Chile’s president Gabriel Boric is celebrating what mainstream media call an important victory, brokering a deal among his country’s multiple political parties to draft a new constitution.
It’s part of an ongoing saga in Chile, where voters decided in 2020 to scrap the constitution adopted 40 years earlier during the anti-communist, free-market-oriented administration of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990.
Nearly a half-century ago Pinochet led a military coup against revolutionary Marxist President Salvador Allende. “At the time of the coup, the Allende government had completely nationalized the Chilean economy and was in the process of consolidating power to form a Cuban-style communist regime,” related Warren Mass for The New American on the 40th anniversary of the dictator’s overthrow.
Pinochet turned that around and transformed Chile into one of the healthiest economies in Latin America after overthrowing the devastating Allende regime. “He has never been forgiven by the Communists or the international Marxist left for that heroic act, or for saving the economy that Allende had ruined and turning it into an economic showcase,” wrote TNA senior editor Bill Jasper. Chilean socialists would later arrest him, an 83-year-old convalescent recuperating from back surgery, on more than 300 trumped-up charges of human rights violations, tax evasion, and embezzlement during his 17-year rule.
Pinochet died in 2006, and his Marxist enemies have been after the constitution forged during his administration ever since, claiming that it established an oppressive, racist dictatorship. In reality, “the Pinochet government had drawn up a remarkable constitution similar to our own which was approved by 68 percent of the voters,” Jasper noted.
“It was approved in a referendum,” agreed Dr. Carlos Casanova, law professor at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago. He told The New American’s Christian Gomez that leftists had modified it so much by 2005 that president Ricardo Lagos, a socialist, called the document “brand new” and quipped that it could even bear his own name. Indeed, amendments that year made great strides in centralizing power in the executive office. Casanova said that demonizing the Pinochet constitution is “an excuse to launch a revolution. It’s not true at all. Just a pretext.”
Communist and socialist parties in Chile persuaded many that the problems inflicted by their changes to the constitution could only be solved by revoking it. Violent riots in late 2019 brought about the 2020 vote for a constitutional convention, with nearly 80 percent of Chileans in favor of re-crafting their government. (There was, of course, reportedly no fraud in that election, though the mainstream narrative claims that rampant election fraud brought victory in Pinochet’s 1980 constitutional referendum.)
“Marxists, not development expectations, sink Chile,” headlines a more rational Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Uprisings are never spontaneous, and Chile has a long Marxist tradition that has waited years for its chance to seize again the reins of power.”
The 2020 referendum handed them those reins. Not surprisingly, “when members of the constitutional assembly were elected, the group was heavy on political activists and light on centrists that might better reflect the makeup of the country,” according to Frida Ghitis with World Politics Review.
It therefore also came as no surprise when voters rejected that panel’s draft in a September referendum, with only 38 percent in favor of it. The Economist tweeted that the draft was “a woke and fiscally irresponsible mess.” It reportedly includes measures to:
- Ensure Marxist take-over of numerous areas such as education, healthcare, housing and environmental policy;
- Grant special “human rights” protections for gender- and neurodivergent people;
- Ditch the bicameral legislature in favor of a unicameral body;
- Establish autonomous “indigenous communities,” making Chile a pluri-national state; and
- Reconstitute the court system with a politicized council empowered to review judges’ decisions.
The voters’ rejection compelled Boric’s administration to incorporate “centrist” demands, and he unveiled his new plan to parliament in Santiago in mid-December. It includes 12 points of agreement subscribed to by 14 congressional parties — hence Boric’s “important victory” — and these include maintaining a bicameral legislature and abandoning the pluri-national provision.
Boric’s new proposal requires a 57-percent majority vote of Chile’s legislature. If the plan passes, a new draft constitution “will be written by 50 popularly elected people, with the help of 24 experts chosen by Congress, where Boric’s party does not enjoy a majority,” Ghitis explains. Those two dozen “experts” will compose an initial draft to be debated by the elected panel of 50. Their updated draft is due for public release next October, with a referendum to approve it scheduled for November 26.
As promising as the new plan sounds, implemented by a government rife with leftist extremists, it is unlikely to produce anything close to the prosperous results of Pinochet’s original. Many expect full-blown communism. The United States should heed the implicit warning as domestic Marxists here push for an Article V Constitutional Convention.
