Chile’s uprising was about more than a new constitution

Women hold a performance in Santiago de Chile during the uprising. Photo: Ventolera.

Opinion • Claudia Hernández Aliaga • May 31, 2023 • Leer en castellano

It feels like decades have passed since October 18, 2019, that fateful day filled with enthusiasm that marked the beginning of the process of social uprising in Chile.

The images of the students jumping turnstiles in Santiago’s metro, promoting massive fare evasion on one of the most expensive public transport systems in Latin America feels like they’ve been kept in a dusty trunk that cannot be reopened. As if they too are part of a distant past, as if it wasn’t we ourselves who participated in those long days of rebellion that convened millions of people into the streets every single day to protest misery and injustice.

I returned to Chile at the beginning of May, after more than a year away.

The last time I was here, the national conversation revolved around the Constitutional Convention, one of the negotiated outcomes of the “Agreement for Social Peace and the New Constitution” announced November 15, 2019.

Elite agreements

It was then that the figures of Chile’s oligarchic political class, including current President Gabriel Boric, huddled among themselves to reestablish order. They channeled the protests towards the figure of exemplary citizens who vote and reduced social outrage and its demands to a new constitution. In doing so, they wished to bury the uprising.

It’s easy to get lost in trying to understand this time period, which was so intense, and filled with public frenzy around what was taking place.

We weren’t able to process all that the uprising was producing on various levels, beyond negotiated institutional agreements, when the COVID-19 pandemic drained our energies and forced us inside for nearly two years. We’re still reeling from the consequences.

Nor was it clear what the Constitutional Convention could achieve, when a series of events that endowed the process with a great amount of credibility and charged with anti-colonial symbolism, especially in the inaugural speech by Elisa Loncon, an influential Mapuche activist. 

We still hadn’t read or studied the Convention’s proposal enough when the first vote came back rejecting it on September 4, 2022. The ‘no’ vote won by 62 percent.

Among those on the Chilean left, September 4, 2022 was a day on which the hope for a new Constitution—which I think was more important to elites than to working people—died. The new Constitution was supposed to replace the last one, a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship, written in 1980. For this left, a state of social and emotional shock set in in September which intensified on May 7th of this year.

On Sunday May 7th, I witnessed part of the second iteration of the constitutional process: the election of new members of the constitutional convention who will draft a new proposal for the carta magna.

That day, Chileans chose representatives who promised order, security and social peace, not progressive, inclusive chance nor (contradictorily) constitutional change. The winners of that vote were members of Chile’s extreme right Republican Party, led by José Antonio Kast.

During a triumphant speech on May 4th, Kast stated that the constitutional process was not important to the vast majority of those who live in Chile. With or without it, they must get up early and go to work, just as they do every day.

It’s awful to agree with the words of someone like Kast.

But about this, the extreme right is correct. And once again, it was able to create a strategy to its advantage, as it protects the conditions that legitimate the most conservative and fascist ideas in perfect synch with the counter offensives of the restructuring processes of global capital.

Our memory of struggle

It’s important at this moment to look back in a more comprehensive way, and to refuse to see the uprising as reducible to a constitutional process.

A new constitution was never the only demand, nor was it the most important demand over the course of the uprisings. It’s worth remembering that, even though we all have to get up and go to work every day, the streets, the plazas and the meeting places in greater Santiago—where I was living at the time—showed how the workday could end much earlier, and how public space was available to be occupied by neighborhood and popular organizing.

It’s worth remembering that there were four continuous months during which we were able to paralyze, at least during a few hours a day, the ticking time of capital. That time was given instead to protests, strikes, protests, gatherings, cultural events and in general, to sustaining a monthly agenda in which we decided the flow of activities ourselves.

It’s worth remembering all of this because during those four months of action, regular people with multiple experiences in territorial assemblies, in community kitchens, in food cooperatives, in cultural, educational and recreational spaces were organizing together. We drew on diverse and heterogeneous organizational forms that allowed us to reproduce an assembly of material, subjective and symbolic conditions that allowed us to reappropriate time stolen by capital, for whatever short moments we could.

That’s what is worth thinking about today, in a context of greater precarity and worsening material conditions: What counternarratives are we producing to avoid falling into negation, defeatism, or false optimism that prevents critical reflection on one of the most significant episodes in the recent history of Chile?

The situation in Chile is far too complicated to believe that it would simply be better to repress all of the images that lead us to believe October 18th could come again any day now, that the revolution could spark off at any moment.

These illusions and hopes should be questioned, but not by continuing to ‘forget’ the capacities and power that was deployed, especially during the first months of the uprising.

We may instead want to lift up the narratives that were obscured by the constitutional process, so that they become the narratives that are told in history and live in our memories. “Hasta que la dignidad sea costumbre, until dignity is a habit,” we sang in every march.

Today, dignity remains far too distant.