Friday, March 29

The tricky Constitution

Next September will mark the 50th anniversary of the military coup that ended democracy in Chile. Few people would have imagined two years ago that this fateful date would arrive not only with Augusto Pinochet’s Constitution still alive, but also with a process underway to replace it led by the same sectors that claim the dictatorship.

Even for me, being Chilean, it is difficult for me to understand the political and emotional roller coaster that my country has been experiencing since the social outbreak broke out in October 2019. Documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who has dedicated his life to portraying and trying to understand our country, recently said that Chile is a contradictory country, accustomed to surprising you. A country of earthquakes that take you by surprise. And that this does not change overnight. Or maybe it never changes.

He said it after having released My imaginary country a documentary that poetically and emotionally portrayed the events that occurred around the social outbreak. When he filmed it, nothing seemed to predict that the political and social changes that Chilean society demanded would not come true. The enormous mobilization had materialized in rivers of people demonstrating and singing in unison the hymns against inequality coined during the dictatorship. There was no reason to think that the revolt that was fueled by the stones of the Andes was not anchored in a deep and sincere feeling, that the protest came from the heart of Chile.

But the country’s history is stubborn and, only two years later, a majority of the citizenry first decided (last September) to reject the constitutional text that was proposed to respond to social demands. Now, he has decided to leave the future of the reforms that had to change everything in the hands of the extreme right.

Opinion surveys say that the people who turned out to vote on Sunday did so thinking mainly of the political agenda of the right and the extreme right: the increase in immigration and crime. The result, however, has been the loss of a new historical opportunity to address the reforms that would make Chile a more just and egalitarian society.

Chile needs a new Constitution for many reasons. One of them is to address transcendental issues that have been on the waiting list for decades, such as the protection of the environment in a country devastated by an economic model that has not set limits to the exploitation of natural resources. You need a text that looks at the 21st century and lays the foundations to create, albeit timidly, a welfare state that provides health, education, pensions and basic social rights to a society where 1% of the population accumulates 25% of the wealth.

The country also needs to design a new system of territorial and political organization that replaces the current one, totally centralized, with a more federal one that allows not only the native peoples to have an institutional fit but also that the most remote regions, such as Magallanes or Atacama, have more autonomy. It is enough to look at a map of the country to see that it is a total anomaly that all decisions are made in Santiago, thousands of kilometers away.

These fundamental questions have not formed part of the debate, however, neither last September, when the text proposed by the first constituent assembly was rejected, nor now. On May 7, a new convention was elected where the most numerous formation is the Republican Party, from the extreme right, which adds 34 of the 50 seats with the traditional right. With these numbers they will be able to write the text they want since they exceed three fifths of the necessary quorum.

Their first announcement has been that they will not make major changes to the current Magna Carta, a text that the lawyer and former constituent Fernando Atria baptized in 2015 as “Tricky Constitution.” Approved in 1980 by the dictatorship, its main objective was to shield a neoliberal economic model where all things that are essential for the maintenance of life in Chile have been privatized, including water. It is tricky because it has managed for 40 years to relegate political representatives to a mere role of administrators, to the point that none of the Concertación governments managed, despite their vast majorities, to carry out even a single one of the structural reforms that citizenship demanded, because the institutional architecture prevented it. It is what the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit defined as a segregating formula imposed by the dictatorship, designed to the millimeter to weaken the State and favor the expansion of big capital.

At the same time that Patricio Guzmán reflected on the disconcerting nature of Chile and its earthquakes, he noted in these pages the risks represented by the fact that the revolt that began in 2019 did not have leaders or a clear program or ideology. This could be taken advantage of, he said, by the extreme right if the progressive forces of the government headed by Gabriel Boric did not convince with clear measures. His words now resonate like a prophecy.

It is difficult to predict where the constituent process will head. Among the proposals of the Republican Party is to ban abortion, and some of its members have come to question the right to vote for women. Something difficult to implement but that is a kind of joke of fate if we take into account the great feminist component that the social outbreak had. It was not by chance that all the voices chosen by Patricio Guzmán to tell it in my imaginary country they were women: they were the ones who carried the voice of the revolt.

It is likely that the more radical the text drafted by this new constituent assembly, the more chances it will have of being rejected in the December plebiscite. A scenario that would make it easier for Chile to continue riding this roller coaster that began in October 2019 with a 30-peso rise in the metro and which, as the slogan of the revolt invoked, was much, much more.



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