The Leftist candidate Gabriel Boric, 35, who won Chile’s presidential election to become the country’s youngest ever leader, started out as a student leader in the country’s capital rallying against the privatised education system. A native of Punta Arenas, Boric as a student led the Federation of Students at the University of Chile in Santiago. He rose to prominence leading protests in 2011 demanding improved and cheaper education.

The Guardian writes about Boric, ‘He belongs to a radical generation of student leaders who are grimly determined to bury dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bitter legacy once and for all’. It reported that Boric shouted on the night of his primary win, “Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and it shall also be its grave!” Boric spent months traversing up and down Chile vowing to bring a youth-led form of inclusive government to attack nagging poverty and inequality that he said are the unacceptable underbelly of a free market model imposed decades ago by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.