A path to plurinationality in Chile

June 29, 2021 8:36 AM

Last fall, Chileans voted to replace their Pinochet-era constitution (previously). The Constituent Assembly which will do the rewriting was recently elected, and it opens the path to plurinationality and recognition of Indigenous rights. It will be the first constitution ever to be written by equal numbers of women and men. Some Indigenous groups hope their voices will aid in protecting the environment – and their communities’ rights to protest – in the new constitution. The ruling conservative coalition was dismayed to fail to achieve the one-third of seats they'd need to veto constitutional changes.
posted by clawsoon (14 comments total)

Whoaaaaaaa! This is a very interesting thing to learn more about!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:12 PM on June 29, 2021

I'm sorry this isn't getting more attention, especially from USians, since it was the CIA that was the secret ingredient in the 1973 coup and its horrific aftermath, including a nice shiny new neoliberal constitution in 1980. Chile was a trial lab for a lot of the privatize-gains, socialize-costs measures that would later be deployed in the US and elsewhere.

Among the wonderful provisions of that 1980 constitution is the explicit OK of water rights to corporations, and much of Chile is suffering a terrible drought largely as a result of agribusiness and other (mostly foreign) corporations that use more water than they should.

I'm not a huge believer in a classic liberal-era constitution as a force that will right all wrongs, but the fact that there is so much progressive force behind this new one, and that it continues to be such a force nearly two years after the October 2019 uprising, is a lovely sight for jaded eyes.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 2:39 PM on June 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

Sheydem-tants: I'm sorry this isn't getting more attention, especially from USians, since it was the CIA that was the secret ingredient in the 1973 coup and its horrific aftermath, including a nice shiny new neoliberal constitution in 1980.

I only learned about it because of a Youtube comment which prompted me to learn a bit more, and I'd love it if anybody who is actually familiar with the situation is able to contribute.

From what I'm seeing, plurinationality seems to have been pioneered by Bolivia's 2009 constitution, which officially renamed the country to the Plurinational State of Bolivia. I just finished re-reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, so it was timely for me to learn more about the intersection of neoliberalism, American empire, and Indigenous rights that are coming to a head in Chile's constitutional discussions.
posted by clawsoon at 4:12 PM on June 29, 2021

What an interesting development! Thanks for the post!
posted by brainwane at 4:58 PM on June 29, 2021

For context: Chile is a profoundly, deeply racist country. 'Indio' is an unremarkable, casual insult, meaning uncontrolled or or uncivilized. Want ads routinely ask for 'buena presencia', meaning 'good presence', meaning 'does not look like they have native blood'. People of native descent are domestic servants, security guards, etc., never managers or CEOs. The timber industry, with the complicity of the police and army, have orchestrated a dirty war against the Mapuche to maintain control of their ancestral lands around Temuco, including Mapuche in jail on trumped up charges, Mapuche dead in one-sided gunfights and later accused of 'terrorism', and journalists investigating all this found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Now 11% of the writers of the new constitution are from the Pueblos Originarios. It should have been at least twice that.
posted by signal at 6:36 PM on June 29, 2021 [14 favorites]

I have been trying to look up a definition of pluronationality that does not include jargon. I can't find one. Can someone explain it to me like I'm five?
posted by rednikki at 7:24 PM on June 29, 2021

signal, thank you as always for the local context.
posted by brainwane at 8:06 PM on June 29, 2021

As I understand it, rednikki (and I may not understand it very well), plurinationality is the idea is that there can be more than one nation within a sovereign state.

When we say "nation", we're talking about a group of people, and not about a government. Wikipedia has a reasonable definition:

A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a common language, history, ethnicity, a common culture and, in many cases, a shared territory. A nation is more overtly political than an ethnic group; it has been described as "a fully mobilized or institutionalized ethnic group".

The "normal" assumption in the 20th century has been that nations and states should be directly connected. Irish people should live under an Irish government in Ireland, not under an English government as part of Great Britain. America should be full of Americans, and immigrants should be taught how to become Americans. All Germans should be part of Germany, even if that means conquering parts of Europe which have some non-Germans in them.

What a "nation" is can get very complicated and fuzzy if you look at it too closely, and a big part of national education over the past couple of centuries has been about convincing people that they are, in fact, part of a nation and have common bonds of language, history, ethnicity and culture with millions of people they'll never meet.

In the case of Chile, it seems that some groups, especially of Indigenous people, have never been convinced that they were part of the Chilean nation. From signal's comment, I gather that European Chileans have never really considered them part of the Chilean nation, either. So if they're their own nation, should they have their own state? Their own government, their own borders, their own army, their own passports?

Or is there another option, where Chile remains a single sovereign state, but recognizes that there are multiple nations who participate in it and should have power within it? Different language, different history, different ethnicity, different culture, but an equal partner in a shared government?

That's my guess as to what it means. I'm happy to learn more and be corrected if I'm getting parts of it wrong.
posted by clawsoon at 8:29 PM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

How far to plurinationality is Belgium? I know they don’t use the term, but I’ve been surprised by how separate some of their internal communities can be.
posted by clew at 8:45 PM on June 29, 2021

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the copper mines...

Reuters
Mining dot com
Bloomberg
posted by nikoniko at 2:17 AM on June 30, 2021

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the copper mines...

Same old story... "you better not do anything against the interests of the rich, or they will go on a money strike and punish you until you regret even having thought that it might be possible to build a more equitable world."
posted by clawsoon at 4:31 AM on June 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

Pretty much. One of the reasons for the 1973 coup was the fear (by both the Chilean elite, and Western mining interests) of the socialist government taking control of Chile's natural resources.
posted by nikoniko at 11:02 AM on June 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

The Constitutional Convention started today. Their first action was to elect a Mapuche woman as president of the convention.
This is a historical event, something is changing
posted by signal at 1:20 PM on July 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

The vice president is a fairly brilliant constitutional lawyer who really knows his shit and also happens to have gone to highschool with my wife.
posted by signal at 5:01 PM on July 4, 2021 [1 favorite]