Hotuiti Teao

Hotuiti Rangi Teao Drago (born 1 August 1977) is a Chilean politician of the Rapa Nui ethnicity who serves as deputy. who subsequently changed his surname to Teao. Following this adoption, the couple had a second child, named Hotunui O Te Rangi (b. 2012), whose name means Hotu (“beauty”) and Nui (“great”), while O Te Rangi means “fallen from” or “sent from heaven.”

In 2009, he was considered a potential candidate for the Chamber of Deputies of Chile by the Independent Democratic Union (UDI); however, the candidacy did not materialize. In 2013, he was nominated by National Renewal (RN) as a candidate for deputy in District 10; according to RN, he was the only parliamentary candidate nationwide belonging to an Indigenous people. He finished in fourth place and was not elected.

For the election of members of the Constitutional Convention held on 15 and 16 May 2021, he ran as an independent candidate for the Constitutional Convention on the Vamos por Chile list in the 7th District, Valparaíso Region. He obtained 4,974 votes, corresponding to 1.5% of the total valid votes, and was not elected.

He was a candidate for deputy in the 2021 parliamentary elections for District 7 (Algarrobo, Cartagena, Casablanca, Concón, El Quisco, El Tabo, Easter Island, Juan Fernández, San Antonio, Santo Domingo, Valparaíso and Viña del Mar), and was elected, serving from 11 March 2022 to 11 March 2026.

During his tenure as a deputy, in March 2023 he was identified as one of the lawmakers who arrived late to congressional sessions. He justified these delays by citing flight schedules from Easter Island; however, he was later found to have been untruthful, as his social media showed records of his attendance at a wedding in Arica with his wife. Teao stated that the matter was private and related to family affairs.