The Chilean revolt: Background, characterization and political challenges

Abstract

After a year of intense protests, crossed by the Covid-19 pandemic, on October 25th of 2020 the Chilean population decided by plebiscite to change the National Constitution, approved in 1980 during the Pinochet dictatorship and a fundamental base of the first and most ferocious neoliberal laboratory in the world. The vote was asking two questions: the first was about to change the current Constitution and the “yes” choice won with 78.3% of the votes; the second question asked about the institutional authority in charge to write a new Constitution. It could be a “Mixed Constituent”, half elected by the citizens and half by the Parliament from among its current members, or a “Constituent Convention” composed entirely of civil society representatives. This second option won with 78.9% of the votes. The overwhelming victory of the “Approval” and the “Constituent Convention” shows the vitality of a movement that claimed the plebiscite as its own achievement, despite many alert are warning about the way this constituent pact has being signed, on November 15th 2019, with the Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution. At that moment, although the government doesn’t have the possibility to rewrite the constitutional law by his own, the executive power and the chilean bourgeois class are doing an evident effort to accept a new constitution in order to chain the social protest to an institutional program and timetable, in order to slow it down. On the other hand, delete the Pinochet’s Constitution it’s a formidable step forward in the class, feminist and anti-colonial struggle, a step that couldn’t have been possible without the extraordinary social rebellion that broke out on October 18th 2019. At the cost of dozens of deaths, hundreds of mutilated people and thousands of political prisoners popular, that rebellion could sow the panic in the chilean fulton class in the following days and months, and it still is goingo on.