CHILE
Change, Deferred
The coronavirus has forced many people to shelve their plans. In Chile, the pandemic is preventing officials from rewriting their constitution, which was created in 1980 under dictator Augusto Pinochet.
As Agence France-Presse reported, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera recently proposed delaying an election of members of a constitutional convention who would rewrite the country’s constitution starting in April until mid-May.
Earlier this week, the Chilean Senate agreed to the proposal.
Voters approved the idea of rewriting the constitution last year after months of protests over social inequities in the South American country that Chileans refer to as the estallido social (social outbreak). The Constituent Assembly will be evenly divided between men and women and include 17 seats reserved for delegates from Chile’s indigenous communities, Al Jazeera wrote. It has a year to draft a document.
Critics say the current constitution gives the central government too much power and prioritizes business and property interests over individual rights.
Chile, for example, is the only country in the world that enshrines in law the private ownership of water, noted María Jaraquemada, an activist at the Espacio Público think tank, in Americas Quarterly. With or without a new constitution, officials are setting up a new Water Ministry to deal with the most privatized water system in the world.
“We long for a constitution that is pluri-national, decentralized, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and that prioritizes unfettered respect for human rights and recognizes the rights of nature,” Ingrid Conejeros Montecino, a member of the Mapuche community, said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Those are radical proposals. But the left failed to coalesce around candidates sufficiently to win enough delegates to dominate the convention. Instead, moderates are expected to hold a majority, Bloomberg reported. Chile’s finance minister predicted that the new constitution would not result in government overspending that might jeopardize the country’s reputation as a free-market-oriented economy but instead pave the way for stability.
The delay is striking because Chile is a world leader in vaccinating its people against Covid-19. Almost 40 percent of its population has been inoculated. It’s likely the first nation that will reach herd immunity. Yet cases of the virus are surging. An epidemiologist told the New York Times that high transmission rates will spread the virus despite vaccinations until most people have received a jab. Variants speed up transmission, too. The country has imposed new lockdowns to stop infections, the Guardian added.
Pinochet’s legacy is on the way out but it’s not going away easily.
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