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Chile puts an end to the drafting of the new Constitution

Santiago de Chile, June 28 (EFE).- Two days ahead of schedule, the Chilean Constitutional Convention ended the process of drafting the new Fundamental Charter, which will be officially presented next Monday in a historic ceremony and will be passed in a plebiscite on September 4. “We have succeeded, despite all the barriers we have had. I congratulate you because after this difficult year, with difficulties and prolonged debates (…) we have met the deadlines”, celebrated the president of the body. , Maria Elisa Quinteros. applause. Plenary voted and sent all final corrections to the draft in a session that was supposed to last until June 30, but was whittled down to just hours thanks to encouragement from most of the convention to speed up the process. “The convention has just approved the proposal for a new Constitution with an average of 75% of the votes. On September 4, your vote will decide”, underlined the independent Patricia Politzer at the end of the meeting. The body has been working against the clock for almost a year to present to the public a proposal for a fundamental law intended to replace the current one, inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and considered by many to be origin of the great inequalities of the country for its marked neoliberal cut. THE FINAL SPRINT The final chapter of the process began a few weeks ago with the formation of the Harmonization Commission, a 40-member body tasked with proposing final changes to the project. Almost all of the suggestions on the order of the standards, the merging of the articles and the changes in wording, spelling and syntax were approved this Tuesday by the convention, which is now preparing to hand over the draft to the Chilean president. , the progressive Gabriel Boric, in a symbolic ceremony next Monday. Finally, it was agreed that the text will consist of 390 articles, instead of the 490 of the draft, most of which aim to expand social rights, protect the environment, women and recognize indigenous peoples. Most of these demands came from the streets in 2019, when a massive wave of equality protests flooded the streets and left thirty people dead and thousands injured. “We have had difficult times. Like nature, we experience harsh winters, but we can tell all the people of Chile that here we are ready to bloom in the spring,” said the former president of the convention and indigenous scholar Elisa Loncon. In addition to the Harmonization Commission, over the past month the Preamble Commission, tasked with preparing the text that opens Magna Carta, and the Transitional Standards Commission, tasked with the articles that will regulate the transition from a Constitution to the other , also concluded their work. APPROVE OR REFUSE? The constituent process opened in October 2020, with the support of almost 80% of the citizens in a historic plebiscite, and will end on September 4 with another referendum -by compulsory suffrage- which will determine whether Chile remains with the new Magna Carta or if it maintains the current one. The results are surrounded by uncertainties and while the option to approve the text has been in the majority for months, in recent months several polls show a greater preference for rejecting the text, although with adjusted results . “This responds to the fact that citizens are less and less expecting things to change. They have been waiting without results since 2019 and the new Constitution seems only the beginning,” said Marta Lagos, director of pollster Latinobarómetro. For Rodrigo Espinoza, a political scientist at Diego Portales University, the reputation of the convention has been damaged by internal struggles, the impossibility of reaching agreements on certain subjects and the controversies that have affected various components. “The process has unique features in the world, due to its entry approval and conformation of the convention, gender parity and the integration of indigenous peoples,” he said. “However, he added, the balance is that everything started with a lot of optimism on the part of the citizens, but it ends in a certain disenchantment”. Patricia Nieto Mariño (c) EFE Agency