“It all started with us, we might not be absent from the Constitution”, launches Valentina Miranda, elected from the Constituent Assembly for the Communist Party (member of the coalition of the president elected in December, Gabriel Boric). At the beginning of October 2019, the young girl is a high school student in Santiago. The government has just announced the 30 peso increase in the price of the metro ride and, like many of her comrades, she begins to jump over the turnstiles in protest.
The fuse lights up then, well beyond the capital, well beyond the announced increase – and quickly abandoned. On October 18, the street ignites and shouts: “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s thirty years. “ Thirty years since the return to democracy during which poverty has certainly fallen, but not the inequalities which fracture Chile. The demonstrators blame the Constitution: written in full dictatorship (1973-1990), it builds the neoliberal architecture of the country. To defuse the crisis, from November 15, the organization of a referendum for the drafting of a new fundamental law is recorded. In May 2021, the Assembly is elected.
Breaking codes
“Our Constitution will offer an ecological, feminist, intercultural perspective”, assures Valentina Miranda, with reference to parity and the presence of constituents from indigenous communities, from her work room, located above the hemicycle of the old Congress, in Santiago. The constituents settled there for semi-face-to-face sessions due to the Covid-19 epidemic and their geographical spread.
The young woman shares a record with Gabriel Bori: aged 36 when he takes office in March, he will be Chile’s youngest president; the student is, at 21, the youngest member of the Constituent Assembly. Under the gilding and moldings of the hemicycle, it embodies this new generation which stands out, even in form. Some constituents sit in costume? She wanders the halls of the old Congress in jeans and « crop top ”, retains its nose ring. A break in the codes already adopted by the elected president, when he officiated as a deputy, since 2014, before polishing his image for the accession to the presidency.
On her backpack, she tied the colorful scarf of the indigenous populations and the green fabric symbol of the fight for legal abortion (allowed in the country only in cases of rape, danger to the life of the pregnant woman or not -vivability of the fetus).
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