Chile’s Bold Adventure in Democracy

 

Elisa Loncón, the president of the constitutional convention and an academic from the Mapuche indigenous community, outside the former National Congress building in Santiago, Chile,

 

"Many of the issues being debated by the members of the convention are specific to Chile yet would seem far too familiar to readers in the United States and elsewhere: How to reduce wealth inequality, respond to an enormous influx of undocumented migrants, reform a violent police force, protect freedom of expression in an increasingly surveilled society, and contend with climate change without disrupting vital economic growth. And how to build a new national identity based on confronting the amnesia that has allowed the atrocities of the past, particularly against people of color and indigenous nations, to be buried and forgotten.

 

Most public attention, until now, has centered on the attempts to rethink the institutional and political changes that Chile requires if it is to be governed differently. How to rein in a presidential regime that gives too much control to one person, facilitating autocracy, corruption, and abuses? And the Senate: Should it be abolished, or at least have its sway markedly reduced? Or is such a deliberative body necessary to guarantee that less populated but essential regions of the country retain representation? As for the judiciary, how to insulate it from pressure and yet also make sure it does not curtail changes that most Chileans are demanding? What sort of autonomous status and judicial independence should the many indigenous communities—or should they now be called “nations”—enjoy? How to return their ancestral lands and rights to them without damaging the interests of so many non-indigenous Chileans who now own or work on those lands?"

 

more in the article by ARIEL DORFMAN