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Some did not answer calls and messages. But of the dozen UDI men and women who did do so this morning – parliamentarians, leaders, former legislators and historical figures – only three decided to comment on how they take it that one of the party’s historical men has been convicted yesterday of bribery and crimes repeated fraud to the treasury in the Corpesca Case, for which the prosecution requests eleven years in prison. Although the former mayor, former congressman and former senator Jaime Orpis stopper He resigned from the party almost five years ago (January 6, 2016, two days after being outraged), he has friends left there.
The party, yes, will not do anything similar to an official gesture. At least that seems afterwards that, made the consultations this morning, the directive that heads Jacqueline van Rysselberghe choose not to pronounce in quotation marks. In the staff and among some veterans explain that an institutional endorsement or signal does not correspondBut that does not mean that there are no links, solidarity and “human support”.
“I believe that each one is the owner of establishing the relationship he has had with Jaime,” his successor for Arica in the Senate thinks about that official distance Jose Miguel Durana, a friend of his and who between 2001 and 2010 was in charge of his parliamentary office in that area. Of course, he thinks that “while this process is open and awaiting the sentence, it is prudent that we not politicize it.” He also believes that what happened “is a shame” and He is one of those who does see him as “an exemplary politician”, but it says that “He was wrong, although this has also been a bit unfair; I hope the sentence is taking into account the quality of person that he is ”.
Durana says that “I sent him a very nice note” and that “I have always had telephone contact and text messages with him, always supporting a very dramatic situation for years.”
A veteran of Congress, the deputy Ramon Barros, reads that “it is the sentence to a time of politics in which Jaime Orpis had to pay all the bills since practically all the rest and many involved did not come out with any scratch.” The also candidate for secretary general in the list of Víctor Pérez He does not speak of errors or mistakes, but rather says that “the crimes he committed in his life they do not diminish their vocation to try to help, at some point with the wrong methods, if one can qualify them by virtue of the sentence ”.
Barros emphasizes that “he dedicated himself to public life” and prefers not to enter into the thick controversy that arose yesterday regarding qualifying him or not as “exemplary”. Yes he insists that “He is being judged, in my understanding, in an unbalanced way making him pay for everyone’s mistakes personified in the person of Jaime Orpis, I am not afraid to say so ”. Regarding who has been targeted with this, he answers that “It is not necessary to name nadie, we all know that at the end of the day he paid for the broken dishes of a system that erred in the way in which it proceeded. But we know that he was the only one at the end of the day, since the others did not come out with any scratches ”.
Other parliamentarians who requested a reservation say they have been in contact or have called him in these days. And that some even chose not to do it yesterday to give it a break, but they say they want to visit it this weekend. And one of them emphasizes that although it is not appropriate for the party to make an institutional point about Orpis, “the people, his friends from the UDI have not left him alone”.
As far as they remember in the UDI, the last time Orpis was publicly recognized was the June 21, 2016, five days after he entered the Capitán Yáber prison annex, where he served forty days in preventive detention.
That time it was to see a delegation headed by the then UDI president Hernán Larraín, accompanied by the senator Juan Antonio Coloma and the deputy Javier Macaya, who today competes against Víctor Pérez for the presidency of the party. In the eyes of the defense of the convicted person, history will say that the only union member who testified in his favor in the process was the former leader Pablo Longueira, who will soon face his own judicial destiny in the Soquimich case.
Friendship with Longueira and others, they do not forget in the UDI, led Orpis to join the group that started a summer community decades ago near Frutillar, in the so-called Salzburg Lottery, on land managed by the former party treasurer and wine entrepreneur Jorge Coderch MItjans. There, Orpis, Longueira, former deputy Cristián Leay, and also former UDI treasurer Andrés Tagle (today a member of the Board of Directors of the Electoral Service) had houses together.
Macaya is the third and last person who wanted to express what happens to him with all this: “I prefer not to talk about it, I can say that there is pain in the human. He himself gave his opinion which was very harsh and self-critical, there is not much more to say after that ”.
Larraín? Like the former minister and candidate for the UDI presidency, Victor PerezHe was also Orpis’s partner in the Senate, on a bench that was also made up of Andrés Chadwick, Evelyn Matthei and others, and where survivors such as Juan Antonio Coloma remain. The three men are some whom the party considers to be close or friends of the condemned man, along with names such as Longueira and several others who are 60 or slightly older.
Hernán Larraín it could have been another unionist declaring in favor of him in the case, but something prevented him. On March 27, 2019, when he was already Minister of Justice, he told CNN that “I have been informed that we have been incorporated by the defense of Jaime Orpis as a witness, there are a significant number of people from the political sphere, I was a senator in that minute and along with 10 other senators we have been invited to testify, which I will do with great pleasure ”.
And he closed with a “I have full confidence in Jaime Orpis, of his conduct, and I hope to give testimony of it if I am required by the courts.” But it did not. In the defense of the sentenced person they say that although he wanted to, It would have been President Sebastián Piñera who told him that he could not and that it was little less than incompatible with his position. These versions suggest that in such a case he would have risked his position. Those who worked at La Moneda at that time remember that this warning could well have been made present as well Chadwick, then Minister of the Interior.
The point is that when Larraín said it, a controversy arose and the opposition criticized the point. There was even a meeting in the Palace between the minister and the president, the press picked up at the time. But among the intimate of the former UDI president, they categorically assure that neither of them warned him about anything, and that it was he who told Orpis’s defense that he would not do itprecisely because he is Minister of Justice. They add that he felt that it could be misinterpreted.
