It is quite understandable that those who dedicated long and intense months to the work of defining a new Constitution want this text to stand the test of time and not suffer too rapid modifications. Despite the fact that the quorums required to approve its articles prevented this proposal from being to everyone’s liking and becoming what was called a true “house of all”. In its drafting, both the majority and minority sectors accumulated frustrations, which suggests that no one, in the end, was very satisfied with what was achieved. It is for this reason that, in the midst of the process, nostalgic voices were already raised about the Fundamental Charter inherited from the dictatorship, but which in fact underwent several important amendments afterward, such as when President Ricardo Lagos removed Pinochet’s signature from the text in 2005 in order to affix his own, with the approval of his entire cabinet of ministers. He assured, moreover, that democracy was inaugurated with this act.
It is very difficult for the world to have a Constitution to the liking of all citizens. It is already clear these days that the US Magna Carta itself has powerful detractors, such as those who oppose the existence of the so-called Second Amendment, which empowers all adults to acquire weapons of great lethal power and use them in “legitimate self-defence”. A constitutional guarantee that claims hundreds of victims every year, as well as those terrible shootings that take the lives of teachers, schoolchildren and minors in their own educational establishments.
The popular discontent that has been expressed for decades against the Constitution of 1980 led to the organisation of the Constitutional Commission that is now completing its task, and the text already has staunch supporters as well as opponents, most probably a tiny number of them having actually read what next September must be ratified or rejected by the people in universal and compulsory suffrage. But the current social effervescence can be explained much more by our historical disagreements than by the lengthy articles of the proposal. Just as we are sure that the Social Outburst of October 2019 did not have a new Constitution as its banner, but much more the demands of an economic nature, in the weariness with the corruption and indolence of the political class and the lack of social and cultural equity. That is, flagrant injustices and an enormous repudiation of phenomena such as organised crime and impunity, including a growing social awareness of the need to save life on the planet.
It seems evident that the social peace that is so longed for will not find a solution in a new constitutional text but in the elimination and replacement of a set of laws that really protect social frustrations. That allow the most basic human rights, such as the right to life, education and social security, not to be violated by economic concentration, starvation wages and those regulations still in force that allow the existence of abusive pension administrators, health insurance companies and other institutional monsters perpetuated much more than the constitutions we have given ourselves.
As long as laws stimulate the profit motive and there is no equality before the law, we can entertain ourselves with such general and therefore ineffective lucubrations, which have never prevented catastrophes such as wars, famines and, now, the imminent environmental collapse.
Chile needs to assume that our differences are much more severe and multifactorial, and to understand that in order to promote democracy as a higher good, there must first be social equity, a common minimum of education and instruction, a social ethic that is imposed on state entities, the courts and the Armed Forces themselves which, suddenly now, even on the left are recognised as guarantors of order, without justice still being done in relation to the lack of probity of their officers. This has led to the militarisation of parts of the country, with the consequences that can be seen if we look at other historic decisions, such as the misnamed pacification of Araucanía.
What we are going to have in the coming months will be a tough political contest with a view to the approval or rejection of the new Magna Carta. Politics, the media and the social networks are already blissfully oblivious to this new electoral contest, just as those who really run the country are gaining useful time to continue postponing the real and most heartfelt social demands.
In this way, the state of war, destruction and death will continue in the so-called southern macro-zone, with or without the military on the roads, in the Mapuche towns and villages. The poor will see how much more expensive bread, paraffin and their most basic needs will be, even if new increases are granted to the minimum wage. Pensions will continue to be miserable and the historical debt to the country’s teachers will continue to drag on, while their creditors die off as the years go by. All this if concrete laws are not urgently promoted, beyond what will result in a new Constitution.
It is not a question of being pessimistic, but of realistically checking what happened in the last decades of our republican life, where the Constitution was scandalous, but in reality, the inequalities were the consequence of laws that protected exploitation with respect to salaries, welfare, discriminatory education and other anti-democratic nonsense. Judges, rather than resorting to the Constitution, applied the norms that seem to have more life than the Magna Carta itself. To which we can add the treaties signed by our governments and parliaments to open our economy to international markets and consummate the plundering of our natural resources.
