Constitutional Rewrite in Chile: Moving toward a Social and Democratic Rule of Law? (original) (raw)

2021, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law

Chile has often drawn the global spotlight, serving as a laboratory for some of the most dramatic political experiments of the past fifty-plus years. In 1970, adhering to well-established democratic rules of the game, Chileans elected Marxist president Salvador Allende, who sought to lead his country to socialism through legal means. Three years later, a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet violently overthrew the Allende government, committing massive human rights violations that terrorized the population into submission, and proceeded to restructure the Chilean state and society along radical neoliberal lines, entrenching the model in a new constitution in 1980. After fifteen years of dictatorship, the democratic opposition managed to use some of the military regime's own constitutional rules and institutions to beat Pinochet in a plebiscite on his continued leadership, triggering a negotiated transition to civilian rule in 1989-1990. In the thirty years that followed, democratic political elites gradually reformed institutions and introduced social policies that helped lower the poverty level dramatically and raised the country's human development indicators into the "very high" bracket. However, inequality remained stubbornly high and middle-class status precarious, and the 1980 Constitution, despite several rounds of reforms, continued to place strict substantive and procedural limits on what democratic majorities could do to address these problems. Popular discontent with the economic system and the political institutions that maintained it thus grew, and in October 2019, boiled over in massive street protests referred to as the "social explosion" (estallido social). After a month of upheaval, elected officials from across the political spectrum negotiated a formal agreement, acceding to one of the key demands of the protestors: a democratic path to constitutional replacement. 1 Chile is thus once again drawing international attention as it pursues an experiment in constitutional rewrite within democracy. This special issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law brings together topnotch analyses by experts on Chilean law and politics that dissect and reflect upon