After Rejection of Constitutional Proposal, What’s Next for Chile’s Left?

interviewed by Dae-Han Song (Networking Team) 

edited by Matthew Phillips (Networking Team)

On Sept. 4th, 62% of voters rejected a new Constitutional proposal that would have replaced the existing Pinochet era one. To examine why the constitutional proposal was rejected and the tasks ahead for Chile’s left, on Oct. 27th, Dae-Han Song interviewed activist, politician, and journalist Taroa Zúñiga Silva for the ISC Progressive Forum. 

Taroa Zúñiga Silva is a journalist for Globetrotter. She is also the co-editor of "Venezuela, Vortex of the War of the 21st Century" and a coordinating committee member of Argos, Observatory for Migration & Human Rights, and the co-founder of the Venezuelan Faldas-r collective for women's sexual and reproductive rights. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

After carrying out a U.S. backed coup, General Augusto Pinochet ruled from 1973 to 1990 and the current constitution was created in 1980 under his regime. More recently, in 2019, protests created a social mandate for a new constitution. The referendum was put up for a vote in October 2020 and 78% of voters approved the creation of a body tasked with drafting a constitution, which would then later be voted on and which was subsequently rejected. In May 2021, 155 members were elected to a constituent assembly. The move towards the left was consolidated further when a former student leader in the 2000 protests was elected with 56% of the vote. However, it is also important to note that an open admirer of Pinochet won the first round of the election, and also managed to get 44% of the vote, which was about 3.65 million votes. So could you briefly describe Chilean society today? What is the people's relationship with Pinochet's legacy?

It's important to know how the Pinochet dictatorship ended. We had an election. That is the problem: a people can't end a dictatorship without a fight in the street. 

And in this election almost 56% of the people voted against Pinochet. But conversely, 44% voted for the dictatorship. They wanted to continue Pinochet-style policies. And this 44% is similar to the number that Sebastian Kast received. 

So for this question it's important to understand that the associated constellation of social and political forces hasn't changed very much in that the right is still made up of the same number of people. Exactly the same. So from my point of view, this is an illustration of the impunity with which this sector acts. They still don't feel embarrassed about being people of the right, or for voting for the right. By contrast, in Germany, people are ashamed of how people in their families took part of Nazism. 

The right uses the same ideas from the time of Pinochet against the left, so their campaign is the same. So that is the legacy of Pinochet. Many people still feel that it is okay to be extremely right wing and still harbor the same delusions about the left as they did in the 1970s.  One could say additionally that they have the same ideas from the Cold War about the left and right. They still hate and are afraid of the communists, like in the seventies. 

The new constitutional proposal was 170 pages long and contained 380 articles. They attempted to enshrine 100 rights, including the rights to housing, education, clean air, water, food, sanitation, internet access, retirement benefits, free legal advice and care from birth to death. It also contained commitments to fight climate change, protect Chileans right to choose their own identity in all its aspects, as well as eliminating the Senate in Chile, the bicameral legislative body, and re-making Chile into a plurinational state. I wanted to talk about the constitutional proposal as a whole and then talk about its various elements. So just to get started with the length of the proposed constitution, Pinochet's 1980 constitution, it has 129 articles and is just 54 pages long. This is in contrast to the much longer proposed constitution. So my question is: why was the proposal so much longer than the current one?

Well, in order to effectively institute a new way of administrating the state, in order to specify the new structures instead of leaving things up to chance, it must be this long. Unless the space is filled by the State, the private sector inevitably fills the vacuum . So in this new constitution the State has been specifically afforded more space than before, more responsibilities, more presence in the land, which demands greater specification in the constitution. 

The Plurinational state proposal was quite controversial and, in particular, the constitution was rejected in the southern regions known for conflicts between Indigenous groups and mining companies. Could you talk a bit more about the context and motivation behind the proposal to re-designate Chile a plurinational state? 

I think that the left made a bad campaign for the Constitution. We did not explain the change involved in this aspect of the proposed constitution enough. One of the articles put out to help others understand was the article on Indigenous Justice, to explain why we have to respect indigenous justice. Instead of grasping this point, people’s unfortunate takeaway was that indigenous justice was going to be more important than national justice. The left does not  know how to explain some of these things very clearly. 

Also, Chilean society is racist. A few years ago people used to change their last names if they had a Mapuche last name. 

The Mapuche consider a part of the country Araucania. During the Spanish colonization period, this area was recognized as a territory. But once Chile became its own independent state, it was no longer recognized. And in these territories of the Mapuche, the right always wins. The conflict around the plurinational state was one of the reasons the constitution didn’t pass.

Given the social mandate (based on the 78% that voted) for a new constitution, as well as the election of President Boric, who campaigned on creating a new constitution, what has been the left progressive movement's position on why the Constitution proposal was rejected? I heard that fake news played an important role in the defeat of the referendum, including claims that the new constitution would ban home ownership, alongside a misapprehension regarding late term abortions. What made these false claims so strong or pervasive?

The right controls the mass media in Chile and they campaigned against the Constitution the moment that the process started. And the left started to campaign after the draft was ready six months later.

So what was more decisive in the proposal’s rejection: was it too left wing? Was it too much too fast? Or was it that it was just simply misrepresented and misunderstood? Of course fake news led the right. But what are the lessons that the left has drawn? 

Okay, first we have to know that the people that voted against the Constitution were people that we didn't know existed. It was only a few years ago the vote in Chile became mandatory. But voter registration was voluntary. Then, we changed the law so that voter registration was automatic and voting was voluntary. But for this election, the government decided – because it was the Constitution and they think that we need to have it look more legitimate – to make voting mandatory again. So, for the first time in history, all of the eligible voters in the country participated in the vote. So, a lot of people that weren’t previously voting voted. It was difficult for us to account for such voters given this situation. 

Okay so my point is that it's not so much a matter of fake news influencing the outcome. It's that we don't know anything about these people, these new constituencies. And we used to think that our ideas from the left represent the popular sections of the society,  instead, what we find is that the thinking of these big parts of the society are more traditional than we accounted for.  And we didn't have that idea before that people were going to vote like this.

And that happened because we weren't working with these things in mind. That is why I say that the constitution was “progressive.” 

Despite the rejection of this constitution, the majority of people do want a new constitution to replace the Pinochet era constitution. President Boric mentioned that the government would re-embark upon this process again. What will the new constitutional process be like? How will the left ready itself for this situation in regards to creating a new constitution? 
We don't have a clear idea of when exactly this is going to happen. But the government says they have two points that we can't lose sight of: Gender parity & democratic election. But that is all that we know for now. The left was caught by surprise and we were not prepared. We didn’t have a plan of what to do if we lost the referendum. But the people can continue to discuss these matters. We have a coalition that is the Communist Party, different from Frente Amplio. There’s a lot of things in motion. Now we have a starting point, and there is a lot of sincerity.