Can Chileans find a way forward that is acceptable to the majority?
A year ago it seemed Chile’s young, leftist president Gabriel Boric was about to sail into a new era of Chilean politics, before a referendum result took the wind out of his sails.
On the point of leaping bravely into the future, Chileans had doubts. I went to speak to them and found a society divided on many issues, but acknowledging that something has to change.
Gabriel Boric Font assumed the office of president aged 36, making him Chile’s youngest ever head of state
On the 7th of October 2019, in response to a 30 peso (3p) hike in the price of a ticket on the city's metro system, secondary school students in Santiago, Chile collectively refused to pay their fares and openly confronted police who challenged them. When the following day a government minister suggested that those unable to pay the higher fare could get up earlier in order to take advantage of off-peak rates, anger about the cost of living spread with many protesters decrying the out of touch elite. The protests that followed came to be known as the social explosion.
Over the next ten days, confrontations between protesters and police escalated with metro stations and other public buildings burned to the ground and pitched battles between protesters and security forces in all major cities of the country. On the 18th of October, then-President Sebastian Piñera declared a state of emergency, warning that the country was "at war with a powerful and relentless enemy [...] willing to use violence and crime without limits." In contradiction of their president and in defiance of his curfew, on the 25th of October 2019, 1.2 million people took to the streets of Santiago in a peaceful protest against income inequality and the privatization of public services. (1.2 million amounts to over 6% of the entire population of Chile, making this possibly the largest protest march in modern history as a percentage of national population.)
A primary target for protesters' ire was the constitution of 1980, authored by the regime of General Pinochet, which enshrines the rights of private enterprise and property over and above access to public goods and political freedoms, thus protecting the free market from the intervention of democracy. In their attempts to quell the protests, the government offered a referendum on the constitution. Exactly a year on from the greatest protest in Chile's history, 51% of Chileans turned out to vote with 78% asking for a new constitution to be drafted by a democratically elected constituent assembly. The constituent assembly was chosen by the electorate in a second vote the following April, with an overwhelming majority of seats won by actors from the left of the political spectrum. They began to draft an unprecedentedly progressive text: it would have enshrined gender parity and reproductive rights, promised action on climate change, and recognised Chile’s indigenous peoples.
In November of 2021 Chileans went to the polls again, to choose their president. Right-wing populist José Antonio Kast was comprehensively beaten by the 35-year old left-wing populist candidate Gabriel Boric in the run-off vote. It seemed that the progressive movement in Chilean society, riding the tsunami of political energy released by the social explosion, was going to sweep away the fortifications of the neoliberal state so carefully constructed during Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
Kast, whose German father was a member of the Nazi Party in the 1940s, aspired to become “Chile’s Bolsonaro.”
Within 6 months of Boric taking the reins, however, the proposed new constitution was roundly rejected in a second referendum; with compulsory voting, 62% of Chileans rejected the draft document. Boric had supported the new constitution from the outset and several of his campaign promises were dependent on its ratification.
A year into Boric's mandate, I arrived in Chile and asked people what they thought of the desirability and possibility of changing the country's constitution.
Rosa
Rosa is one of the bar staff at The Last Frontier, a craft beer place in the university town of Valdivia. She studied sociology at university. She’s forty-ish, diminutive and has a curt, no-nonsense manner.
For Rosa, the 1980 constitution is a symbol of General Pinochet’s neoliberal-authoritarian regime. She sees the need for a new constitution as matter of legitimacy; Pinochet’s constitution “was never agreed by the people. It was written in the times of dictatorship.”
Indeed, Pinochet did hold a referendum on his 1980 constitution, but given the campaign of terror he had been waging against Chilean society, and given that they treated any blank or spoiled ballots papers as votes for the constitution, it can hardly be seen today to have much democratic legitimacy.
Furthermore, the 1980 constitution “doesn't address the needs of people today… Many primary resources in Chile are privatized and that is quite unusual. Even the water we drink is privately owned and many people in Chile today still don't have access to safe drinking water.”
90% of Chile’s water is owned by private interests, such as the Suez group, a sanitation giant based in France, who may sell it to the highest bidder. Decades of unsustainable water use by agribusiness (Chile produced 220,000 metric tons of avocados in 2022) and the country’s enormous mining sector, amongst other industries, have irrevocably depleted aquifers and reduced rivers to trickling streams. Large parts of Chile are in the grip of a decade-long drought, with 67% of the population living under a water emergency, and Chileans pay far higher prices for water than any other citizens in the region. Almost every disgruntled Chilean that I spoke to used water ownership as an example of how public goods are insufficiently protected by Chilean law.
“The right to water” – graffiti in Valdivia created to share the draft constitution’s highlights with passers-by
Like many on the left, Rosa is embittered by the rejection of the draft constitution, by the sense of an opportunity missed. “They are going to write a new constitution, but it won't have the same legitimacy as the defeated draft. The most democratically created constitution was rejected and defeated.”
It is true that the rejected constitution was created in a radically democratic manner. The method by which it was drawn up has been described as an experiment with democracy in real-time. While this may be a strength from the perspective of legitimacy, it resulted in an unwieldy document that was easy for the right to attack and undermine so that it was democratically rejected. Yet, as the example of the 1980 constitution shows, a constitution does not need to have been created democratically in order to have a lasting effect on the shape of a society.
Gregorio & Paulina
I have been standing at the side of the highway in between Castro and Ancud, on the island of Chiloé, for only two minutes when a black 4x4 pulls over. I hop up to be greeted by two rosy-cheeked septuagenarians. Paulina is heavily made-up with a string of pearls sitting over her black sweater. Her husband Gregorio at the wheel wears a black beret over a brilliant white moustache. While she speaks in a loud sing-song voice, he speaks in soft, forgetful tones.
The road to Ancud shortly before sunrise
Paulina taught in a primary school for over 40 years before retiring at the start of the pandemic. She thinks that the constitution needs to be made “up to date” because it was written a long time ago and some of it “doesn't cover the world as it is today.” She thinks it particularly important that any new constitution protect the environment because “the wildlife of Chile is a gift for the whole world.” Gregorio, in the driver’s seat, keeps very quiet.
The rejected constitution was deeply concerned with the environment, with 13% of its articles addressing the environment. It would confer on nature “the right […] to the regeneration, maintenance and restoration of its functions and dynamic balances, which include natural cycles, ecosystems and biodiversity.” The impacts of climate change are particularly obvious in Chile. Today, desertification threatens not only the country’s wine industry but also its biodiversity.
Gregorio, an engineer, isn't so sure Chile needs a new constitution, but concedes, a little petulantly, that, “the politicians seem to want one.” It seems they both voted against the proposed draft of the new constitution and when I ask why Gregorio focuses on the members of the constituent assembly, describing them as “ill-mannered.” When I ask what he meant by that, he changes tac and explains that they did not have sufficient experience: “they were unqualified for the job, just ordinary people.” It is easy to see how a constituent assembly made up largely of environmentalists, feminists and communists chaired by an indigenous woman might not be palatable to these well-to-do Chileans, who kept their heads down during the ‘disappearances’ of the 1970s, prospered during the economic boom of the 80s and 90s, and may or may not be apologists for Pinochet’s reign of terror.
Paula complains of the constituent assembly, "they wanted scrap everything and start again. It was too violent, too aggressive." Neither of my hosts is keen to elaborate or give details as to which aspects of the proposed constitution they considered ‘violence,’ but its clauses included obligatory gender parity on the boards of public companies; that reproductive rights should be extended (abortion only currently being allowed in cases of threat to life and rape); and, that the state should respect the self-determination of indigenous groups and guarantee them their ancestral lands in perpetuity.
The constitutional crisis has become a proxy for Chile’s culture wars. The same energy that filled the constituent assembly with anti-establishment figures of the left, could end up propelling a toxic far-right populist such as Kast into the presidency.
Protesters gather peacefully on the Alameda in central Santiago on International Women's Day, many demanding access to elective abortion
Constanza
Constanza, dressed all in black with facial tattoos and a septum piercing – the uniform of young Santiaguiños, is tapping away on her laptop in the Museum of the Social Explosion, a collection of artwork and artefacts connected with the movement that ignited Chile in 2019.
It is no surprise that Constanza believes Pinochet’s constitution is “standing in the way of democracy.” But why does she think that the people rejected it?
“The right wing were always telling stories and spreading lies. Probably half of Chileans never read it [the draft constitution], but they believed what they heard.”
In the months leading up to last September’s vote on the draft constitution, misinformation about its contents abounded on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. Many of these took the form of deliberate misinterpretations or exaggerations of clauses included in the document, which were therefore harder to refute. One popular claim seized on the draft’s assertion that Chile was a ‘plurinational’ state to suggest that the country was being broken apart. Posters were printed suggesting that abortions would be permitted up to 9 months and that the protection of private property was coming to an end. It is difficult to know how much of an impact these lies had on the electorate. Unusually for Chile, the final referendum to approve or reject the draft constitution was compulsory, thus including many more indifferent or apolitical voters who predictably preferred no change to an apparently highly controversial unknown.
Constanza points out that “the older people, those over the age of 40, grew up in an age of repression.” She thinks that as a result they “find it very difficult to hear young people talking about issues that for them are taboo, such as homosexuality or reproductive rights. So this too has put them off the new constitution. I don’t know what it is like in your country, but older people in Chile don't respect the ideas of younger people.”
She is describing very accurately the suspicion and lack of respect that I observed in Paulina and Gregory only days before. It is a neat picture: the reactionary older generations – haughty, repressed and fearful – unite to crush the progress of the youth and maintain the grey status quo. It is, however, worth noting that the authors of the draft constitution were not all particularly young; 60% of the constituent members were over the age of 40. More importantly, it was not only the Paulinas and the Gregorios who voted to reject; many young people voted to reject the draft constitution, as did many indigenous communities.
She also complains about the misconceptions regarding the make-up of the constituent assembly. “They heard that the constituent assembly were not experienced and so they didn't trust them, but it was not true, there were many lawyers involved in writing the constitution.”
It is true that the constituent assembly was not only very democratic, but also contained many objectively well-qualified and talented people. However, its workings were not characterised by harmony and collaboration. The right-wing rump were not needed to secure the necessary two-thirds majority required for any additions to the draft document and were thus alternately trampled and ignored, which did not stop them from passing unflattering anecdotes and scare stories to a hostile press. Long before the draft document was available to read, many Chileans must already have decided that it was not the constitution for them.
Carolina & Joaquín
Carolina runs a guest house in the town of Machalí, an hour south of Santiago by car, on the edge of the Andean cordillera and just a few miles from the world’s largest underground copper mine, El Teniente. Joaquín is her neighbour and boyfriend.
“We used to go swimming in the river after school.” - Carolina remembers growing up in the mining town of Coya in the 70s and 80s before climate change and unsustainable water usage made the area dangerously dry
They are both concerned about the effects of climate change in their region, which has witnessed devastating forest fires in recent years. They both voted for Boric at the presidential run-off, but while he voted for the proposed constitution, she voted to reject.
Joaquín explains, “we need a new constitution but there are many competing interests that divide the people and so impede the process. For example, the mining industry: our economy needs copper, but we also need a healthy environment.”
Chile’s copper mining industry makes up 15% of its GDP and the role of mining is set to increase with the race on to increase lithium production and match global demand. Meanwhile, the water usage of the mining sector is placing an unbearable strain on ecosystems.
He felt that the proposed constitution would have empowered the state to reign in private companies; she thought Chile could do better. She reasons, “If the constitution is going to last, it has to represent the people of Chile, a majority of people, and this text was a bit ahead of its time.”
Who knows when it will be the time to listen to those suffering under environmental, racial, gender-based and economic injustices in the country.
Despite the disappointment of the progressive element in Chilean society, there seems a strong likelihood that the 1980 constitution is on the way out. Congress – finely balanced between left-wing and right-wing coalitions – has turned away from direct democracy to a more hybrid approach, appointing a group of experts who will draft a new text according to twelve institutional bases agreed upon by lawmakers. This draft will be handed to a directly-elected ‘constitutional council’ of fifty to edit, before a final referendum in December of this year.
