I spoke this week with my friend, writer and journalist Patricio Fernández, 52. founder of the excellent Chilean weekly The Clinic and author of some books on Latin America. Pato, as we know him, has plunged in recent years into the adventure of being part of the Constitutional Convention, elected himself, helped to write laws and immersed himself in the process that began to be driven by the political youth currently in power in Chile.
From the experience, he came away happy with the draft of the new Constitution delivered this week, and, after the binding and mandatory plebiscite of September 4, it will end to write the history of those times, from the protests of 2006, 2011 and 2019 to the uncertain outcome. of the vote. I can’t wait for this book.
Some things worry you. “We left out all the radical ideas, the ones that had huge repercussions in the media, much more than the positive and modern initiatives that, yes, were included and maintained. Even so, many people think, for example, that we are going to expropriate land and all natural resources, which is not true. We made a document that includes the marginalized minorities in Chile for centuries, indigenous peoples, women and Afro-descendants, we leave no room for the end of private property and we still reinforce the idea of a State of Right. We did all this in a democratic way. That is, what is normal in a modern society”, he says, “and even so, they are portraying us as if we were plotting, all this time, a Bolshevist revolution”.
The feeling is true when reading the conservative local media or the debates on the networks. And that night of October 25, 2020, when I saw people taking to the streets euphoric, seems distant, celebrating the end of Pinochet’s Constitution. In the referendum that day, 80% of those who went to the polls asked for a new Charter. What’s more, they asked for a new Charter drafted by an Assembly of open composition, giving space to various figures from society and independents, as well as representatives of ancestral indigenous communities.
However, in the following days, weeks and months, the propaganda against it didn’t let up, through bizarre memes that said that Chile would “turn Venezuela” (again the empty mantra of the right, yes, again), attacks on of indigenous people with racist labels and the wide-open misogyny of a patriarchal society against which so many young women have come out to demonstrate in recent years.
The worst “fake news” are those that propagate that Chile, from a supposed “example of an economic model” (which it never was, otherwise why so many people showed dissatisfaction? buy medicine?) would become a kind of communist dictatorship.
As if the “fake news” and disinformation were not enough, a serious publication like The Economist this week portrayed the Chilean Constitution with a roll of toilet paper. That. British humor has stooped to the point of approaching our so famous and infamous dick bottle.
Misinformation plays hard for this view to spread easily. Many do not know, for example, that the Constitution, in many cases, will have articles that will still go through a regulation that will have to be approved in Congress, in the case of abortion, euthanasia, plurinationality and the autonomy of indigenous peoples. They say that the text is evasive, but they don’t know that it was always thought of as a set of laws that establish general guidelines on the topics covered in it. How they will be applied, regulated and put into practice will be a task for parliament and then for the responsible authorities. And it would be good to reinforce that the new parliament has a strong presence from the right. Therefore, the possibility that these articles will be softened, toned down, before being put into practice, after a proper political debate, is enormous.
The question of indigenous autonomy is outrageous. The general view of those who feed on disinformation is that indigenous people will inhabit territories under which only they will legislate and govern and that the State will not be present. Is not true. The Constitution proposes that autonomy be decided in agreement with the communities. The so-called indigenous justice will be linked to the common justice. Do you think this is new? It is in the Constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, and it is nothing more than paying off debts with a population that has been in Chile suffering abuses since long before Chile was a country.
The British weekly even counted how many times the word “gender” appears in the document: 39. I would say, 39 is not enough. If the reader does not want to delve into history, let him read the novels of the most widely read Spanish-language writer in Latin America, Isabel Allende, and then he will see how urgent the issue of gender is in Chile. If numbers are missing, some from the Chilean government itself: 50.3% married women have experienced at least one case of physical or sexual violence, 16.3% of psychological abuse, 42.7% have suffered sexual violence before the age of 15. years, while 22% were threatened with weapons. and, to make matters worse, 60% live below the poverty line.
Chile’s new Constitution could suffer the same injustice as the Colombian government’s peace agreement with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). At the time, very few people read the entire document (yes, it’s true that both are huge), but they decided to vote against it because they were misinformed, via networks, via pastors, via politicians with threatened interests. And they ended up voting “no”.
Let us hope that Chileans do not suffer the same fate. Who can want back Pinochet’s Constitution, which ignored the apparently feared “gender issues” and the completely ignored demands of the indigenous people, who, in the Chilean case, make up 12% of the population?
The campaign to go wrong is already huge. How about a campaign to understand what the new Charter is about, before giving an opinion?
This will not be better than maintaining what has always been the rule in Chile, that is, constant friction between ruling families and invisible people. That’s how Ecuador lives, where the indigenous people are brutally repressed from time to time and the issue is patched up with agreements that, as we all know, will fail in the medium (or perhaps short) term. Isn’t it better to resolve differences within established democratic spaces than in the violence of social networks and the streets?
Chile is pointing to a democratic way out of its enormous historical differences. It should be an example, not a windowpane to be stoned.
