Boric Leaves Chile  With Protected Seas and Unsettled Political Tides

As Gabriel Boric leaves La Moneda, Chile is left with a large new marine protection area, a difficult final assessment, and a clearer question about what kind of Pacific power it wants to become amid the upcoming rightward shift in Santiago.

A Farewell Written on Water

A few hours before leaving office, Gabriel Boric signed a decree that was both practical and symbolic, a final act meant to last beyond the immediate attention. By expanding the Nazca-Desventuradas and Mar de Juan Fernández marine parks, Chile increased its protected waters to fifty-four percent. This expansion adds nearly 360,000 square kilometers of ocean under strict protection, bringing the total protected marine area to 947,142 square kilometers. This places Chile among the top countries in ocean protection and gives it the world’s third-largest fully protected marine area.

The scale is huge, but the meaning gets clearer when brought down from the map to the islands. EFE reported that the new parks in the Valparaíso Region protect an archipelago of singular biodiversity, with high endemism and immense ecosystem value, as the Environment Minister Maisa Rojas said at the decree signing. In Juan Fernández, eighty-seven percent of fish species are endemic. In the Nazca Desventuradas Islands, the figure is seventy-two percent. The waters shelter the Juan Fernández fur seal and lobster, while also serving as a corridor for whales, sharks, sea turtles, and ocean birds. Beneath the surface lie seamounts that function like living oases, hosting ancient cold-water corals, hexactinellid sponges, and broad crinoid fields. It is a hidden republic of life, far from Santiago, but deeply tied to what Chile is.

That’s why Boric’s final environmental move also has a geopolitical meaning. In Latin America, protected land is often seen as a moral or scientific issue. It’s both. But in Chile, it’s also about ocean sovereignty. A country stretched along the Pacific isn’t just defined by what it mines, exports, or ships. It’s defined by what it chooses to protect. Large marine parks aren’t just conservation tools. They’re statements about how a country imagines its territory, its scientific credibility, and whether it wants to respond to global ocean pressures with extraction alone or with restraint, law, and lasting protection.

An Island Demand, Not a Capital City Fantasy

What gives this decree unusual weight is that the initiative did not begin as a polished slogan from the capital. The Juan Fernández community itself pushed it. The islands’ artisanal fishers have managed the lobster fishery sustainably for more than a century, and they wanted permanent protection for the ecosystems that sustain their culture, economy, and identity. That local origin matters. In a region where environmental policy is often suspected of arriving from above or abroad, this one carried the voice of people who live within the sea’s consequences.

“The islanders understand that the sea connects us and that is why we must care for it,” Julio Chamorro Solís, president of the local management council for the protected marine areas of Juan Fernández and Desventuradas, told EFE. He said the milestone was born from the island community and reflected an effort that began with Bachelet, continued with Piñera, and now culminated with Boric. That continuity says a lot. In Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, governments change, tones harden, coalitions fracture. Yet sometimes a territorial truth survives ideology. The sea, in this case, proved more durable than party lines.

Chamorro told EFE that protecting the sea is in the islanders’ DNA and part of the inheritance they want to leave to future generations. Senator Ricardo Lagos Weber said that the expansion shows how local leadership can drive one of Chile’s most important advances in ocean conservation. Maximiliano Bello of Blue Marine Foundation called it a decisive victory for the species that live there. Blue Marine, Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, Island Conservation, and Fundación Patagonia Azul all took part in the process, providing scientific, technical, and strategic support. The larger lesson is hard to miss. In a world of increasing stress on the oceans, Chile found a way to make local stewardship and scientific backing reinforce each other rather than compete.

A Final Speech Under a Changing Sky

But Boric’s final hours weren’t just about water, parks, and long-term goals. They were also about political setbacks, accountability, and the transition to José Antonio Kast. In his last national address before handing over the presidency, Boric defended his government’s record on security, pensions, and health care, but also took responsibility for two painful episodes near the end of his term. “I leave with my head held high and my hands clean,” he said in a live message from La Moneda on March 10. Then he got more serious. He mentioned the handling of the Monsalve case and the failed attempt to buy former President Salvador Allende’s house, adding, “In both, I take responsibility.” He also defended Allende’s legacy, saying, “The dignity of the former president is not stained by the mistakes I may have made.” He stated during a speech meant to bring political order to the final hours of his presidency.

The failed attempt to buy Allende’s house and turn it into a museum became especially damaging after legal conflicts involving then Defence Minister Maya Fernández and Senator Isabel Allende came to light. Boric had already admitted in January that an obvious conflict had gone uncaught in time. This hurt deeply because it touched the symbolic heart of Chile’s left, where memory is more than history—it’s moral capital. Boric’s final words tried to separate his own mistakes from Allende’s legacy, as if to say the state may falter, but the memory of the dead remains above the paperwork.

The speech also tried to cool the weeks of friction with Kast’s incoming team. Boric promised an impeccable transfer of power and said both he and Kast know that Chile comes first, a notable appeal to restraint after the clash over information shared during the transition on a proposed submarine cable project involving China. That dispute led Kast to suspend bilateral transition meetings and accuse the outgoing administration of lacking transparency. Here, the geopolitical layer sharpens. Boric leaves behind a country more protected at sea, but also one entering a new ideological era in which questions of China, security, infrastructure, and alignment with Washington will likely be read through a harder lens. His final rebuke to Donald Trump over the war with Iran, calling the U.S. president’s remark an example of “the banality of evil,” only underscored how different those instincts are.

So Boric leaves with two images attached to him. One is oceanic, patient, almost civilizational: Chile, with fifty-four percent of its waters protected, a Pacific country trying to build a legal shield around vulnerable life. The other is more raw and immediate: a president admitting mistakes, defending memory, and trying to keep institutional calm as the country shifts right. Both are real. Together, they tell the true story of a Latin American presidency at dusk, where legacy is never simple, only layered.

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