This September, a long-awaited new constitution in Chile underwent a mandatory vote. From outside Chile, everything seemed to indicate that the constitution would be expeditiously approved. Few imagined that the proposed constitution would be resoundingly rejected—by a vote of 62 percent.
What went wrong? “Problems started from the beginning,” said Dr. Victor Tricot, a Latin America expert at the School for International Training. While the content of the constitution has largely been blamed for the rejection, the constitutional convention’s reputation also played an instrumental role. Several scandals undermined the convention’s reputation and ultimately hindered the constitution’s chances of passing. In order to understand how Chile arrived at the decision of rechazo, rejection, it is important to first remember Chile’s recent past.
When Joaquin Soto ’24, a Chilean national, visited the streets of Santiago in spring 2022, he was struck by the lurid murals of murdered President Sebastián Piñera and spray-painted “ACABs” covering buildings. The scene, Soto said, “felt like the aftermath of good chaos.” This good chaos started in 2019 when high school students jumped turnstiles in Santiago in repudiation of increased subway fares, which escalated into nationwide demonstrations known as the Estadillo Social (Social Outburst). Over one million civilians took to the streets in Santiago to demand reform for Chile’s economic inequality—the worst among the world’s wealthiest nations. Piñera declared Santiago and several other cities to be in a state of emergency, mobilizing the armed forces to respond in tandem with Chile’s national police, the Carabineros. Human rights organization Amnesty International reported 31 fatalities. Over 12,000 individuals required emergency medical treatment during the demonstrations. There were also accounts of property damage, including burned-down train stations and vandalized urban centers. Two years later, Soto was still walking among the fallout.
If the year 2019 was a clear sign for Chile that its citizens wanted severe political restructuring, the following years were a time for a nationwide conversation on how to move forward. In response to the demonstrations, Chile’s Chamber of Deputies held a plebiscite in October 2020. Chileans voted on whether to replace the current constitution, which has been in effect since 1980—a vestige of President Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. An overwhelming 80 percent of voters supported changing the constitution. In the same election, Chileans opted for a constitutional convention of elected individuals to draft the document, rather than a small body of non-elected experts. The result was a majority independent and predominantly progressive convention with individuals representing every corner of Chilean society.
The convention produced a constitution that was a dizzying 170 pages, which would have led the world’s constitutions by securing over 100 rights. These included protections for natural resources, services meant to provide care “from birth to death,” and legal autonomy for Indigenous groups. After historic protests and years of mobilization, why did Chileans reject such a progressive document that would have led the world’s constitutions with such an extensive list of rights? The answer largely lies in the convention that was elected to draft the constitution. An unbridgeable gap developed between those who felt they were representatives of citizens and the actual citizens. By the time Chileans voted on the proposed constitution, it was clear that the constitution did not reflect the public’s collective ambitions for Chile.
Before the Estadillo Social, Chileans already widely agreed that a new constitution should be written, according to Dr. María C. Escudero, a professor at the University of Chile. “The issue of a constitutional process did not start in October of 2019,” explained Escudero. “It came from long before with a lot of citizen participation.” Debates by 2019 mainly focused on whether the process should be conducted by a constitutional assembly or not. In the thick of the constitutional convention’s first-semester meetings, presidential elections arrived. President Gabriel Boric was elected in 2021, leading his campaign with the promise of supporting the constitutional convention. Boric is left-wing and the youngest president in history. His presidency, coupled with a left-leaning constitutional convention, set the stage for more progressive governance.
The composition of the constitutional convention seemed to indicate that diversity would be central to this process. “We had to elect 155 representatives, which, by mandate, half were going to be women,” said Tricot, who last year published the first English book-length analysis of the Estadillo Social in Chile. “So it wasn’t only parity in the people who were competing in the election, but it was also parity inside the institution. There were 17 seats reserved for Indigenous populations—seven for Mapuche, two for Aimara, and one for each of the other Indigenous peoples.” Adjustments to the rules for competing in the election also enabled the participation of candidates not affiliated with a party. According to Tricot, the outcome was that only 23 percent of convention representatives were conservative and the rest ranged from the center to the left.
Once the constitutional convention was configured, a series of events led to doubts about the convention’s ability to execute the task at hand. Tricot listed some of the more memorable incidents: “A member of the convention ran [for his seat] saying that he had cancer and then they found out that he didn’t have cancer—he ended up resigning. Many members did not have political experience. Others started fighting amongst themselves. There were members who went to the convention dressed in costumes.” Some instances seemed harmless, like when Tía Pikachu, the elected convention member who became famous for wearing a Pikachu costume at protests, wore her costume during a lunch break at the convention. However, a more serious issue was that the convention alienated itself from civic participation and Chilean political tradition.
“The big problem with the convention—that it had no ties with the exterior.” This was the assessment of Escudero, who served on the constitutional convention’s Technical Advisory Committee and last year published a book about constitutional assemblies in Latin America. Escudero felt that the convention successfully integrated the views of organizations focused on social issues, but did not represent traditional Chilean politics. As a result, “the convention collided a bit with the constituted powers— the Congress and the Executive. I think in the end it generated a lot of resistance towards the convention from the outside.”
Despite feelings of disconnect between the people’s vision for the constitution and the convention’s outcome, the conventional proceedings were overwhelmingly transparent. “It was a matter of turning on the convention TV channel,” said Escudero. “You could see all the discussions.” Controversial debates were televised as part of the convention’s meetings, and although many did not materialize in the final text, they nonetheless tainted the people’s perception of the proposed constitution.
Moments of controversy in conventional meetings were exploited to exacerbate existing fears of an overly leftist constitution. “Many right-wing conventional representatives went there just to boycott the constitution and they were very efficient at what they did,” Tricot said. A disinformation campaign led by right-wing coalitions misled Chileans to believe that the new constitution would ban its national symbols (flag, emblem, and national anthem) to account for Indigenous plurinationalism; that private healthcare would be eliminated; and that the right to private property would be abolished.
“People are not going to read the entire constitution, but they are going to trust that it is well done,” Escudero said. In any constitutional process, it is crucial that the constituents feel included in the drafting process and trust that Chile will be better off.
Dr. Alejandro Olivares L., associate professor and political scientist at the Universidad Mayor in Santiago, cited the content of the proposed constitution as maximalist. “I think part of the problem is that the constitution contained many things. I would have preferred a smaller constitution with a smaller catalog of rights but clearer on some things.” Some of its more controversial inclusions, such as the right to abortion up to nine months of pregnancy, could have unnecessarily repelled voters. Just a few years ago, Chile decriminalized abortion in cases where pregnancy endangers the life of the carrier, where the fetus is not viable, and where the person was impregnated through rape. The inclusion of the right to abortion alone resulted in two million rejections for the proposed constitution, Escudero estimated.
The constitution proposed a radical restructuring of Chile’s government. These reforms answered long-awaited calls for some Chileans and rang alarm bells for others. Chief among these changes was the elimination of the Senate in exchange for a new legislative body called the Chamber of Regions. The proposed Chamber of Regions would provide more regional representation, which would benefit Indigenous groups. “In Chile, there has always been a demand for decentralization. We are a unitary country with a strong central government and everything is decided in Santiago,” Escudero explained. However, the legal distinctions between the existing Senate and the proposed Chamber of Regions were unclear. According to Olivares, the Chamber of Regions was “basically a Senate without being called a Senate.” Olivares explained why the constitutional convention might have gone through the trouble of creating a nominal new governmental body: “Sectors of the left have the impression that the Senate is an oligarch, so the Senate had to be eliminated.” This bold yet vague proposal unnerved many Chileans, who were left without a clear picture of what Chile’s government would like in the new constitution.
The day of the constitutional vote arrived and Chileans around the world cast their mandatory ballots. Tricot flew into Barcelona from his home in Bilbao to place his vote as an overseas citizen and spent the afternoon in a restaurant amongst other Chilean expats, awaiting the results.
“Barcelona—it’s a bubble,” Tricot admitted. Tricot, who voted in favor of the constitution, understood that the overall consensus among his fellow expats did not match the general opinion within the country. So when the results declared that the proposed constitution had been rejected, Tricot was not surprised. “Three or four months before the election, we started seeing all the polls saying that the constitutional proposal was going to lose. However, nobody thought that they were going to lose by so much. Fue una boleada,” Tricot said, referencing a saying used in soccer to mean a total loss.
In reflection, Tricot continued, “Many people stated that [the approval of a new constitution] was now or never, and I still believe there is some truth to that. I think that there are a lot of things that were really good in that constitution that we will lose. The protection of the environment—that’s not going to come back. The important recognition of things that the Indigenous were going to have with the constitution—that’s not going to come back. In the proposal, they were going to have plural nationalities, certain autonomy, protection of their territories—things that they have been fighting for, for decades.” Tricot was disappointed that such a groundbreaking opportunity was lost.
After the results of the constitutional vote, Boric declared in a speech that he would seek an agreement among all stakeholders for a new constitutional process. Due to legal restrictions, however, elections to create the new constitutional convention cannot resume until next year. The hope is that by April 2023, a new constitutional convention will be selected. With so much uncertainty, Chileans all have different perspectives on Chile’s future.
Tricot is concerned that the new constitutional process will be a setback for representation. “Conservative parties are trying to make the constitution created by a small group of ‘experts,’ including former presidents or academics from the university,” Tricot explained. “The first news that you could see about the people that different parties were proposing—there were no women! Only men, and of course, no Indigenous people!”
On the other hand, Olivares is not so sure that a new constitutional process will ensue at all. He believes that an entry plebiscite should precede a new constitutional process to ask citizens if they still want to go through with drafting a new constitution. Olivares explained that it would be undemocratic to continue the constitutional process without holding a plebiscite. However, he acknowledges that at this moment a plebiscite would likely fail. “In an open reflection, I don’t know what the future of this is.”
For Soto, this feels like recurring history. Student protestors have always been at the forefront of “fast change” in the country. “I’m sure that if [change] is not happening pressingly, people are going to worry about it. And they are going to come to the streets to protest. So I’m hopeful that change will be made.”Despite concerns about reaching a national consensus for a new constitution, Tricot concluded that “the only thing that gives us hope is that, as a country, we are solving our conflicts through democracy.”
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Dr. Alejandro Olivares L. incorrectly