In 2019, a police officer fired rubber bullets towards a psychology scholar named Gustavo Gatica, simply one of many hundreds of protesters demonstrating across Chile in opposition to the nation’s authorities and deep inequality. Mr. Gatica misplaced one eye and was blinded within the different.
Mr. Gatica thought-about it a devastating sacrifice, however not one made in useless. The protests forced a process to scrap the Chilean Structure, which nonetheless had roots within the nation’s bloody 17-year navy dictatorship, and write a nationwide constitution from scratch. Mr. Gatica grew to become a part of a nationwide marketing campaign for a brand new, hopeful path ahead for this South American nation of 19 million.
Now, 4 years later, after a sequence of bruising political battles and votes in constitutional assemblies and on drafts, Mr. Gatica finds himself in a disorienting place. On Sunday, he’s planning to vote to maintain the dictatorship-era Structure that he misplaced his imaginative and prescient preventing to switch.
The rationale? The proposed constitution Chileans are deciding on would truly pull the nation extra to the appropriate.
“Unexpectedly, they managed to write an even worse constitution,” stated Mr. Gatica, 26, sitting within the psychology apply he began in Santiago, Chile’s capital, just a few blocks from the place he was blinded. “In 2019, I never would have thought we’d be at this point.”
Chile’s vote is the fruits of a four-year enterprise to undertake a brand new structure that at one level was hailed as a model for democratic governance the world over — and is now an illustration of how messy democracy really is.
There have been the big protests, first prompted over a 4-cent rise in subway fares, that left components of Santiago destroyed, greater than 30 civilians useless and 460 protesters with extreme eye trauma.
There was a nationwide referendum — with 78 percent voting in favor — to switch the present Structure, a closely amended model of a 1980 doc first enacted by the navy authorities of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
There was then a constitutional meeting made up of political outsiders, principally from the left and much left, who drafted a 388-article textual content that will have enshrined greater than 100 rights, the most of any national charter in history, together with the appropriate to housing, training, web entry, clear air, sanitation and care “from birth to death.”
There was the overwhelming rejection of that text final yr in a nationwide plebiscite.
And at last, this yr, the election of a brand new constitutional meeting, now largely led by a far-right occasion, that drafted a wholly new constitution that critics say would harden the financial situations that the protesters had fought in opposition to and that began the entire course of.
“It’s been our turbulent way of coming to terms with the unfinished work of the transition to democracy,” stated Felipe Agüero, a College of Chile political scientist who has studied the nation’s evolution because the finish of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990.
Each the left and the appropriate, when given the prospect to lastly write a brand new constitution, shunned compromise and as an alternative wrote texts nearly utterly based mostly on their worldview, he stated. “It’s a consequence of postponing changing the Constitution in a significant way for so long,” Mr. Agüero stated.
Final yr, Chileans got here out in droves to help or struggle in opposition to the proposed constitution in a second that felt momentous for the nation.
Days earlier than the vote, a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals supporting the left-leaning textual content engulfed downtown Santiago, the sight of the tense protests years earlier, for a live performance to shut the marketing campaign of what they hoped can be the beginning of a brand new, extra equal nation.
Then 62 p.c of Chileans rejected the proposal. The left was deflated, and far of the general public grew to become disillusioned and disengaged.
Months later, right-wing candidates gained two-thirds of the 51 seats in a brand new constitutional council. Many had been members of Chile’s surging far-right Republican Celebration, which usually opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and speaks nostalgically in regards to the Pinochet years.
As a part of the second constitutional course of this yr, Congress appointed a gaggle of 24 specialists, most of them attorneys, who drafted a mannequin textual content that introduced a common-ground method.
“I felt we could all live with it,” Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s center-left former president, stated in an interview. As a substitute, the right-wing dominated council considerably expanded on the mannequin to create a extra conservative textual content. “The temptation for them was too big,” she stated.
“You can’t win everything or gain everything,” Ms. Bachelet added. “That’s what happened with the first attempt, and that’s what’s happening now.”
Luis Silva, a Republican Celebration member of the council who has emerged as its spokesman of types, has stated that the method was truly balanced as a result of each the left and proper agreed on the parameters, there was an equal variety of men and women concerned and the mannequin textual content from the bipartisan group of specialists closely influenced the ultimate proposal.
“I am convinced that the proposal is a balance between the views of the left and the right regarding all constitutional issues,” he stated in a televised debate this month.
The 216-article textual content units out a variety of guidelines and rules — the U.S. Structure has seven articles, by comparability — however how they’d be enacted into legal guidelines is unclear.
The text supports a pro-market method to governing, guaranteeing the non-public sector a main position in areas like training and well being. It seems to lock Chile into a non-public social safety system that has been broadly criticized for offering meager pensions, in addition to an insurance-based well being care system that usually makes remedy dearer for ladies, older individuals and other people with preexisting situations.
The textual content additionally consists of nods to the deeply held spiritual beliefs of a few of its authors. (Mr. Silva, as an illustration, lives in a home particularly for followers of Opus Dei, a strict Catholic group whose members are sometimes celibate.)
Language within the proposed textual content might result in legal guidelines that give establishments the appropriate to be so-called conscientious objectors, which means well being clinics might refuse to carry out abortions and companies might theoretically invoke their spiritual beliefs to say no companies to sure teams, corresponding to homosexual {couples} or transgender individuals.
Mr. Silva has stated that he opposes abortion, however that the Structure was not the place to litigate that.
But the supply that has obtained essentially the most consideration by far is a one-word tweak to the present Structure’s language on the appropriate to life. The proposed draft refers back to the safety of the lifetime of “who is to be born,” as an alternative of “that is to be born” within the present constitution.
Many Chileans are involved that this variation might allow the courts to strike down Chile’s legislation that allows for abortion in certain circumstances.
Polls have instructed for months that Chileans would reject the proposed textual content, although the margin has narrowed just lately. Politicians and the Chilean authorities have stated that if rejected, they’d scrap the thought of writing a brand new structure, at the least for now.
Whether it is rejected, it might be extremely uncommon. Earlier than Chile’s plebiscite final yr, voters had authorized 94 p.c of the 179 full constitutional referendums worldwide since 1789, according to research by Zachary Elkins and Alex Hudson, two American political scientists.
In two years, Chile might tally simply the twelfth and thirteenth rejections of a brand new structure in trendy historical past, in line with their evaluation.
Mr. Gatica, who has started a rock band with seven different protesters who misplaced eyes within the 2019 demonstrations, stated that whatever the consequence on Sunday, Chile won’t have achieved the long run he had hoped for.
“It’s disappointing, but I understand that social processes are like this,” he stated. “I at least won’t give up on continuing to demand that things change.”
Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting.
