“Naive”, “idealistic”, “radical”. The Chilean constituent process, which ended this Sunday (4th) with the plebiscite, was the target of all sorts of criticism.
Delivered to President Gabriel Boric on July 5th, the document written by an Assembly of 154 independent citizens addresses all the structuring issues of Chilean society, including the most difficult ones, such as reproductive rights, gender parity and the recognition of rights
of indigenous peoples.
Its historical legitimacy is unequivocal. The Constituent Assembly fulfills the mission assigned to the 18-O generation, named after the social explosion that took place on October 18, 2019.
At the heart of his divergence from the previous generation, that of September 11, 1973, was the diagnosis of the legacy of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The former leaders of Chile believed in the progressive and negotiated improvement of the constitutional framework, based on the political project of Concertación. The news came to power with the promise of refounding the state.
The Chilean constituents, however, suffered from two decisive limitations. They are the representatives of a new inspiring political class, but at the beginning of its trajectory. A reality far removed from the Brazilian Constituent Assembly of 1988, for example, composed of experienced politicians, unassailable representatives of civil society, and countless old foxes from Brasilia.
The second limitation is socioeconomic. Although the Chilean social situation is difficult, it is much better than the South African one, when Nelson Mandela came to power with a mission to end apartheid.
The defense of constitutional change did not find acceptance among the victors of Chilean capitalism, who dismissed it as an unnecessary adventure at a time of geopolitical uncertainty.
Attentive to these issues, constituents were adept at putting aside the windmills of the old left, such as the discourse against the “neoliberal model”, and instead putting climate policy at the heart of the new institutional design.
Ecology is not included in just a few articles of the proposed Charter. It permeates and organizes it. It introduces fundamental notions of climate justice and intergenerational preservation that are still far from existing even in the most advanced democracies. The new environmental law changes the power relationship between society and the extractive industry.
The failure had nothing to do with its supposed utopian exaggerations. The movement for the approval of the Constitution was a victim of the wear and tear of the political transformation process that triggered it. He suffered from the negative association with the Gabriel Boric government and its difficulties in carrying out its economic and social program.
Then, its defenders had to present a text full of new concepts in a context of high inflation that was unprecedented for Chilean standards. Finally, a wave of fake news flooded the public debate with accusations of amateurism and disorganization.
Resoundingly, the defeat poses an existential threat to Boric’s project. The document, however, goes down in history as the first concrete attempt to prepare Latin America for the
new climate era.
