Chance for Chile to forge new path in vote to scrap Pinochet-era constitution

[Judi Lynn]

Sunday’s referendum could mean end for 1980 constitution that allowed privatization to flourish and led to widespread inequality

Charis McGowan
Thu 22 Oct 2020 04.00 EDT

Carlos Hinrichs clearly remembers the fear and repression of the Pinochet years.

His father was jailed for supporting Salvador Allende, the leftwing president deposed in Chile’s 1973 military coup. His mother and sister were dismissed from their university positions. He saw classmates shot dead at protests.

When the general finally left power in 1990, Hinrichs expected that the legal framework for his rule would soon be replaced.

But, the constitution introduced by Pinochet remained in force for decades, safeguarding a market-driven economy at a cost of subsidized healthcare, education and pensions.

This Sunday, Hinrichs will finally have a chance to help condemn the dictatorship-era constitution to history, when Chile holds a national referendum which could clear the way for a new magna carta.

“It would open the possibility to live a better life,” said Hinrichs, who plans to watch the results with his adult daughters and his 94-year-old father. All three generations are hopeful that the country will vote for change.

Chile’s 1980 constitution has been criticised since its inception as fatally compromised by its links to a dictatorship guilty of political murder, torture and mass incarceration.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/chileans-pinochet-constitution-referendum

[Judi Lynn]

2. Chileans Finally Have a Chance to Scrap Pinochet's Constitution

AN INTERVIEW WITH
FERNANDO ATRIA

A year after mass protests erupted in Chile last October, a historic referendum on the Pinochet dictatorship’s 1980 constitution will take place on Sunday. Three decades after the transition to democracy, Chileans now have an opportunity to break with the legacy of violence and dispossession that the constitution has upheld.

In a year now notorious for the dismal pandemic that has gripped the globe, as well as the far-right authoritarianism that has blossomed in its midst, a remarkable opportunity is facing Chile. Some three decades after the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet left power by way of a national plebiscite, more than a million Chileans took to the streets on October 18 of last year to demonstrate the stark neoliberal policies that his government wove into the very foundations of Chilean society.

Despite the transition to civilian rule that took place in 1990, the country’s 1980 constitution — forged during the height of Pinochet’s violent dictatorship — remained in place. That constitution has helped maintain much of the privatization and power the Chilean right wielded during the seventeen-year dictatorship. Consequently, despite Chile’s reputation as a thriving democracy and economic success story in the region, it ranks among Latin America’s highest rates of inequality.

At the height of last year’s protests, now referred to as el estallido — the explosion — the country’s billionaire president, Sebastián Piñera, declared a state of emergency, claiming the country was “at war” with an internal enemy. Chile’s Carabineros, the nation’s armed police force infamous for its participation in the torture and disappearance of thousands of Chileans during Pinochet’s rule, took to the streets, embracing violent repression and human rights abuses that alarmed the world and harkened back to a political climate many Chileans thought the country would never see again.

But the collective action of so many Chileans bore fruit: a national referendum to draft a new constitution was decided upon, and with it, the nation now faces a chance to break with a legacy of violence and dispossession that its constitution upheld. The referendum, originally slated for April of this year, was of course delayed due to the previously unimaginable COVID-19 pandemic and is now set to take place on October 25.

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/chile-democracy-augusto-pinochet-constitution-referendum