After being worked on for a year, Chile’s new draft constitution was officially yesterday to be submitted to Chilean President Gabriel Boric, before eventually being put to a referendum in the deeply polarized country.
The new text, which would replace the constitution written during Chilean President Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990), aims to establish new social rights.
It was drawn up by a constituent assembly of 154 citizens — most of whom were independent of political affiliation — that was to be dissolved a year to the day after it began work on July 4 last year.
The document is to put to a referendum on Sept. 4, with voting obligatory for 15 million Chileans, who must decide whether to accept or reject it.
Rewriting the dictatorship-era constitution was a major demand of protesters who flooded onto the streets in 2019 and kept up weekly demonstrations for months before the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed them.
In the first of the new constitution’s 388 articles, Chile is described as “a social and democratic State of law,” as well as “plurinational, intercultural and ecological.”
“It recognizes the dignity, freedom, substantial equality of human beings and their indissoluble relationship with nature as intrinsic and inalienable values,” the document says.
“I think we have met the social demands, with the desires of the citizens, which is what people hoped for and wanted of this process,” said Barbara Sepulveda, a draft assembly member from the Communist Party.
“It is a proposal that represents a historic advance in terms of democracy and the guarantee of social rights for our country, and on top of that, it is filled with feminism from head to tail,” said Alondra Carrillo, from the leftist Broad Front.
Other right-wing constituent members were less enthusiastic.
For Cristian Monckeberg, it was a “missed” opportunity to “build something that unites rather than divides” the country.
However, with just 37 out of 154 seats in the constituent assembly, the political right was in a minority.
The process “was not as simple and friendly as many of us would have wanted and dreamed of,” said writer and journalist Patricio Fernandez, one of the 104 independent members of the assembly.
However, with a two-thirds majority needed to approve each article, the only source of solution was dialogue and compromise, even where tensions arose.
If the constitution is adopted, it would make Chile one of the most progressive countries in the region.
The nationwide right to abortion would become enshrined in law.
Split equally between men and women, the constituent assembly also contained 17 seats reserved for indigenous people, who make up around 13 percent of Chile’s 19 million population.
One of those members, Natividad Llanquileo, an activist for Chile’s largest indigenous group, the Mapuche, said the constitutional process represented “the most democratic space that we have known in the history of this country.”
As well as recognizing the different peoples that make up the Chilean nation, the new constitution accords a certain amount of autonomy to indigenous institutions, notably in matters of justice.
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