Lucas Cifuentes, a national director of the Libertarian Left party (Izquierda Libertaria), believes that even the constitution’s opponents recognize that Chilean society remains a “boiling pot,” its crises unresolved, and thus recognize the need for reforms to reduce the pressure. “No matter what,” predicts Cifuentes, “there are going to be changes to health care, to education, to the pension system. But the question is the depth, the real impact, and that’s what we’ll be looking at attentively to see what happens.” Yet if indeed a new convention comes to pass, it will look different from the first. In the October 2020 plebiscite authorizing the new convention, Chileans also voted on the form the convention would take. They opted to sideline federal officials and directly elect the constituents who would write the document. Now, instead, Congress will almost certainly become central participants in the process. “All of the uprising, the process of the constitutional convention was in good measure an anti-elite protest,” says Cifuentes, “and now the elite is going to create the new constitution.”
The Chilean elite had already reinserted themselves into the constitutional process via a national press dominated by right-wing outlets. Many were the worries about the impacts of “fake news” on this plebiscite, which indeed shaped occasionally outlandish fears—that, for instance, the new constitution would change the flag and national anthem, and would enact seizures of private property, from residences to pensions. But an antagonistic press likewise eroded support for the document over the life of the convention and the months of decision afterwards. “A structural problem of our politics is that the agenda, the capacity to impose an agenda and themes that define what’s discussed publicly—the rich have that one hundred percent,” says Cifuentes. “In Chile there was more diversity, more media pluralism during the dictatorship than in democracy. It makes for a managed politics.”
Still, the job of the constitution’s backers was to win even in the face of all that. Instead, rechazo won in every single Chilean region, with poorer populations voting most heavily to reject. The difficulties of the apruebo (approve) campaign are evident in the gnarly case of Petorca, an area in central Chile where the appropriation of the rivers by large avocado growers has dried up the basin and left poor households without water, dependent on water delivered by truck. “The centralization, the privatization of water, have meant that Petorca is a symbol of pain,” ex-constituyente Carolina Vilches Fuenzalida told me. “And it hurts! It hurts because we’re grieving people who have committed suicide, we’re grieving migration, we’ve lost the local economy, gastrointestinal illnesses, allergies. . . . They’ve brought water in plastic tanks to say to the politicians in Santiago, to say ‘look, this is the water that I have to use to bathe, that I have to wash my hands, that I have to cook and to clean my baby’s bottom.’” Yet such water users have found little redress, as say-so over water planning in any basin is tied to the water property rights one owns. Petorca has thus launched a powerful social movement, Modatima, to fight for the right to water. Vilches Fuenzalida and allied constituyentes collaborated to translate that demand into the text of the new constitution, which would have guaranteed water as a human right and a communal good, and prioritized human consumption over all other uses. And then, on September 4, Petorca voted to reject the constitution.
