jara Román, a member of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and a leftist candidate, seeks to become president of the South American country, backed by her achievements as a minister under President Gabriel Boric and her grassroots support.
On June 29 of last year, Jara won the leftist primaries with 60% of the vote, becoming the representative of this bloc, to which the Christian Democratic Party later joined. As a public administrator and lawyer, she served as Minister of Labor and Social Security in Boric's government, where she succeeded in passing the 40-hour work week law, raising the minimum wage to $534, and carrying out a pension reform that had been stalled in Congress for decades.
This Sunday, November 16, approximately 15.77 million people are eligible to vote in Chile's presidential election to choose among eight candidates. The 51-year-old candidate was born in "El Cortijo," a poor neighborhood in the commune of Conchalí, in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, where she experienced "inequality firsthand," as she recounts in a book she co-authored with journalist Alejandra Carmona López.
To combat crime, the former minister promised to lift banking secrecy to "follow the money trail," as she commented during the last presidential debate on Monday night. In her book, she also reflects on the rise of the far-right in the world and the country, with a discourse of hate and the malicious use of social networks to discredit people, destroy any public effort, and promote the reduction of the state with "chainsaws."
On international issues, the candidate expressed interest in Chile joining the BRICS group, although this topic does not appear in her government program. Her government program also considers raising the salary to a vital income of $800; universal childcare; price regulation for essential medicines; and facilitating access to a mortgage loan for young people, with subsidies for the down payment and preferential rates. On economic matters, Jara ruled out a tax reform and explained that she will strengthen the oversight powers of the Internal Revenue Service (SII) to prevent large taxpayers and companies from evading tax payments.
