Chile Is Ready for a New Constitution

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/opinion/chile-protests.html

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Chileans awoke on Friday to a historic agreement, signed by lawmakers and leaders of nearly every political faction, setting down the rules for a path to a new constitution. It will be the first time in the nation’s history that all citizens will be given a voice and a vote in the drafting of their own sovereign future.

The text of the two-page compact, reached in the halls of the National Congress in Santiago and titled “Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution,” is a simple yet striking step toward forging a new founding charter. That charter, if ratified by the people, will replace the Constitution of 1980 imposed by the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Under the terms of this agreement, Chileans will vote in April on a two-question referendum. The first question is straightforward: Do you want a new constitution? The second asks voters to hold either a citizens-only constitutional convention or a “mixed” constitutional convention, including citizens and members of the National Congress.

If the first referendum question passes, and regardless of what Chileans choose for the second, in October 2020 voters will directly elect the citizen representatives for the convention. That elected assembly (with or without members of Congress) will then meet for nine months, with the possibility of a three-month extension, to draft the new constitution. A two-thirds supermajority will be required for each new provision. The drafters will, in effect, be writing the people’s will on a blank page; nothing in the old constitution will be binding on the framers.

The resulting text will then be ratified or rejected by the citizenry at a mandatory election at a date to be decided later.

There are many technical aspects about this process that the Chilean National Congress and civil society have yet to iron out, like the size of the constitutional assembly, its representativeness and how indigenous populations will be accounted for. All of those details are profoundly significant if Chileans want a constitution that protects the rights of all people.

But that this path forward was made possible at all, including by elected officials who once made common cause with Pinochet, is indicative of the singular moment Chile is in — an astounding political acknowledgment of structural demands that have long festered unaddressed.

In a month’s time, Chile has gone from being one of the wealthiest and most stable countries in Latin America to a nation on the brink of collapse, its institutions and economy shaken by protests, a military response and human rights abuses unlike any since the return of democracy in 1990.

Chile’s 30-year democratic project seems to hang by a thread. The social and political unrest, which was prompted by a subway fare increase in Santiago, soon grew to encompass entrenched economic inequality and free-market, neoliberal excesses enshrined in Pinochet’s constitution. That document has been amended dozens of times over the past 40 years, but it never abandoned an abusive model that has made the rich richer and the ruling class more powerful. Everyone else was left to suffer under precarious pensions, rising student debt, meager wages and inadequate access to health care.

All of those issues have solutions in the country’s Congress, which has been working overtime to find legislative fixes. But the people kept demanding something more meaningful. On Oct. 25, as more than a million Chileans took to the streets in Santiago, the chants of “it’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years” became a rallying cry for a regime change beyond the small subway fare increase that started it all.

In the face of weak leadership by President Sebastián Piñera, who instituted a military curfew in the early days of the protests and said his government was “at war” with marchers, the demonstrations, looting and violence grew only more intense. Last week, amid more protests, supermarkets, pharmacies and storefronts across Chile continued to be ransacked or set ablaze, and fears of a recession and a spike in unemployment loomed large.

None of these concerns will be allayed by a new constitution — nor should they be, as written constitutions are not panaceas that make problems go away. But a charter delineating the Chile of the future, debated and voted on by Chileans themselves, could be a foundation for a self-determined people to build on.

Already, a constitutional spirit has set in. As The Times’s Pascale Bonnefoy reported last week, even before Friday’s agreement was struck, municipalities, mayors and community groups were taking it upon themselves to convene thousands of local assemblies and town halls to address public malcontent and the need for constitutional change. Meanwhile, opinion polls showed a robust level of support for a new constitution, while the printed version of the old constitution became a best seller.

A new constitution will offer Chileans a cornerstone upon which to set their future course.

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