Chile has always been a strange country, I tell myself in the middle of a huge crowd. I am in Santiago, at the closing ceremony of the campaign for the I approve and next to me a man dances reggaeton disguised as the new Constitution. Another, already old, raises a sign that says: “For a dignified life.” On the facade of a building: “A new Chile will flourish” and beyond that a huge canvas: “Nothing will give us the same anymore. The same will never give us anything.” We are close to the referendum, where the country will decide whether or not to approve a new Constitution. The atmosphere is festive but also tense. It is a historic election, the most important of my life, and the campaign, following Donald Trump’s script, has been dominated by disinformation and false news shamelessly propagated by the representatives of the rejection.
The comparison, while uncomfortable, is apt. As in the case of Trump, the rejection campaign has been supported by large economic groups that have made multi-million dollar donations inside and outside the framework of the law. As if this were not enough, disinformation and lies have been their favorite tools. They lied on the television slot, which had to be monitored daily by civil society, they misinformed in radio advertisements and printed thousands of flyers with half-truths about the text. This has been indicated by international media such as Reuters, in a note entitled “Chile fights a sea of half-truths days before the referendum” or the BBC who spoke of “The brutal misinformation about the new Constitution proposed for Chile”.
The lies covered sensitive points for society. They said, for example, that the new constitution would allow abortion without a limit of weeks, when what the text does is mandate the legislator to set the conditions for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. They also said that the new constitution would divide the territory, when the text explicitly says that Chile will be a unitary state. They said that with the new constitutional framework, “the dream of owning a home” would end, although the new text not only recognizes private property but also establishes for the first time the right to decent housing. They said that indigenous peoples would have more rights than the rest of Chileans when what the text does is recognize a plurinationality that has always been there and settle a long-standing debt of dispossession.
Baffled and upset, with no media at their service and no millionaire donors, supporters of approval turned to an unexpected tool. An ancient weapon that, however, usually does not disappoint: reading. The new constitution became the best-seller of the year. Long lines crowded before the doors of the bookstores. Women and men, boys and girls, Chileans, migrants, and even some clueless tourists longed to read it. The book was sold in newsstands, it was shouted loudly on street corners, it was discussed in classrooms and over luncheons. His words were scratched on the walls: “dignity”, “equality”. It was hummed, it was declaimed, it became a poem and even a song. And this allowed some valuable points to break through the fence of misinformation and lies.
The text is unparalleled in the world and I do not say that lightly. I’m a renegade lawyer, maybe I should have started this column there. I was a good student, applied and serious, although uncomfortable in that role. Sitting in the last row of the Law School, I soon found out that Kafka was right: studying law was like feeding the spirit with sawdust. And perhaps the worst sawdust of all was the 1980 Constitution. An ultra-conservative text, approved in a fraudulent plebiscite in the midst of Pinochet’s dictatorship and which has governed the country for more than forty years. That Constitution made Chile the world’s neoliberal laboratory: it transformed education and health into consumer goods and privatized everything that could be privatized, including pensions and water. Once we recovered democracy, the progressive governments danced according to the rhythm of that model. They spoke of the “Chilean miracle”, of the great growth of the GDP, they called themselves “jaguars” and “English”, they bet on a supposed trickle of wealth, and they hid a frankly shameful inequality under the rug. In addition to raw materials, Chile produced in thirty years the richest rich in the continent.
Decades passed: the nineties, the 2000s. Generations were born and grew up with neoliberalism as a model. Pay to get educated. Pay to heal. Everything to retire, years later, with an unpayable debt and starvation pensions. The model permeated everything: subjectivities, links, cinema and even literature. But underground and mute discontent grew and from that massive discontent the need to write a new book was born.
It is the first ecological constitution on the planet. The first to admit that there is a climate crisis and that we must take action to mitigate its consequences. To do this, it not only establishes duties for the State but also redefines the human being, abandoning the classical liberal fantasy of individual autonomy in favor of a paradigm of interdependence. We depend on each other and at the same time we depend on nature, says a frankly innovative text. It is a profound change, but it is not strange that this happened in Chile. It is the country that has been ruled by the neoliberal model for the longest years and its consequences have become visible in very concrete ways. Rivers have dried up and others have been diverted by mining companies or monocultures. There are environmental sacrifice zones and thousands of people without drinking water. We have had, in Chile, a glimpse of what awaits us as humanity. And before that devastating image there was no other option than to change the paradigm.
It is also a feminist Constitution. It not only enshrines the right to voluntarily interrupt a pregnancy, but also establishes that democracy must be parity. It also recognizes that domestic and care work is socially necessary and establishes the need to move towards co-responsibility. The text also recognizes sexual diversity and dissidence, a wide variety of families, establishes that the courts must rule with a gender approach and mandates non-sexist education.
All these articles were read in chorus at the end of the Approval campaign. I listened to them like someone listening to the description of an imaginary country. That is what language does, both that of literature and that of law. Word after word, it creates reality.
In a few more hours we will finally know the result. As in any election, there will be winners and losers. However, if the new book is approved, those who voted against it will have won as well. They will have earned rights. They will have won democracy. They will have gained equality. They will have gained dignity. If tonight Chile declares itself a social and democratic state of law, if it recognizes itself as multinational and ecological, if it loudly and clearly declares that its democracy is parity and that it is a republic of solidarity, there will be only a few losers: machismo, lies, greed and, by the way, Donald Trump’s script.
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