By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Utter the words “nine eleven” and what instantly comes to mind? The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, of course.
But that’s not the case in Chile. On Sept. 11, 1973, that South American country witnessed the violent overthrow of the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and its replacement by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Pinochet set to work designing a constitution that would consolidate executive power, constrain democratic representation, and enshrine free market fundamentalism. In 1980, seven years after the coup, Chile got a new constitution. He set the country on a path of such extreme neo-liberalization that Chile would become the only country in the world with a constitutionally privatized water system.
Debt soared and Chile became the most unequal country in the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Chile’s tuition fees rank among the highest in the world, trapping students in cycles of debt repayment that can last decades.
In October 2019, the country exploded in student-led protests. The unrest was sparked by a hike in public transportation prices, but it quickly expanded into broader demands for greater equality and more social protections. The demonstrators were brutally suppressed by President Sebastian Pinera, who authorized the deployment of the Chilean Army to enforce order.
A year later, Chileans turned out in record numbers to vote in a special plebiscite for a new constitution, organized in the wake of the protests: 78.28 per cent voted in favour, and 79 per cent for a convention of elected citizens to write it.
The charter that emerged from the Constitutional Convention elected in July 2021 was the first in the world written by a body split equally between male and female delegates.
Its proposals included characterizing Chile as a “plurinational” state, to reflect the multi-ethnic nature of the country, and strengthening the rights of its indigenous peoples, about 13 per cent of the population, by establishing autonomous indigenous territories. It also introduced rights to free education, healthcare and housing. And it prioritized the environment and put climate change centre stage.
On Sept. 4, 2022, a referendum was held on the new constitutional text drafted by this body. Amid historic turnout rates, a crushing majority of Chileans -- 61.82 per cent -- rejected the proposal.
It was a major blow for current President Gabriel Boric, a left-winger elected in the autumn of 2021 who had risen to prominence during the anti-government protests. Boric had tied his fortunes so closely to the new document that the result was seen as a rebuke to his government.
He had lobbied hard for the new document but he acknowledged that the results made it evident the Chilean people “were not satisfied with the constitutional proposal that the convention presented to Chile.” Still, most Chileans seemed to have agreed that the current document, that dates from the Pinochet dictatorship, must change.
Yet this past May 7, in a further slap at Boric, the right-wing Republican Party won a resounding victory at the ballot box in elections for the newly formed 51-member council that was elected to draft the new constitution. To add to Boric’s setback, the Republican Party’s founder, José Antonio Kast, was the man Boric beat for the presidency two years ago.
The plebiscite was the first vote in Chile with compulsory voting and automatic registration, so it was the most in-depth look at the entirety of Chile’s electorate.
The new body has 23 representatives of the Republican Party, eleven from others on the right, and only sixteen from the left (plus one representative of indigenous peoples). And they will probably create a document that will be similar to Pinochet’s old one.
How do we explain the lurch of Chilean society, from left-wing positions and demands for sweeping social reforms, towards the right, in just a few years? Clearly, Chileans were not ready to support a charter that would have been one of the most progressive in the world and would have fundamentally changed the South American nation.
There was a lot at stake in the plebiscite, and fears were stoked among the population, such as anxiety over losing ownership of private pension funds, fear of losing privately owned housing, and concern of the effects of plurinationality, which was presented by its opponents as a dissolution of national identity.
The nation, the left had contended, should be “pluralized” into a series of communities (or “peoples”) rooted in “territories,” thus questioning the constitutive unity of the country itself. This pluralized notion of the state and the nation left a bad taste in people’s mouths: The call for separate local justice systems for indigenous peoples and the replacement of the Senate (one of the oldest in the modern world) by a chamber of regional representation did not go over well.
The 2021 presidential election was an early warning of a major shift in popular sentiment, especially since Kast had won first place in the initial round that November (albeit in a context of high electoral fragmentation) until overtaken by Boric a month later. So in 2023, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that violently ended the democratic socialist experiment of Allende, the left remains in disarray.
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