Chile: an indigenous woman has been chosen to lead the drafting of the new Constitution

The 155 candidates who will draft Chile’s new Constitution this Sunday elected Elisa Loncon, an indigenous woman, to chair the body that will create the new fundamental law, which will replace the current one, inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973 – 1990) .

Loncon, linguist and Mapuche activist – the majority indigenous ethnic group in Chile – was elected by absolute majority in the second round, during the opening session of the convention which took place in the former National Congress of the capital, an act which was stopped for almost an hour due to the protest of a group of voters.

“I would like to thank all the Chilean people for having voted for a person and a Mapuche woman to change the history of this country”, celebrated Loncon after his election, in Mapudungún then in Spanish.

With this act, Chile kicked off the drafting of a new Constitution, the first in the world to be drawn up by a joint body and the first in the country to include indigenous peoples, a group that represents the 12th, 8 % of the population but which had never been recognized in the Basic Law.

While the president’s role and powers are yet to be defined, experts point to Loncon’s election as a symbolic and historic act, a nod to feminism and indigenous peoples, and it is expected let him be its spokesperson. moderator of the debate.

“We install a way of being plural, democratic, participatory, for the rights of our nations of origin, for the rights of the mother of the Earth, of the women who marched against a system of domination and of the children”, a declared the already president of the congress.

London occupies one of the 17 seats reserved for natives in the convention, including seven for the Mapuche people, two for the Aymara and one representative of each of the others: kawésqar, rapanui, yagán, quechua, atacameño, diaguita, colla and changeo.

Among the stamps he wants to print on the new Constitution, there is that of multinationality so that the languages, cultures and territories of the peoples of origin are recognized, as he said in interviews with certain media. the previous days.

In these cases, too, he called prisoners of social protests “political prisoners”.

The Constituent Convention, which was fully elected at the ballot box last May, is dominated by independent citizens with no partisan affiliation (they are 48 of the 155 candidates), the majority of whom are progressives, while the ruling right has not won. only 37 seats.

The constituent process was born in 2019 as an agreement between political parties to try to alleviate the biggest social crisis in three decades of democracy, which erupted in October of the same year with massive marches for a more socio-economic model. fair, and which left at least thirty dead and thousands injured.

The body will have up to a year to draft the Constitution, the first which will emanate from a fully democratic process in the history of Chile and a text which will have to be ratified in another plebiscite in 2022 and which will replace the current Magna criticized. Carta.

Inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), the current Basic Law is perceived by many sectors for its neoliberal tribunal and for having privatized basic services such as water, education or pensions.

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