Chile

New Constitution After years of consistent protests by people's movements in Chile, a new draft Constitution, with several progressive provisions, was prepared to replace the Pinochet dictatorship era Constitution. During the first referendum held in October 2022, the new draft Constitution, received more than 60% approval votes, but in the second referendum held in September 2022, the proposed text of new Constitution was rejected by a majority. Below is a note on the situation by Sergio Reyes, a social and political activist from Chile. On October 25, 2020 Chileans had voted overwhelmingly to write a new constitution and to have a Constitutional Convention with more than 150 members, with gender parity, and reserved posts for representatives of indigenous nations. Tr...

By Vijay Prashad and Taroa Zúñiga Silva“If [Augusto] Pinochet were alive, he would vote for me,” said José Antonio Kast in 2017, during the Chilean presidential election when he ran as an independent candidate. This was an especially provocative statement made by him out of the many he has made over the years—he had also said that “Chileans need God,” during his campaign in 2017, while proposing religious teachers in all public schools in Chile.Kast, who is now a member of Chile’s right-wing Republican Party, is in the running in the 2021 presidential election in Chile as a candidate for the party. The first round of voting for the election took place on November 21.Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), to whom Kast was referring in his 2017 statement, was a military dictator in Chile from 19...

Walter Smolarek Download PDF flyer By a massive margin, Chileans voted on Sunday to scrap the country’s constitution and elect a convention to write a new framework for the country’s government. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans last night packed Plaza Dignidad — the iconic center of the protest movement that swept the country a year ago — to celebrate the results. 78 percent of people who went to the polls voted to “Approve” the drafting of a new constitution, with “Reject” carrying a majority in only a tiny handful of the richest municipalities in the country. “This is a win for the people through struggle and resistance in the streets,” argued Karla Martin, a Chilean activist who was an organizer in the country’s historic 2011 student strike. In October 2019, high school you...