Chile Out With The Old

 

NEED TO KNOW

CHILE

Out with the Old

Recently, an officer in Chile’s national police force, the Carabineros, was caught on video throwing an unidentified 16-year-old over a bridge. The teen is now in the hospital recovering from the 23-foot drop.

During the days of Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who ruled Chile between 1974 and 1990 after a CIA-backed coup, the public couldn’t do much to express its outrage over such miscarriages of justice. Those days are long gone.

Chileans have taken to the streets to demand reforms in the Carabineros, who racked up 8,500 human rights abuse allegations in the past year, as well as other big changes to the country’s political system, the Guardian reported.

Earlier this week, the demonstrations descended into looting and violence.

The protests started a year ago over an increase in metro tickets. They’ve now morphed into demands for wholesale change based on grievances stemming from years of political, economic and human rights abuses, wrote the New Yorker. The Carabineros’ crackdown on protesters hasn’t helped.

Gustavo Gatica was blinded after being shot in both eyes by the Carabineros during a protest in November, he told Amnesty International in a first-person piece. “The most difficult thing has been going outside and using a walking stick,” he said. “It’s stressful because of the noise and the surroundings. But in March I went out to protest again in the same plaza where I was shot.”

A referendum on Oct. 25 to change the South American country’s Pinochet-era constitution has become a rallying point for the demonstrators, Agence France-Presse explained. Proponents of the referendum said it would end the inequality fostered by Pinochet, who allowed a few elite families to acquire massive fortunes while the middle and lower classes fell behind.

Around 70 percent of voters favor reforms, mostly because a new constitution would guarantee education and healthcare, MercoPress wrote. The referendum would also weaken the power of property owners and the private sector, including making it easier to change laws that currently can be blocked by small, right-wing political parties.

Pinochet handed down the current constitution in 1980. Since then, it’s been amended numerous times. Chilean leaders drafted a more liberal constitution a few years ago. But it was scrapped in 2018 when conservative President Sebastián Piñera took office, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Conservatives fear a new constitution would jeopardize the economic growth that has made Chile a darling among globalists for its pro-business policies, reported the Washington Post.

“Chile has become the freest, safest and most prosperous country in Latin America,” argued Pedro Pizano, a fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, and Axel Kaiser, a scholar at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in a separate Washington Post op-ed.

Evidently, many Chileans disagree.

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