Culminating a process of social protest which began in October 2019, a majority of Chileans, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, went to the polls yesterday to vote in a national plebiscite to do away with the 1980 constitution imposed on the country by fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. With 99% of the votes counted, 78.3%, or 5.9 million people, voted to approve the writing of an entirely new constitution, while 21.7%, or 1.6 million, voted to reject this option. A proposal to create a constitutional convention responsible for writing a new constitution, whose members would be elected, also passed by a large margin. There are 14.8 million registered voters in Chile.
The results of the plebiscite sparked enormous jubilation throughout the country, as citizens thronged to the main plazas in several cities, and especially to Santiago’s Plaza Italia. It has been the site of the mass demonstrations that began a year ago when Chileans revolted against 40 years of a free-market system — misnamed the Chilean “economic miracle” — devised by the University of Chicago. It was Pinochet’s constitution, written by fascist ideologue Jaime Guzman — a devoted follower of Hitler’s “Crown Jurist” Carl Schmitt — which provided the legal underpinnings for that perverse system and deprived Chileans of their economic and political rights. The privatization of the pension system, was a centerpiece of this so-called “miracle.”