Who is the tattoo artist of Gabriel Boric, the president-elect of Chile?

Yumbel Góngora, a tattoo artist in Chile, came into contact with Gabriel Boric, then a student leader, by chance.

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They would talk about the design of what would be the first visible tattoo that Boric would stamp: a strip on his wrist with the islands of the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego. However, the idea did not materialize immediately.

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The artist maintained contact with the one who soon after would become elected deputy in 2014 and designed his first large tattoo, hidden on his right shoulder, representing the map of Magellan, without knowing that years later Boric would become the President-elect of the South American country.

Boric, a 35-year-old leftist who defeated far-right José Antonio Kast on Sunday in the second round of the presidential race, has four tattoos, all linked to the southernmost region in the world – Magallanes – from which he hails. He will make his mark as a young leader with visible tattoos, something striking and seemingly unique in a Latin American president.

And most, designed by Góngora.

“All his tattoos revolve around his region of origin,” Góngora told The Associated Press. “It is important for a person to never forget where you come from … that always keeps your eyes focused on where the important things are, not to get carried away by fame.”

Boric swept the young and urban vote, and for Góngora the president-elect represents a mix between urbanism with regional identity, which marks his character, humility and accessibility.

Góngora says that he finds the best way to express himself as a visual artist in tattoos. He assured that he studied ancient maps of that region at the ends of the world for months for that first tattoo design of the now president-elect.

“With Gabriel it is always a little longer than with other clients due to the issue of his time, so we kind of start talking here sometimes, but we review the sketch here and then we do the tattoo like months away,” he said. “I find him a normal ‘goat’, I did not feel that he was with someone as famous, he is someone ‘quiet’, simple, we talked about many things but that has been a long time ago”.

Góngora returned to make two more tattoos, a Magellan beech, a tree that on that side of the world is swayed by the strong winds of the place, on his clavicle, and the lighthouse on his left arm, much photographed.

He made several sketches for that lighthouse, which from the ends of the planet continues to offer its light and which became a kind of emblem in Boric’s life, when he was going through a personal depression of which he spoke and for which he was criticized during the first stretch of the campaign.

Góngora assured that the president-elect told him about that symbol that appeared in one of his dreams. “A lighthouse that shines on a desert island,” said the tattoo artist, who studied visual arts at the University of Chile.

Góngora’s studio is full of delicate drawings of different signs, in a careful space open to sexual diversity, full of combative and feminist references.

“I have tried to make my studio, my workshop, a political, safe place, for women, dissidents,” explained Góngora, whose hair combines jet black with different shades of green and whose body is dotted with dozens of harmonic tattoos . “I have voted recently in my life,” pointing out that “everyone’s hopes are pinned on what Gabriel can do with his team at this time.”

Góngora defines herself as an “anarcho-feminist” and that is why she says that for a long time she did not exercise her right to vote. Until he saw that such action could be counterproductive. “I already started voting when (the current president Sebastián) Piñera threw himself for the second time and I said this cannot be, this cannot be, it is backfiring me.”

Góngora was also one of the people who felt disappointed when the current president-elect signed the peace agreement on November 15, 2019, which represented an institutional solution to the social revolt of October of that year. She said that like many, back then, she felt betrayed by Boric, whose decision was widely criticized and led to the resignation of many of his party members.

“At the end you are like handing over a group of people who are fighting in the street to make an agreement with the powers that be,” he explained. Those who fought on the street, “the majority are currently in jail, and there has been no justice, there has been no reparation, there has been nothing. There are a lot of victims, also from the repression; victims of eye trauma, there is a lot of damage ”that has not been repaired, he added.

“Clearly now it is betting because well, Boric does what it has to do and that with this it can continue to advance in this process of making a little better country,” he said, smiling.

In his folder he keeps a sketch of a fifth tattoo for the new president, agreed long ago. He does not know if the more rocky and careless aesthetic that characterized him and that he had to abandon in this more formal stage of his life as the main political figure of the country, will allow this project to be carried out.

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Deshawn