It’s a sad but apt coincidence that former Chilean President Sebastián Piñera was killed in a helicopter crash this week — just as we were watching the sensible conservatism he represented die yet another cringeworthy death in the U.S. at the hands of conservative “parodies.”
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Miami got a big kick hurling that word “parody” to disparage the sensible immigration reform legislation that sensible Senate conservatives had crafted. Rubio and the Republican Party killed the bill so their presumptive presidential nominee and cult leader, former President Donald Trump, can use the border crisis as an issue against President Joe Biden.
But I hope Rubio ducked when “parody” morphed with astonishing speed into a boomerang that came flying right back at his and the GOP’s heads.
Because right now they’re the ones who look like the parody — a satire of MAGA conservatives who can be counted on time after time to reflexively do the right-wing thing instead of the right thing.
Piñera, who was 74, was not that kind of conservative, because he’d already seen how the right-wing thing — or the left-wing thing or any extremist thing — can poison a country like rabies. He came of age during Chile’s monstrously fascist Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. His family was part of the conservative elite that backed that regime; his brother served in Pinochet’s cabinet.
But Piñera, like most Chileans, voted against extending Augusto Pinochet’s rule in a 1988 referendum that ushered the military tyrant out of power. And when Piñera became Chile’s president in 2010, as a billionaire, he usually showcased a more constructive conservatism — which felt reminiscent of the Richard Lugar Republicanism I grew up with in Indiana.
He demonstrated it on the one hand by pushing pro-business policies that helped make Chile Latin America’s most prosperous country per capita. Meanwhile, however, he also went all out in 2010 not just to save the 33 Chilean miners trapped 2,000 feet below the Atacama Desert for 70 days, but to enact sweeping labor reforms in the aftermath, including a tripling of Chile’s mine-inspection budget.
When I interviewed Piñera shortly after the miners’ rescue, he said the experience had made him more bent on “closing [Chile’s] giant gap between the richest and the poorest, so we don’t have people living on two distinct planets.” He stressed that meant “getting our business owners to see that we need not only innovation from them but social responsibility as well.”
To be sure, Piñera made his share of conservative mistakes — especially in his second presidency, from 2018 to 2022, when he sent out the military to quell massive protests against that wealth chasm, which lingers in Chile like the odor of spoiled sea bass. Still, Piñera’s legacy matters because he showed post-Pinochet Chileans that a conservative can display the right, not just right-wing, stuff.
Even the young, leftist president who succeeded him, Gabriel Boric, said after Piñera’s death this week: “He was a democrat from the very beginning and genuinely sought what he believed was best for the country.”
Pan back to the U.S. — to the parody of conservatives who genuinely seek what they believe is best for Donald Trump. That lampoon was on full display this week when Rubio, fellow GOP Florida Sen. Rick Scott and House Republicans like Miami Congressman Carlos Gimenez vilified the very immigration reforms — especially a tightening of the dysfunctional asylum system — they’ve spent years screaming about and dressing up in camouflage on border visits for.
Why did they do a hit on the measure? Because El Donaldo told them to — because he needs chaos optics on the border, not reform, to make his racist demonization of immigrants look presidential come November.
But what he’s got now, in February, are the optics of a hypocritical GOP standing in a circular firing squad.
And that gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight image only got worse when House Republicans’ efforts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the border emergency went down in humiliating defeat Tuesday night — because three GOP members couldn’t bring themselves to mock the U.S. Constitution that way.
Or because, in other words, a trace of the sensible conservatism Sebastián Piñera kept alive in the Americas may still be alive in America.
Tim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.
