The security crisis that has been installed in Chile for some years is producing important political, social and perhaps electoral effects (on May 7, 50 constitutional councilors will be elected to draft a new Constitution, based on a draft prepared by a expert committee). We do not know very well when this crisis began: with the social outbreak of 2019? With the emergence of illegal immigration in 2016-2017 as a public problem? Or maybe it is a crisis that has been incubating for years and for multiple reasons?
Whatever the explanation, the death of three police officers in a little less than a month is causing havoc, becoming a possible condition for an authoritarian solution, obviously not coup-like, but illiberal. Candidates interested in imitating leaderships such as Rodrigo Duterte (in the Philippines) and, above all, Nayib Bukele (in El Salvador), are already being observed. rock star of punitive populism in Latin America with wide acceptance in his country. For the moment, right-wing mayors are already beginning to touch that atavistic feeling of security by proposing formulas that until recently were unimaginable (for example, a possible state of exception in the Metropolitan Region).
However, there is something deeper in this crisis: a revealing effect of a growing boredom in the population with violent forms of crime, linked to a majority attachment (according to surveys) to toughening of criminal law (especially the law of privileged self defense of the police), which has resulted in incipient citizen mobilizations in favor of the police officers and even in saucepans in middle and high sectors of the capital. This is not everything. The death of these three police officers has revealed the debacle of the idea general security of the Government of President Gabriel Boric (from public security to social security, an attractive definition, with the capacity to make sense in the more educated middle classes, but excessively abstract for the popular sectors).
Although until now the social security policies in terms of pensions and health unite the two left-wing coalitions that serve as the support base of the Government, in terms of public security the division has been evident. When voting on one of the laws on the public security agenda (the Naín-Retamal law), no legislator from the Approved Dignity coalition (President Boric’s original coalition) voted in favor (not even his own party, Convergencia Social ), taking refuge in abstention, rejection or absence in the room. Very different was the conduct of the second left-wing coalition, Democratic Socialism (made up of socialists, liberals, radicals and the PPD), whose deputies voted almost unanimously for the government project.
The emotional dimension of the crisis and its possible electoral consequences led President Boric, aware of the imperfections of the Naín-Retamal law, of the possible violations of human rights that it can induce and of the incendiary opinions that the head of The State and Approve Dignity issued against the police a handful of years ago, it will close its eyes and promulgate it without delay or consultation with the Broad Front and the Communist Party (the two pillars of the Approve Dignity bloc).
This is a very serious crisis, as it highlights the deepening differences between the two coalitions that support the government (a phenomenon bi-coalitional which is already a rarity in Chilean presidentialism), as well as an almost cultural collapse of the promise of transformation of left-wing politics, great popular hostility towards the opinion of experts, human rights organizations and even UN organizations . But above all, what this security crisis reflects is a progress in agendas in which many Chileans recognize themselves, showing themselves available to trade, intuitively, freedom for security.
For the left, especially for the new left of the Broad Front and the Communist Party, it is very difficult to deal with this common sense that the French call securitaire: a month after electing constitutional advisers to draft a new Constitution, the fight for human rights risks a strong setback in exchange for guarantees (at a high price) for a feeling of security lost today.
As always, the ironies of the story play a role. This year, 50 years of the coup d’état of September 11, 1973 are commemorated: in the absence of substantive changes in the country’s situation, the risk that the memory of the tragedy and the current experience of insecurity is considerable. It would be a tragedy within what was our last tragedy, to paraphrase the title of Henry Rousso’s book. Another irony is to see how the Broad Front, by withdrawing support for President Boric in essential matters, behaves in the same way that the Socialist Party behaved with President Allende (which in turn explains the enormous socialist loyalty to President Boric 50 years later, almost by way of redemption). By the way, none of this is deliberate: in a commemorative year, an unconscious of history operates, passing over different generations.
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