[The Boric government can recover from the lopsided rejection of
Chile’s new Constitution by harnessing the energy behind the
country’s reform movement.]
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CHILE’S CONSTITUTIONAL MAKEOVER, TAKE 2  
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John Dinges
September 12, 2022
The Nation
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_ The Boric government can recover from the lopsided rejection of
Chile’s new Constitution by harnessing the energy behind the
country’s reform movement. _

A Santiago protester holds up a placard reading “Wake Up Chile”
on September 5, the day after Chilean voters overwhelmingly rejected
the country's new Constitution in a referendum vote., Javier Torres /
AFP

 

There should be a rule in politics that if you have trouble explaining
something, you can’t build a movement around it.

Chile’s new draft Constitution—defeated in a resounding referendum
vote in early September—had 388 articles and was the size of a small
paperback. It enshrined 100 kinds of rights—including things like
free legal advice and Internet access. It was drafted by a sometimes
raucous group of elected representatives, many of whom had strong
opinions on one issue or another but otherwise shared little in the
way of political experience. And yes, there was the delegate who faked
a serious illness to get elected; and another who took off her shirt
to address the convention.

Sorry; there’s more. A group of people participating in an official
pro-Constitution rally performed a simulated a sex act—using a
flagpole that displayed the Chilean flag.

The process was so very easy to caricature. And Chile’s right-wing
press had a field day doing so. The new Constitution’s opponents,
led by the right but including some centrist leaders, railed against
the creation of a “plurinational state” with independent court
systems for multiple ethnic groups. A poll of Mapuche voters—members
of the country’s largest ethnic group—showed that only 12 percent
favored the creation of a plurinational state, and a large majority
distrusted the process.

Supporters of the Constitution were unable to point to a coherent,
unifying vision around which a consensus could form. In the end,
proponents were forced to argue that they would push through a series
of improvements to the complex document—provided voters approved it
first.

Supporters of the Constitution were unable to point to a coherent,
unifying vision around which a consensus could form. In the end,
proponents were forced to argue that they would push through a series
of improvements to the complex document—provided voters approved it
first.

That was hard to explain. Voters didn’t buy it, voting it down by a
resounding 24-point margin in a referendum held last Sunday.

The defeat was overwhelming and humiliating, especially for the new
leftist president, Gabriel Boric. Rejection varied little across age,
class, and income lines. Not a single major city or region voted in
favor.

Yet there is still plenty of room for optimism in the referendum’s
aftermath. The country’s rightist leaders, better organized and
financed and benefiting from Chile’s monolithically conservative
press, tried to frame the rejection as a political victory. But they
are wrong. There remains a mass movement for change in Chile, and over
coming weeks it will likely coalesce around a second, more orderly,
attempt to save the heart of the recently rejected Constitution.

The new Constitution promised to be perhaps the most progressive
national charter ever drafted. I read most of it, and found it an
inspiring document, although not an easy read. Chief among its merits
was purging Chile’s political system of the previous Constitution,
imposed by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1980. The crux
of that document—drafted in consultation with Milton Friedman and a
group of hard-right libertarian economists from the United
States—was the concept of the “subsidiary state”: the idea that
economic forces must be allowed to work free of government regulation,
except where there was no other alternative. The practical impact of
this model was to keep democratic elections at bay by a system of
designated senators and special oversight boards. The military was not
subject to civilian control—an arrangement that was more than
semi-fascist. You might say Chile was the country where Milton
Friedman fell in love with Francisco Franco.

Amendments more than a decade ago changed some of the most draconian
aspects of the Pinochet Constitution, but its economic vision and
regulatory regime remained in thrall to the dogmas of neoliberalism.

The heart of the new Constitution greatly strengthens the obligations
of the state to enhance labor, gender and consumer rights and to
renovate the underfunded public educational system—all measures that
sparked little public opposition in the run-up to the referendum vote.
Women are guaranteed “at least” half of all positions in state
institutions. Reversing the order of the neoliberal regime, the
Constitution strongly protects private property, while defining it as
a social good in an ecological context. It’s worth quoting:

_Every person, natural or juridical, has the right of property in all
its species and over all kinds of goods. Exceptions are those goods
that nature has made common to all persons and that the Constitution
or the law declares cannot be appropriated, such as water or air._

_The law shall determine the manner of acquiring property, its
content, limits and duties, in accordance with its social and
ecological function._

Despite the claims of the rightist opposition, the Constitution is not
a socialist document—far from it. Its economic and monetary
provisions didn’t spur controversy, and indeed, won the all-clear
from business publications such as _Bloomberg News_. But putting the
environment on the same plane as the economy is a radical idea—as
well as a timely response to accelerating climate change.

Water rights, for example, are currently a market commodity sold to
the highest bidder. The massive Aconcagua River, whose headwaters are
in the pristine glaciers descending from the 20,000 feet summit of
Mount Juncal, is badly depleted by the corporate-owned avocado
plantations and mining companies in its watershed. The river is now
dried up before it reaches the Pacific Ocean, less than 100 miles
away.

The new Constitution defines water as
“incomerciable”—unmarketable. Chile’s hundreds of magnificent
glaciers are also designated natural resources, and granted special
protection under the proposed Constitution.

Yes, it is hard to explain in a pithy slogan or sound bite why the
Constitution seeks to reflect a broad consensus around women’s and
Indigenous rights, while also leveraging massive support for consumer
and environmental protections. And that’s a big reason why the
cacophony of opposition on many fronts—including campaigns of
disinformation—led to the massive rejection of these guarantees.

The failure has been laid at the feet of the inexperienced young
politicians in the Boric government, and the 36-year-old leader did
not shrink from taking responsibility. The outcome was “humbling”
he said—and in the immediate wake of the referendum’s defeat, he
reorganized his government and jump-started an initiative to pull
together a new and simpler document.

Humility was not a sentiment shared by other leftist leaders
associated with the failed convention. “Thanks to the Chileans for
scorning their own country,” wrote one former delegate on Twitter.

Diego Ibañez, the spokesperson for Boric’s party Convergencia
Social, said scolding people for not “thinking like us” is
absolutely the wrong reaction.

“I think there is punishment for arrogance,” he said. “I believe
the Approve side ended up not building a vision for a possible Chile,
which would offer greater security for citizens to choose change. It
was not enough to list a catalog of social rights, instead of
communicating to the citizens, in their own language, a different
philosophy [of government] that they could trust. We failed in that,
and we have to be honest about saying that, in order to get back up
and continue this process.”

The painful relaunching of the constitutional process began this week,
with negotiations in Congress and new, more experienced faces in
Boric’s cabinet. The president fired his interior minister, a close
friend, and demoted his top political adviser, former student leader
Giorgio Jackson, who had led the government’s pro-Approve campaign.

Their replacements are both seasoned politicians who had served with
President Michele Bachelet, the establishment left’s most beloved
leader. The top cabinet spot went to Carolina Toha, also a successful
former mayor of Santiago municipality, which includes the center of
the sprawling city. The key secretary of the presidency position was
assigned to Ana Lya Uriarte, who on her first day persuaded rightist
leaders to step back from an announced boycott of the negotiations for
a rewritten Constitution.

The groundwork for success going forward hinges on an uncomplicated
political equation. An enormous majority—almost 80
percent—supported the 2020 plebiscite rejecting the Pinochet
Constitution and setting in motion the constitutional convention. The
movement to change Chile’s governing system was powered by a series
of massive popular protests starting in October 2019. That movement
put more than a million people in the streets in one rally—an event
echoed last week when the pro-Approve forces staged a peaceful, music
filled demonstration with a crowd estimated at well over 100,000
people.

The core elements of this movement for change seem to be intact,
despite the blowout vote against the new Constitution. Boric will have
to draw on deep reserves of political skill to orchestrate a second
writing and an approval initiative that will avoid the gaffes of the
September referendum campaign. Boric is firmly identified with the
movement and the process, but he does not control it—and the same is
true for the center-left parties in his coalition.

Chile is not another South American nation convulsed by destabilizing
currents of authoritarian populist rule, in the mold of Brazil.
Indeed, the revolt against the Pinochet neoliberal regime might be
more aptly termed anarchist than populist. It has a dark side. During
the 2019 uprising, protesters trashed and burned Metro stations; a
Catholic Church was ransacked; black-clad “Front Line” squads
wielded clubs and shields in skirmishes with Chile’s notoriously
brutal militarized police.

Boric’s administration has not seen a repeat of the violence. Most
political observers in Chile credit him with calming the waters in
2020, when the protests threatened to get out of control.

At the same time, his approval rating has plummeted. Among other
crises, Chile has been hit by high inflation and drought. Boric’s
ambitious reform agenda is only getting started—and in order to
steer it back toward consensus, he must now coach a leaderless
movement in an orderly rewrite of the country’s first constitutional
rewrite.

John Dinges has been writing for many years on Latin America. His
latest book is _The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought
Terrorism to Three Continents_.

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ __permission_
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Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
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* Chile; Chile's Constitution; Boric;
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