Felipe Portales

After the loss of the Papal States in 1870, the Vatican intensified its conservative, intolerant and anti-Semitic positions. This was expressed fundamentally in the biweekly, semi-official Vatican magazine La Civilta Cattolica, directed by Jesuits, which from 1880 to 1938 published,…

With this title, Editorial Catalonia has just published a book on the subject. The idea has been to delineate as accurately as possible the dimensions of the phenomenon and to search for its deepest historical roots in order to understand…

In case of winning the “I approve” in the plebiscite of September 4th, we will face an unprecedented situation in a constituent process at world level: That the organ in charge of concretizing in laws a great part of the…

It has been known that the 1925 Constitution sought to replace the discredited oligarchic parliamentary regime, incorporating the emerging middle sectors into the state apparatus and seeking to implement a model of industrialisation based on import substitution. But what has…

The Political Constitution of 1925 not only had a completely anti-democratic origin – as we saw in Part I – but also had an extremely authoritarian-presidential character. In contrast to the de facto political system existing between 1891 and 1925…

In the brief historical references given by the Government about the previous Constitutions -in its information campaign on the constituent process- there is a serious error regarding the 1925 Constitution. This is that it states that this Constitution was written…

The theoretical and limited democratic achievements of the Constitutional Convention (given the undemocratic quorum of two thirds, which threw out numerous articles approved by more than 60% of the Convention members) could be eliminated, if the Convention – through the…

It would seem that our country has always suffered more than others – because it is certainly not a Chilean “monopoly” – from strong doses of amnesia, deceit and historical self-deception. To confine ourselves to our recent history, we can…

The statements critical of the grotesque electoral fraud carried out by Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua made by the deputies Camila Vallejo and Karol Cariola; by the mayor of Santiago, Iraci Hassler; by the presidential pre-candidate, Daniel Jadue; by the prominent…

Unfortunately, institutional violence has accompanied us throughout almost all of our republican history. Ever since the bloody battle of Lircay imposed an extremely authoritarian and conservative de facto order, well disguised in the Constitution of 1833. As Diego Portales himself…