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SANTIAGO, Chile – In 2019, when hundreds of thousands of Chileans took to the streets in protest, a young, tattooed politician helped broker a deal to end the unrest. The pact called for a new constitution to appease protesters demanding a fresh start — and a voice for those long largely left out of the South American nation’s politics: women, indigenous people, the LGBT community.
Now this young politician, a shaggy-haired 36-year-old former student activist named Gabriel Borich, is the president of Chile. And this week he received a document that could become Chile’s new constitution, a 388-article charter that envisions a progressive, feminist future for the South American nation.
“Today we begin a new phase,” Borich said Monday at the former building of Chile’s Congress in Santiago, the 19th-century palace that has hosted the constitutional convention for the past year. “Once again, the people will have the final say on their fate.”
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Chileans are set to vote on September 4 on the document, which will enshrine many of the priorities of social movements led by younger generations: gender equality, environmental protection, indigenous rights and guaranteed access to education. The constitution is one of the first in the world to be drawn up in the context of a climate crisis and written by a convention with gender equality. It recognizes the sentience of animals and their “right to live a life free from abuse.”
It is a woke constitution driven by left-leaning millennials and created for a modern nation led by one. The question is whether Chileans are ready for it.
“What Chile decided … was to become part of the new demands raised by a particular generation,” said Sergio Toro, a political scientist at Chile’s Mayor University. Their success, he said, depended on whether they could achieve this new social pact. “If they succeed, it will mark the beginning of a different country.”
The experiment could serve as a case study in writing a progressive constitution in the 21st century – and the challenges of getting a divided nation to agree to it.
After the 2019 protests, nearly 80 percent of Chileans voted in 2020 to draft a new constitution to replace the country’s Augusto Pinochet-era charter, influenced by Milton Friedman. But Chileans now look increasingly unlikely to approve it – polls show the vote to reject it has a clear lead.
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At one point, the first democratically drafted constitution in Chilean history included 499 articles, making it one of the longest such documents in the world. It was reduced to 388, plus another 57 to help transition the country to the new charter.
This is a significant departure from the current charter, which does not mention Chile’s indigenous population.
The document will establish Chile as multinational – comprising many different peoples — and pick up the possibility of autonomy for local territories. One section would ensure restitution of lands to indigenous people at a “fair price”. Another would make the government responsible for preventing, adapting and mitigating the effects of climate change. Elsewhere the document would warrant protecting biodiversity, enshrining the right to nature and clearing the way to replace the country’s deeply unpopular private water rights system.
“It was an unprecedented process because we were able to take into account all the evidence of climate change when we were drafting the new constitution,” said Cristina Dorador, 42, a microbiologist from Antofagasta. “I hope that all this can serve as an example to other countries.
The charter will make the government responsible for providing free higher education, health care and many other services. This would guarantee the right to housing and leisure. That would require that at least half of all members of government and Congress, as well as employees of public and public-private companies, are women. It would also recognize the government’s responsibility to eradicate gender-based violence.
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The first article defines Chile as inclusive and gender equal.
“Feminism appears in the constitution as one of the central pillars of the redistribution of power,” explained Constanza Schoenhout, 33, a delegate from Santiago.
It would shake up Chile’s political system, abolishing the Senate in favor of a “chamber of regions” — an upper house made up of elected delegates from each of Chile’s regions — and lowering barriers to independent candidates running for office. elective positions.
“This proposal is completely different in form and content from the 1980 constitution,” said Kenneth Bunker, director of Tresquintos, a political analysis website. “If this was drafted in one room by four generals, then this new proposal was written by a full majority.”
The 155-member Constituent Assembly was composed mostly of independent and leftist members. Seventeen seats were reserved for the country’s 10 indigenous communities.
The composition of the assembly was subject to criticism.
“The proposal is radical because it represents only one sector of the left, which is clearly not what our country wants,” said Arturo Zuniga, a conservative congressional delegate who waved the red, white and blue national flag at Monday’s ceremony. “I think the way forward is to find a new method of writing a constitution that will unite our country.”
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The stormy negotiations were marred by controversy, which helped fuel a campaign to discredit the convention.
Delegate Rodrigo Rojas Vade, a popular figure during the 2019 marches, was elected to the convention on promises of free, high-quality health care — and because of his experiences suffering from a rare form of leukemia. His diagnosis turned out to be false and he resigned.
The spread of misinformation and selective reading of the text have sparked fights. One conservative senator, Felipe Cast, the nephew of Jose Antonio Cast, whom Borich defeated in December, falsely tweeted that the proposal would allow abortions at any point during pregnancy.
The text would guarantee the right to free, autonomous and informed decisions about one’s own body, reproduction and contraception; as well as the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy. But it is specified that abortions will be regulated by a separate law.
If voters reject the document, the 1980 constitution will remain in place and the country will likely have to convene an entirely new constitutional convention to start the drafting process again, said Tanya Bush Ventur, a law professor who teaches constitutional rights at the University of Chile Andres Bello. .
“Chile is a country where people don’t know how to talk about things directly,” she said. “Maybe it’s a process where for the first time we sat down to talk honestly and saw that our differences are deeper than we thought.”
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