Chile's New Constitution
Written by Ruwan Jinadasa
A New Chile
The New Constitution
One year ago, protests started in Chile, over the inequality and injustice, within Chileans ranging from young to old, insisting on restructuring the nation’s deeply rooted structural problems. They asked for Chile to have a new constitution, with more rights and better protection for everyone.
On October 25th, a referendum was held asking voters two questions: Should Chile write a brand new constitution? And if so, who should be writing it; an assembly of half congressional representatives and half citizens, or an assembly of just citizens? The results were 79% of Chileans demanding a new constitution written by Chilean citizens.
This is a prime example of the power of protests, and the power of people’s voices. Usually, countries write a new constitution only when war ends, or transitioning to democracy. Moreover, it is quite unusual for constitution to be composed solely of citizens.
Reasons for protests
Chile’s current constitution was created when the dictator, Augusto Pinochet, governed the country from 1973 to 1990. However, even after stepping down in 1990, his dictatorship-era constitution persisted. It created a reduced power of the left, and favoured current presidents, thus reducing turnover in office. This created a lack of political incentives to listen to votes, thus the formation of an unresponsive political class.
However, these issues were overlooked by Chile’s booming economy, only this boom made the rich get richer. In 2019, the wealthiest 10% of Chileans received nearly 40% of the country’s income. Chile is now one of the most unequal and wealth divided, developed nations.
This is due to the rich and corporations having low taxes, while it’s poor suffer poor conditions. This is a known issue through Chile, however leaders who followed Pinochet, did little to alter this model as it advantaged them.
Little changes were introduced in 2017, such as an expanded seats in congress, and gender quotas but this was not enough to resolve the stressing issues.
In 2019, Chilean’s protested for reform, wanting free higher education, increased pensions, better wages and an end to gender violence.
This movement was not peaceful at all, with iconic parts of Santiago being destroyed last year and much more. Police fired rubber bullets at protestors, and many of those who were arrested reported counts of extreme brutality including sexual assault and torture. Hundreds were wounded and over 40 were killed.
New constitution
With the constitution being written by every day Chileans, the power from the political class will be reduced. Furthermore, women will have a greater voice in the future of Chile. During the Pinochet era, there were only 2 women among the 12 authors of that constitutions.
“never again without women”
The men in congress complained about this, resulting in the women standing outside of the chamber chanting “we are half, we want half”. Now, by law half of the citizens who will be elected to write the new constitution must be women. This establishes a ground breaking global standard for women’s political inclusion.
The new committee will also reserve seats for Indigenous people like the Mapuche, whose ancestral lands were stolen by the government.
However, many debate whether a new constitution will solve the country’s underlying issues. A new constitution does not necessarily mean a longer bill of enforced rights which many people neglect to acknowledge.
Soon, we will see the effects of this new constitution, and no matter what the consequence is, this has been the latest and loudest demand for citizen democracy and equality which is something that may allow Chile to shed it’s dictatorship past.