Cracks in Chile’s constituent capture

Illustration by Paz Ahumada Berríos for Ojalá.

Opinion • Fany Lobos Castro • May 18, 2023 • Leer en castellano

I write to share a view from the borderlands, a sense of the constitutional process in Chile, a timid attempt to understand the what happened at voting booths across the country on May 7, 2023.

That day was the second time representatives to the constitutional convention were elected, after over 60 percent of voters rejected the first proposed constitution last September. The ‘no’ vote came after continuous manipulation on the part of hegemonic mass media, which claimed the project was leftist, Marxist, Bolivarian and obstructionist.

It would be a lie on our part to pretend we weren’t at least a little excited about the first attempt at a constitutional convention that would, supposedly, bring us back the “democracy” we’ve waited so long for, that would create more “social justice” and turn hegemonic feminism upside down.

Many of us believed we were witnessing change and transformation through a new Constitution, without realizing that we were never included in a process that was determined by money by those in the comfortable seats of the political and business class. A process that obeyed global interests over local ones.

The results on May 7 showed Chile’s Republican Party, an extreme right party, was the big winner. It received 35.5 percent of the votes, giving it the right to veto and power over all of the decisions related to the new constitution.

Social media and news programs tabulated the percentages, and the word NULL appeared over and over again in the media. Null votes, along with blank votes and abstentions, made up more than 40 percent of all ballots cast nationally.

Now we’re asking ourselves: what’s behind this constitutional tedium? How can we understand these results? Did the null votes end up handing over the writing of the carta magna to a coalition with fascist tendencies?

These questions arise because they’re the lines of responsibility that we’re able to perceive in the complex map of loyalties that has been drawn over Gabriel Boric’s administration.

The fondness among those who had taken to the streets in October of 2019 dissolved and social organizations publicly sparred, claiming null votes facilitated the continuation of the Pinochet era constitution and the rise of the extreme right.

Even so, we hold up the act of ballot spoiling as a dissident spark, unwilling to participating in the cutting of the cake. It’s one of very few ways we can show that other constituent imaginaries are possible. 

Illusory democracy 

The current political cycle in Chile began on October 18, 2019, with a simple action that echoed through the country. Previously contained popular anger exploded in a social rebellion. “Chile has awoken” was heard in every corner of this very tall country.

We felt our eyes opening, and even as ex-President Sebastián Piñera declared war and set about mutilating and jailing our opened eyes, the struggle in the streets carried on. The people in the streets demanded a Constituent assembly, or even a constituent convention.

In those months we watched the explosion of a process that had been gestating from below, among the people, in the student uprisings of 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2018. This process has long desired to rip up and burn the tyrant’s constitution of 1980 and confront the consequences of Chile’s savage neoliberalism.

But in response to the demands of the uprising, the state put its oligarchic machinery to work, proposing a closed constituent process that would take place behind the back of the population.

This recalls the history of failed sovereign constitutions in Chile. According to a study by Gabriel Salazar, over the last 200 years there’s been 11 constitutional processen in Chile which have been influenced by the corporatist interests of the state.

After the awakening of the people and the social organizations, hope collided with a democratic trompe l'oeil. A trompe l'oeil can be used to describe an architectural technique that tricks the eye. In politics, trompe l'oeils mix up and confuse. The most recent process in Chile is another political trompe l'oeil, calculated with a long history of trickery and fraud, which again holds popular desires hostage in a room full of experts who write a “new” constitution behind closed doors.

Resistance as collective lifemaking

We can identify various, multicolored threads in the Chilean constitutional process. Among them is the notion that the drafting of a new constitution is yet another piece in the overarching economic configuration of a homogenous world.

We know they want us in ironed uniforms with tired minds, closed mouths, and our emotions flattened, as if this were a territory of death that is no more than a decoy for globalized democracy, in which “the local” cannot be understood, nor can struggles for “the commons.”

But, as I write from the rural territory of small farmers, I dare to suggest that the social uprising and everything that came before didn’t stay in the streets; it went into our homes. I ask myself if it disappeared, or just took on other forms?

It seems to me that many struggles went silent, or tried to adjust to dominant codes. Many others tried to collectivize other ways of understanding life.

In the streets we felt and learned about our collective strength, and we became aware of the need to turn the world upside down, rethinking the traditional way we think about social struggle. 

These words are being written in a country that governs for capital, and the capital [city], and which makes millions of people indebted and slaves to the market for the accumulation of wealth, while rural and urban territories are kept under the anesthetic of economic mandates.

At the same time, I write these words from a house built of clay, built communally through mingas [communal work] without the state and without bosses, surrounded by women who weave, who spin, who dye, women artisans and farmers, of children who are rebellions and strong, of men (who are not so manly) who know how to give up their privileges, of rural elders who tell us the stories of old as we sip maté, of the plants and forests that help us through good times and bad, and of the fields that filled the tables with food. 

We’re aware that there’s political apathy, and apathy toward the struggle, but that there are also places where life is being lived at a distance from the edges of the world economic agendas.

Weaving collective autonomies

Our intention isn’t to romanticize the rural world. But we do want to create and re-create new ways of understanding struggle, of breaking the barriers between the public and the private, of resignifying intimacy in collectivity, and of centering life through community gardens, care work, campesino schools, collectivized supplies, trade guilds, mutual exchange and community houses.

It is from here that we can understand a constituent process taking place from and in the diverse territories of Chile, woven from a multiplicity of knowledges and geographies. Maybe it is from here that we will be be able to create a road map plotted independently and communally, allowing for autonomy on the part of each locality, no matter how small. Maybe we’ve decided to travel the roads of autonomy and sovereignty through other forms of struggle, if we consider resistance not as resisting, but as creating and recreating the possibility of other kinds of life.

Chavela Vargas once said that “in order to create, you must break your soul.” Maybe that’s where we are, in spaces forgotten to the modern world, a collection of broken souls, waiting to meet another just as broken who wants to make the insurgent and rebel dreams of this country called Chile reality.