Chilean Constituent Leader: “Let’s choose who supports the new Constitution”

The president of the convention that is drafting the new Constitution in Chile, the Mapuche academic Elisa Loncón, secretly requested the vote for the left-wing deputy Gabriel Boric, who on Sunday will fight for the Presidency against the extreme right Jose Antonio Kast.

“Let us defend what we have advanced and opt for the proposal that the new Constitution is defending, parity, the rights of nature, the rights of sexual dissidents, the rights of women”, Loncón said.

The statements of the indigenous activist were given at a Mapuche congress held on Sunday in the south of the country, but they transpired this Monday after the circulation of a video on social networks.

Boric, a 35-year-old former student leader, in favor of building a welfare state similar to the European one, has defended at all times the constituent process in which Chile is immersed and which was conceived as the institutional solution to the serious protests at the end of 2019 .

Kast, on the other hand, opposed the change of Magna Carta in the historic plebiscite of 2020 and many analysts have warned that, if he reaches the Presidency, he could boycott the work of the convention in charge of drafting the new text.

“If they did not respect the right to freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom of education, of private property, I would lead, within the legal frameworks authorized by the Comptroller’s Office, everything I can so that this is rejected.”said the leader of the Republican Party in the presidential debate on Friday.

The text, which must be approved in an exit plebiscite in 2022, would replace the current one, inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and considered by many as the origin of the country’s great inequalities.

Although it was reformed more than 50 times in democracy, the current Magna Carta was inspired by the so-called “Chicago Boys”, a group of ultra-liberal economists who were disciples of Milton Friedman and who promoted the privatization of services such as water, pensions and health.

Some of the 155 members of the convention see in the constituent process an opportunity to change the role of the State, currently subsidiary, and to guarantee more social rights.

The candidate who is elected on Sunday will have the titanic task of calling the exit referendum and implementing the new Fundamental Laws, if ratified.

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