Chile votes on replacing Pinochet's Constitution
October 25, 2020 3:57 PM   Subscribe

Chileans gather at Plaza de la Dignidad (realtime video, worth a watch) to start celebrating what looks like a massive 'Yes' vote on the plebiscite to change the Pinochet-era Constitution.

This comes little over a year after the protests and riots started. The current constitution was written by Pinochet's government and approved by an illegitimate plebiscite in 1980.
posted by signal (26 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
And BTW, remember the gringo libertarian who opened fire on protesters last year? He got sentenced to 11 years in jail.
posted by signal at 3:59 PM on October 25, 2020 [13 favorites]


Always gratifying to see a libertarian in chains.
posted by aramaic at 5:02 PM on October 25, 2020 [9 favorites]


Very interesting.

Can someone familiar with the story help explain this:
Navia argued that Chileans are mainly looking to the new charter to provide them with expanded social rights. "What they will get is a whole new constitution, and not necessarily a longer bill of rights that can be enforced," he said.
Does the Chilean constitution currently have a bill of rights that's similar in purpose to the US Bill of Rights? Why wouldn't/couldn't a new constitution incorporate directly the same sorts of civil rights that would otherwise need to be recognized by amendment or legislation? Is this something that in theory is possible but the politics of drafting a new constitution makes unlikely to actually happen?
posted by biogeo at 5:03 PM on October 25, 2020


What’s Wrong with the Current Constitution?
Todays vote is on whether to replace Pinochet-era constitution with new charter drafted by citizens.
posted by adamvasco at 5:43 PM on October 25, 2020 [7 favorites]


Reuters
Three-quarters of Chilean voters favour new constitution: partial count
posted by adamvasco at 5:46 PM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


☒ New Zealand
☒ Bolivia
☒ Chile
☐ U.S.
posted by signal at 7:01 PM on October 25, 2020 [17 favorites]


We won! <3
posted by ipsative at 7:49 PM on October 25, 2020 [14 favorites]


When you allow a dictator to take over, it can take decades to undo the damage.
posted by benzenedream at 10:54 PM on October 25, 2020 [5 favorites]


Huh. Just yesterday I spent a couple hours looking into Libertarian economist James Buchanan's 1962 book. He (one of 8 people from the Mont Pelerin Society who've won the Economics Nobel) was closely studied in Nancy MacLean's 2017 book 'Democracy In Chains'. One review had this to say:
MacLean's much more concerned with ideology and policy. By the time we reach Buchanan's role in the rise of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet (which backfired so badly on the people of Chile that Buchanan remained silent about it for the rest of his life), that's all you need to know about who Buchanan was. - Review by Genevieve Valentine here.
I recall that Margaret Thatcher once called Pinochet a 'good friend'. All you need to know about who Thatcher was.
posted by Twang at 2:04 AM on October 26, 2020 [5 favorites]


A very good thing to replace a fundamentally illegitimate document by a democratic one and a powerful symbolic day for Chile.

I hope that it does for them what they hope. I will note though that for the 8 years that Bachelet was president, it only rarely got in the way of her programme of socialist (really social democratic tbh) reforms and most of the countries in the world that have the things that people were asking for (better pensions, healthcare, and education) do not have constitutional guarantees providing them.

I hope that the drafting of a new constitution is only the start of a programme of legislation and institution building that does deliver the material things that people ultimately want.
posted by atrazine at 2:47 AM on October 26, 2020


Chile is getting rid of Pinochet’s constitution and the sinister influence of Buchanan, Friedman and Hayek; Chileans Vote to Draft a New Constitution.
I trust Brazil takes note. Present Minister of Economy Paolo Guedes is a big fan boy of Friedman and Hayek.
posted by adamvasco at 4:11 AM on October 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


Final result (99.85% counted): Yes 78.27% / No 21.73%. Boom.

There's 346 municipalities in Chile. Of these, 341 voted Yes, 5 voted No.
Of the 5, 3 are where the 1% lives (Las Condes, Vitacura, Lo Barnechea), one is the Antarctica bases, mostly military personnel, and one is a tiny locale in northern Chile with a total of 334 votes.

Went out last night, people celebrating in the streets and public spaces, everybody masked.

Now the real work begins.
posted by signal at 6:19 AM on October 26, 2020 [17 favorites]


Final result (99.85% counted): Yes 78.27% / No 21.73%. Boom.

That is nicely decisive. I hope this leads directly to the changes and progress people are wanting.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:24 AM on October 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


I hope they put human rights first in the new Constitution, with free speech secondary.
posted by benzenedream at 7:57 AM on October 26, 2020



☒ Bolivia
☒ Chile
☐ U.S.

I hope this trend doesn't start to regress after the US gets a president who knows what they are doing in terms of interfering with Latin America's politics.
posted by simmering octagon at 12:18 PM on October 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


> human rights first in the new Constitution, with free speech secondary.

Free speech isn't a human right?
posted by pwnguin at 12:34 PM on October 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


"Why wouldn't/couldn't a new constitution incorporate directly the same sorts of civil rights that would otherwise need to be recognized by amendment or legislation? Is this something that in theory is possible but the politics of drafting a new constitution makes unlikely to actually happen?"

I've been trying to find an English explainer of this, but it's my understanding that not only does the 1980s constitution fail to guarantee social rights, it guarantees property and free enterprise in ways that make certain kinds of social reform unconstitutional.

I'll continue looking for a good source on this and link to it here!
posted by ipsative at 1:09 PM on October 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


One issue is the binomial election system, which led to a two-coalition system with the minority coalition (usually the right) over-represented. It was reformed in 2015 by combining constituencies and adding representatives, but not going to something like a straight proportional or a semi-proportional like they do in Germany, or a single-member constituency system like in Westminster systems.

The constitutional court and its decisions are something I'd be interested in reading about, in Spanish, French or English.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 1:20 PM on October 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


With the 1980 Constitution, Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship enshrined the principle of subsidiarity, which handed over personal responsibility to individuals through the market. According to the Constitution, the state cannot create companies nor directly provide social services; it is only able to intervene in the case of market failures by, for instance, supporting low-income sectors with voucher programs, a policy of targeted social spending that displaces the universal provision of rights.

If the Chilean economy was constructed using U.S. tools, so too was the Chilean state, whose builders relied on the U.S. public management model when creating new institutions. For instance, to safeguard the Central Bank’s independence over economic management—a crucial tenet of the neoliberal project—Chilean neoliberals ensured that the bank’s actions were not subject to democratic control. A similar process occurred in the provision of public services, where the state was only allowed to serve as a market regulator and optimizer. As these examples suggest, Chilean neoliberals valued technical efficiency and efficacy above all else.


Orellana (2020). In Chile, the Post-Neoliberal Future is Now.
Open access summary here.

Also here. But psssssht.
posted by ipsative at 1:22 PM on October 26, 2020 [5 favorites]


Monday, stony Monday: "The constitutional court and its decisions are something I'd be interested in reading about,"

Ciper is a good source.
I'm not an expert on Chilean con-law, but from just watching the news, the constitutional court works as a kind of shittier supreme court; whenever the left wants to reform say, campaign finance, the right wing senators send it to the Constitutional Court, which promptly declares it infringes on the right of companies to do whatever the fuck they want, and it gets struck down. So the only way to make structural changes is by changes to the constitution itself, which require a 2/3 majority, and the right wing historically controls about 33% of the senate (it used to be more with the binomial system where they were over-represented even worse than Republicans in the US, with some Senators getting voted in despite having less than 10% of the vote, for example), so that's that.
This is why we voted yesterday to scrap the whole thing.
posted by signal at 2:39 PM on October 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


Ciper is fantastic. So is Fernando Atria, a constitutional law professor who's attained public intellectual status. He's probably one of the main academic voices behind the push for a new constitution, and he has a (Spanish language) monograph, La Constitucion Tramposa about the 1980's constitution as a "cheating constitution", one that's filled with tricks and traps to prevent democractic reforms to the system that would depart from Pinochet et. al.'s vision of the state.

This is a recent interview with Atria on Jacobin mag.
posted by ipsative at 4:01 PM on October 26, 2020


Great links all. It does sound like there were provisions in the old constitution that make it more than just symbolically problematic.

That binomial election system (though they got rid of it without changing the constitution) was absolutely wild. You almost want to admire that level of sophistication in skulduggery.
posted by atrazine at 1:53 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


atrazine: "That binomial election system (though they got rid of it without changing the constitution) was absolutely wild. "

Yes. Jaime Guzman, intellectual architect of Pinochet's regime, especially in terms of repression, and main author of the 1980 constitution and the binomial system, was himself elected to the Senate with 17% of the vote, beating out Ricardo Lagos (who would go on to be President in a later election) even though Lagos got 30% of the vote in his senate run.

Chile has historically had 1/3 right, 1/3 left and 1/3 up for grabs, so the binomial system guaranteed that the right, which spent more than 2 decades after the dictatorship with just its base 1/3 of the electorate, was way overrepresented in congress and blocked most of the attempts at meaningful reform.
posted by signal at 6:40 AM on October 29, 2020


Free speech isn't a human right?

Putting human rights before free speech rights allows a constitutional basis for prosecuting hate speech. Free speech is protected until it impinges on human rights (e.g. saying a minority group is not really human). I am not a lawyer or constitutional scholar but this is my understanding of why Canada did so in it's charter.
posted by benzenedream at 8:09 AM on October 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


Free speech isn't a human right?

Of course it is. The issue is the approach to which human rights are enumerated and how conflicts between them are resolved.

The US approach is to enumerate a relatively small number of rights, essentially all of them in terms of what the government may not do, and then leave balancing between them to a notionally apolitical judicial system. That turns judicial nominations into a proxy election because it's where real decisions get made about what kind of country one wishes to have.

Other countries leave balancing rights to a matter of pure legislative power. Yet others expect courts to apply balancing tests between multiple rights. And the USSR has a long constitution with lots of rights guaranteed but no mechanism at all with which to enforce them.

Protecting, for instance the right to own property - a right which is enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - but not the right to housing (also in the UDHR) leaves a court or a legislature with no legal mechanism to balance one against the other. Often that is by design because these documents are often written by property-owners.

Similarly, protecting the right to free speech but not the right to leave free from discrimination, racial hatred, etc. will inevitably lead to a maximalist legal position in favour of the enumerated vs the un-enumerated right. That is especially true in protecting rights which are about positive outcomes rather than just constraining the power of the state. Fundamentally, the state must have the power to limit the actions of some people in some ways in order to balance between the rights of the people so limited and the rights of others. People cannot simultaneously have the absolute right, for instance, of free association, without infringing on a right that others may have not to be discriminated against.
posted by atrazine at 8:24 AM on October 29, 2020 [3 favorites]




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