Several dozen people demonstrated this Saturday in Santiago to show their rejection of the new Constitution that is being drafted in Chile, to replace the one promulgated in 1980 by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and that will have to be validated in September in a mandatory voting plebiscite. .
“Popular rejection”, “I do not approve” or “It was no more abuses, no less rights” were some of the slogans chosen by the protesters on their banners and posters to show their disagreement with the work that they have been carrying out since July 4. the Constitutional Convention in the elaboration of the new Magna Carta.
“They don’t protect us at all, it only benefits them. They have done absolutely the opposite of what they offered the people. Here there are things to change, but not in this way. That is why we reject a new Constitution,” Sandra Lavín, a 58-year-old independent worker, told AFP.
The protest was held in a park in the center of the capital and the adherents denounced that the constituent body intends in the new Constitution to remove rights such as private property, legalize free abortion or expropriate individual private pension funds.
The Convention has already approved an article that guarantees rights over one’s own body, which opens the possibility of legislating on free abortion, something that is currently only allowed when there is a risk to the life of the mother, fetal inviability, and in the event of rape.
The protesters also alleged that the new Magna Carta will lead the country to communism at the hands of the new president Gabriel Boric, a 36-year-old former student leader at the head of a leftist alliance that includes the Communist Party but has criticized governments such as that of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
“Unfortunately, here in Chile, if we don’t do something, we’re going to sink. All of Latin America is towards communism, the only patriots are (the president of Brazil, Jair) Bolsonaro and we who are on the street,” a protester identified as María Angélica, 55, told AFP.
Deputy Agustín Romero, from the far-right Republican Party, participated in the protest, inviting those present not to approve the new Constitution in the plebiscite on September 4, alleging that it will be “refoundational”, “Marxist” and “Chavista”.
The Constitutional Convention was conceived as the institutional solution with which Chile channeled the violent social protests that broke out on October 18, 2019 denouncing the current Magna Carta, inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) as the origin of inequality in the country.
