Epidemiologist María Elisa Quinteros was elected this Wednesday (5th) as the new president of Chile’s Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting a new Magna Carta to replace the current one, inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
There were two days of sessions and nine rounds of voting — the first eight taking place between Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning — until Quinteros obtained exactly the 78 votes needed to replace Mapuche linguist Elisa Loncon in office.
“We hope to be able to conduct this process wisely,” said the president-elect of the constituent body after taking office. She is a representative of District 17, in the south-central part of the country. Dentist graduated from the University of Talca and PhD in Public Health from the University of Chile, she has been working since 2015 as an environmental, perinatal and reproductive epidemiologist.
Quinteros attracted the support of a majority of independents like her, from different social movements, indigenous representatives and members of the Communist Party.
The Constituent Assembly still has nine months — extendable only once for another three — to write the new text, which must be validated in a mandatory voting plebiscite to be convened by the government of the elected president, the leftist Gabriel Boric, who will assume the Presidency on 11 March.
The 155 members of the collegiate were elected in May of last year, on an equal basis and with the inclusion of 17 seats reserved for native peoples.
The wording of the new Constitution emerged as an institutional solution to the protests that broke out across the country in October 2019, which pointed to the current Magna Carta as the source of inequality in the country.
The current Constitution was created in 1980 during the Pinochet dictatorship and established a neoliberal model that, although it guaranteed economic and social development for more than three decades, deepened the differences between the rich and the poor in the country.
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