Chile, Mapuche and the Constitution on a thin ledge

The enormous desire that united 80 percent of Chileans to build a new Constitution with an authentic democratic and social profile that bury the one left by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980, has become a thin ledge path for the government of the Social Democrat Gabriel Boric.

The new text, drawn up by a Constituent Assembly born from the popular uprisings of 2019, must be supported in a manner mandatory referendum this September 4, but polls warn it is likely not to pass that test. Far from that 80%, today’s result is an enigma.

Although the differences have been closed, the intention of the favorable vote of the “rejection” is maintained, all probes coincide. For Boric it is a serious challenge that undermines the future capabilities of his government committed to a central commitment, since the election campaign, in favor of this historic change.

In addition, the president, ignoring the recommendation of his advisers, became the main militant the positive vote of the constitutional text. So the polls in September are also referred to as referendums on executive management whose image fell clogged the government by a series of mainly economic problems.

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They are largely caused by the crisis associated with the coronavirus, but they fall off like urgent requests on the current administration.

The problem with the new Constitution, according to analysts, is not found only in some chapters of the text, but also in those who drafted it. Conventional ones were chosen the culmination of the mobilizations of 2019, a protest that grew unpredictably, threatening the continuity of the then government of Sebastián Piñera.

It was Boric, then legislator, who secretly negotiated with the pinochetist UDI the proposal for a new Constitution, a courageous step that became the outlet for those tensions. Since then, the country has returned to a rather central normality.

In the elections that consecrated this president, the population filled the Congress with traditional forces, with socialism, which in Chile has a clearly European profile, and with Christian democracy. None of these forces could compete for the chair of La Moneda, but by the legislature they became a reassurance of the rules of the game.

That equilibrium was not registered in the elections of the conventional ones, mostly independent but with a left-wing nationalist profile that left aside the right, center-right and social democracy, which represent half of the country. So the constitutional text had some registers that generated unnecessary controversy and they lowered his authority.

One of the most controversial chapters, in particular for the convulsive scenario in southern Chile, has been linked to the conception of a pluri-national state, which grants autonomous rights to indigenous peoples, including the hierarchy of its legal system. “on par with the national judicial system”.

This section, for many excessive, forces the state to finance the “Indigenous territorial autonomy for the proper exercise of right to self-determination of indigenous peoples“. It also grants seats to these peoples in Congress.

the controversy

The text also dissolves the judiciary and instead creates a Council of Justice, made up of 17 people, of which only eight judges, the rest two indigenous, and another five individuals appointed by Congress. Another proposal that reveals a certain assembly fervor among the conventions was the proposal from which it then withdrew cancel the three republican powers.

Boric, in an attempt to reverse the rejection trend, proposes to amend the new Constitution as soon as it is approved. The judiciary would not be touched and the questions concerning the indigenous peoples and their autonomy, essentially the Mapuche, would be blurred, clarifying “the unique and indivisible character of the territory of Chile.

Furthermore, respect for private property would be highlighted in the chapter dedicated to guaranteeing housing for all Chileans, as well as the right to private pensions and private health. A nice change in the relevant foundations of the text.

The closure of the Senate, another point of conflict, however, would be maintained despite the protest of high-ranking socialists such as Isabel Allende, the third daughter of Salvador Allende.

The promise to rearrange the text has improved the intention to vote in favor of approval because presidents are still believed in Chile. But not enough. The strategy was at least complicated and rustic because, as stated in Clarione José María del Pino of Santiago, the right and also the center left have reproached the government for being equivalent “buy a damaged car, with the commitment that he would then take it to the workshop”.

In this context there is a novelty that does not seem naive. The arrest of the eminent Mapuche radical leader, Héctor Llaitu, on Wednesday shows a clearer reaction from the government against the violence shown by the toughest sectors who say they identify with that ethnic group.

This individual is in charge of the Arauco-Malleco Coordinator, an indigenous group associated with the Mapuche Ancestral Resistance that the fugitive Facundo Jones Huala leads to Argentina. Llaitu was arrested while he was having a leisurely lunch at a restaurant in the city of Cañete, in southern Chile, a detail indicating that The possibility of this government hardening was not on its register.

the conflict

It is possible to hypothesize that this significant step could generate a turning point in favor of the Executive in the mood of the center-right electorate. The even more speculative idea remains in the air, that the government ordered this measure for this purpose and it shows a rigor that liquefies the apprehensions about the constitutional text and confirms a severe future attitude of La Moneda in relation to the endless Mapuche conflict.

If so, the maneuver reveals a risk for the executive beyond the praise received from the right and center-right. From today until the polls, the Mapuche question threatens to attract all attention with new episodes of violence demand repressive action that it is not clear to what extent the authorities are willing to take.

In Chile, Llaitu has claimed responsibility for arson against farms and vehicles and has called for it this year the “armed resistance against the state” rejecting Boric’s calls for dialogue. But only now has he been arrested.

The terrorist attitude of these groups has already forced the new government to dismantle its criticisms of Piñera’s strategy of militarizing the south of the country. Boric should have asked Congress to resume these measures in the face of the growing violence of the so-called Mapuche, who even were shot to the Minister of the Interior in his first attempt at dialogue.

These measures had the added effect of deepening Boric’s growing contradictions with the sectors more radicalized and chavistas of the alliance that brought him to power.

The Mapuche case counts for an elementary question which the conventionalists have taken into account. In Chile there are at least 11 ethnic groups, with an indigenous population representing about 13% of the nearly 20 million Chileans, as Eva Vergara recalls in Associated Press.

But the academic Marco Moreno, of the Central University, points out a factor that intersects with the debate on these contrasting points and it is the “gradualist” character that identifies Chilean society. The translation is that Chile discusses the contents of the Charter (the sale of the text is a best seller across the country) and asks for corrections from a cautious perspective, but does not question the need for a new Constitution.

The same UDI has given for dead the one who invented the dictatorship. There will therefore be no crack in the future. On the right or center-left it is argued that, in any case, the process must be restarted if the rejection or the I approve.

It should not be forgotten that the demand for change in Chile in 2019 was raised not by the most radical groups, but by large concentrations of the middle class. who asked for the modernization of the country. It was necessary to resolve an inequality and concentration of oceanic income that reduced the opportunities for individual development and earned the country the nickname of North Korea of ​​capitalism.

What happens on September 4th is a puzzle. It is a date that also flies over history. As Ariel Dorfman recalls, that same day, 52 years ago, the Chileans elected Salvador Allende and his proposal to a new road for Chile. In any case, this is what it is all about.
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