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A new path for Chile?

A crowd celebrates the victory in the referendum in Santiago, on October 25, 2020.NurPhoto (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

There are dates that have a special resonance for the towns. This is what happens to the Chilean people with September 4, a Sunday in which they must decide whether or not to approve a new Constitution, and which also happens to be the day, 52 years ago, when the voters of Chile, in another crucial day, they elected Salvador Allende as president of the Republic.

That night of September 4, 1970, together with thousands and thousands of fervent compatriots, I heard Allende promise, from a balcony overlooking the Alameda, that “a new path” was opening for Chile, “the happy path towards a life different and better.” Allende’s victory embodied a thirst for justice, freedom and national sovereignty that had been brewing throughout the 20th century and that was rooted in the struggles of Chilean men and women since the dawn of Independence, the same thirst that now animates the Constitution of 2022.

And also that legendary September 4, like the one that now confronts the people in these days, had a magnitude that surpassed national borders. It was the first time that a socialist had come to power using, not the violent and insurrectionary methods of previous revolutions, but through a democratic path.

That transcendental experiment – ​​“a path,” Allende said that radiant night, “that other peoples of America and the world will be able to follow” – ended tragically. Three years later a military coup overthrew the president freely chosen by his fellow citizens. During the 17 years that followed Allende’s death in the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, Chile would suffer a treacherous dictatorship whose effects corrode and corrupt our society to this day.

One of the main legacies of that autocratic period was the Constitution that still governs us and that was imposed, by force and fraudulently, by the then dictator Augusto Pinochet. It is this Constitution that Chileans, this Sunday, September 4, have the opportunity to repudiate, adopting a Magna Carta that, instead of being devised by a group of experts, has been drawn up by a popularly and democratically elected Convention, and whose 388 articles, discussed publicly and transparently, were adopted by more than two thirds of the conventional ones.

When the Convention began work on July 4 last year, I had no doubt that in the final referendum voters would overwhelmingly mark the Approve option. Didn’t that Convention respond to the most massive protests in Chile’s history, a social outburst that demanded the essential changes that Pinochet’s Constitution had blocked since the return of democracy in 1990? And the need for a new legal framework had not been endorsed by 80% of those who voted in a first plebiscite? And didn’t the faces of the delegates to that Convention look like a mirror of authentic Chile, perhaps “they are not like us, like the real country,” as multiple interlocutors in the streets of Santiago emphasized to me, amazed? They saw themselves reflected in an assembly in which many members came from disadvantaged regions and were young and unknown. And, by the way, it was a joint Convention with a significant representation of the original peoples, so invisible for centuries.

And as if to underline the certainty that the Approval would be victorious, 56% of voters – the highest majority in history – chose Gabriel Boric as president in December 2021, a charismatic 35-year-old former student leader, whose transformation program structures coincided with the same priorities and desires of the Constitutional Convention.

And yet, despite so many favorable winds, the polls indicate the possibility that the Rejection option wins the plebiscite.

One factor that explains this turnaround is a considerable decline in the popularity of the Boric government, which has been – it was inevitable – incapable of resolving urgent problems inherited from the past in the short term. It also didn’t help that maximalist positions of a vociferous minority in the Convention were cunningly exploited by the Chilean right and its monopoly of the media, to paint the conventionalists as extremists who would take the country to a communist cliff. And millions of voters, not having read the long 167 pages of the new Constitution, believed a barrage of false news about its content (for example, that it ends private property, or that it will lead to Chile being “another Venezuela ”).

In any case, I am convinced that if enough citizens come to understand the profoundly democratic and ecological spirit of this new founding document, it will finally be ratified. It establishes a social and democratic state, emphasizing solidarity, participation, freedom and decentralization, daring to imagine a country with male/female parity, where the justice system serves everyone and not just the rich, where it is the duty of the State to protect nature and where indigenous communities are recognized as protagonists of a plurinational and intercultural State. It enshrines the right to abortion, health, water, housing, education and decent pension funds, and the need to exercise sovereignty over mineral resources. And, repeatedly, it emphasizes the defense of children and animals and the elderly, and even glaciers and rivers. It is a progressive, responsible, even tender vision of how to move towards a society that can meet the challenges of our turbulent times.

It is true that several measures in terms of Government and the Judiciary have led several important figures of the privileged elite of the center-left to demonstrate in favor of Rejection, which further confuses undecided voters, but that situation can be reversed with the commitment of the parties that support Boric to amend these deficiencies.

I am confident, as Allende was more than five decades ago, that the Chilean people will know how to speak out for a wise and just future, to build, together, “the new society, the new social coexistence, the new morality, the new homeland” that he dreamed I am confident that on the night of September 4, 2022, the words with which Allende moved us in the Alameda that other extraordinary night will be repeated in some hearts: “It has been the anonymous man and the ignored woman of Chile who have made possible this transcendental social fact. Thousands and thousands of Chileans sowed their pain and their hope in this hour that belongs to the people.”

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Source: EL PAIS

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