During the first week of February, José Antonio Kast, leader of the Chilean Republican Party, attended an event in Colombia organized by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian rights defense organization. In his dissertation he published an excerpt from the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio in which three young people from the right-wing extremist formation for the municipal council elections stood out. One of the names was Beatriz Hevia Willer, who was in the audience in her role as international director of the Center for Republican Ideas Studies. Three months later, Hevia, a 30-year-old attorney, became the candidate with the highest percentage of votes in those elections nationally: 23% and for the southern Los Lagos region. The following month she was elected by her peers as President of the 50-strong Constituent Council that will draft a new proposal to bury the Magna Carta inherited from the dictatorship. Since May 7 of last year, he has headed the Chilean electorate, which is precisely dominated by his Republicans.
Kast said he saw Hevia growing. Once she defended her law degree at the Universidad de los Andes, a private Opus Dei institution — where Republican adviser Luis Silva gave her research seminars — she got involved in Kast’s 2017 presidential campaign. She toured Chilean territory with the candidate as a youth coordinator. After the presidential candidate’s defeat that year, she asked then-deputy Harry Jürgensen, who belonged to the traditional centre-right Renovación Nacional (RN) party, for a job as legal adviser. Both came from the southern city of Osorno, had studied at the same German institute and their families had known each other for a long time. Jürgensen only interviewed her for the position.
In parallel, Hevia was part of the Acción Republicana, the movement Kast had before the party was founded. The head of the formation recalled how surprised he was by the young lawyer’s performance in televised debates. For example, she went on CNN and without hesitation defended her position against abortion. Or against the replacement. Or against in vitro fertilization. The conservative movement took note of this.
In Congress, some bills on which he advised Deputy Jurgensen made their way to the port, such as the bill regulating solid biofuels to raise thermal energy quality standards. Hevia has had to meet several times with other advisers to members of the House of Commons Economic Commission. Her ability to reach consensus prompted the Economy Ministry of Sebastián Piñera’s government to include her in its team. Lucas Palacios was the minister in the middle of a pandemic. And now that Hevia is at the helm of the Constitutional Council, she brings out the same qualities as those who know her little or a lot: hardworking, meticulous, competent. “She was very succinct in her comments. Whenever he spoke on a particular legal issue, we all paid close attention to him because they were deep reflections,” adds Palacios.
With the arrival of Gabriel Boric in La Moneda, Hevia returned to advise Juergensen, who had been re-elected in 2021 as an independent and with Republican support as an MP. According to the lawyers, she has neither hunger nor political ambitions. They assure that he is not thinking of making a career. But when she’s not thinking about it, her training partners are already thinking about it.
One of the options considered was that Hevia would promote herself as a legal adviser in the district of her region in southern Chile, so that she could take over the post of MP in the region tomorrow. Now it is likely that she is better known than Jürgensen. Not just in the region, but in the country.
The Republican House of Representatives, as the leadership team calls the party, asked Hevia to run for the office of elector. She saw international relations as the study center of the Republican Party, a parallel to Spain’s Fundación Disenso, chaired by Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right formation VOX. Both centers are linked, as are other international groups, where they organize seminars and carry out exchanges of young professionals who could enter the political arena tomorrow.
Hevia, the eldest of three sisters, agreed to become an advisor in the campaign, representing the southern region where she lived until she was 18 and to which she often escapes. In the promotional videos, he said he knew “what that daily exertion is, that work exposed to the cold and the rain.” “In Santiago, they don’t understand our way of life, we feel invisible and hardly heard,” he said, while in the kitchen he was putting bread in a wood-fired oven and making tea. In the middle of the campaign, his father, Gerardo Hevia Hott, partner and director of the Osorno Agricultural and Livestock Society, died suddenly. They always talked about politics and she really wanted her daughter to win the election. Hevia reduced the intensity of the election campaign and reduced its media appearances.
He took part in the TV show “100 undecided” on the Mega channel, where candidates of different political persuasions had to convince the public of their positions. Despite the fact that it was perceived as complicated at times, such as with the health care system, tears of pride flowed in the Republican House of Representatives that night. For the same reason, they were not impressed by the relief with which she appears to be accepting the post of President of the Constituent Council. Vice-President Aldo Valle, an independent socialist, has his office next to Hevia’s in the Congress headquarters in Santiago, in the center of the capital. They meet in one area or another to discuss the tasks assigned to them. Sometimes they address issues beyond the eventuality.
In his early days leading the trial, Valle emphasizes Hevia’s dialogue and careful demeanor so as not to create mistrust or animosity between the various magistrates. There are even issues that could be defined behind closed doors and they have preferred to discuss them with the leaders of the other factions in favor of transparency. Referring to the speech Hevia gave on the day of the council’s inauguration, in which he spoke of Chile going through a moral, political, economic and social crisis, Valle claims that this is an expression of the Republican Party’s political vision. The vice-president makes it clear that while he respects other ideological perspectives or moral philosophies, he is always careful that “hopefully this legitimate conservative conception does not degenerate into authoritarianism.”
Hevia, newly married, is adept at dodging controversial topics. For example, when asked his opinion on Augusto Pinochet, he concludes that we need to look to the future. What attracted most attention was his diagnosis of the “moral crisis”, to which he referred in the speech. This week, in every interview granted, he explained that he was referring to a more civic issue, such as parents not paying child support, domestic violence or the weakening of family life.