They say that God is Argentine. Perhaps a few days ago he was walking around Recoleta, he saw that a madman peeled off a weapon and prevented it from being shot. They also say that God is everywhere. But in Chile the rat was made Or maybe this has nothing to do with God, but with a story that we have not finished elaborating, with facts that we do not accept and with struggles that we postpone over and over again. Perhaps the mistake was believing that part of this fight had already been won and no, we lowered our guard for a moment and they beat us by knock out.
My head is full of ideas, about to explode. I’ve been trying to write this text for days, but I know that one way to ease the anguish is to put it into words. Words build realities, but in this case, it is a rare, unexpected reality that collides with our desires and hopes. I start an idea, start with another and so on. I have tried new spaces and times to write, but all of them are uncomfortable for me. However, I do not drop the text. I follow. I write between classes, my work in PageI1 and some chat on the networks with Chilean and Argentine friends. Spaces that have now become places of contention.
I need to speak, understand a reality that is becoming increasingly harsh, overwhelming, incoherent and dissociated. I felt the result of the september 4 vote as if someone had died. Defeat is a duel for our hope. The constitution represented a revolutionary process that we saw grow, feed, care for, fight. It was a little oxygen for our exhausted bodies that could no longer support the conditions determined by the model of a neoliberal country that found its representation in the 1980 constitution. As Mario Uribe points out, “the people of Chile were wounded, degraded in the register of the human condition, hostage or slave of the market that suffocated them, deeply damaged in an essential aspect of their subjective structuring: the dignity of the subject”.
The Declaration of Human Rights had already recognized dignity as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. That is why it became one of the emblematic slogans during the marches: “until dignity becomes a habit”. The student demonstrations in 2019 gave rise to the complaints accumulated during the 30 years since the return of democracy, from which -in complicity with the dictatorship that preceded it- a private system has been established to solve many of the social demands. The social explosion began endless breaks with this model of neoliberal representation. The relationships that were articulated under this social order, based on a subsidiary State, began to collapse. The town had woken up and there was no longer time or space to continue in this way. It is inevitable that these representations have to change, as a result of every social and historical process that is being reconfigured. And the September 4 election is part of all this.
And now, after this last battle, one of the most important, we are facing a great void, a break with the continuation of a process that we believed to be more solid than it ended up being. A holder of the Amphibious Magazine warned before the result of the constituent process: “We are in shock.” Inevitably, I related it to Milton Friedman’s doctrine, which came to produce a dislocation with reality. This result produces a feeling of mourning, as Freud would say, of a lost object, which does not find a representation or identification in reality, because the logical, the plausible, does not exist in this case. The representation of our social struggle through a new constitution had been lost.
This is not just any loss. It means squandering the opportunity to form a new social pact, designed with gender parity, environmental, multinational, and social rights. There are those who affirm that the constitutional text was too avant-garde for the Chilean reality. There are also those who clarify that many Chileans did not feel represented. Is it possible -from one day to the next- to guarantee all these rights to a people that is not used to seeing itself as an actor and manager of its own destiny? How could you feel represented if for a long time your reality was built under the terms of a model that has been unable to guarantee the protection of human dignity? It is a naturalized “pattern” that does not disappear from one day to the next, since it is difficult to leave what is known, what is “safe”. A status quo is preferred over the unknown.
Likewise, aside from the uncertainty that marked the progressive proposal, the new panorama that was approaching scared many who did not have the tools to be able to embrace these ideas. There is also a certain responsibility in those who had to go out and explain them, the government of Gabriel Boric, the conventional ones and the political parties. There was no united force that generated the conditions for society to understand its importance and relevance within the political process. This was a breeding ground for the fateful result.
Is abuse naturalized in Chile? The district of Petrorca, in Valparaíso, where the “Rejection” option triumphed, is one of the places in Chile that suffers the most water scarcity. The new constitutional proposal was going to enshrine the right of access to water as a common good, instead of the privatization of water use rights. Did they not realize it or was there misinformation?
I turn on the TV and see adherents of the rejection celebrating. Conflicting images again. A member of the LGBTI community, who affirms with pride and satisfaction her adherence to rejection. A Venezuelan in a car exclaiming that he comes from the future like Marty McFly, repeating ad nauseam that in Venezuela we live in a dictatorship and that is why in Chile we must reject it. He does not wonder within his hallucination if the new constitution was more inclusive or if the old one might have certain nationalist undertones. Probably many people, before carefully reading the substantial differences between the two constitutions, have been influenced by the hegemonic media messages (sound familiar?).
Some media like The Economist included in its title “Common sense triumphs with Chileans rejecting a new constitution”. Along the same lines, Mauricio Macri was not far behind either and for the great Argentine newspaper “Good sense prevailed”. With some rejoicing, the red circle media sought reactions in Argentina that would celebrate and echo after the “No” triumph. It sounds strange that now they use the “No”, the same one that was the most precise and forceful declaration of rejection of 1989, for Pinochet to leave the command of a power that he had illegitimately usurped, but we already know how the newspapers and the media operate in general.
I don’t know if everything has to do with everything, but now I think that a certain connection could be established between what happened on one side of the mountain range and the other, as if there were a setback in the entire Southern Cone. In Argentina, for all the hatred that has been generated for a long time around Cristina Fernández with the corollary of the attempt to assassinate her. And in Chile, the rollback to a constitution that we could have outgrown a long time ago. There are common denominators, such as the hegemonic media fueling contempt for life here, generating more violence, and there the lies of the Chilean media to maintain that infamous constitution. Without a doubt The Mercury and most of the Chilean television channels took advantage of the fallacy of the slogan of the right: “Reject to reform”, since in reality its only objective was to continue with the current constitution.
To this we add the fear and conservative spirit that Chile has. Hate and weakening democracy seem to go hand in hand. Their arguments are the consequence of the lies spread in the media. An example of this is that the constitution included the project of the decent house, replacing it with the one of the own house, turning this article into a human right. Chile does not recognize this guarantee in the current constitution. In the proposal, it included that the State should ensure it. It made noise for a large part of the population because the idea arose – fueled by the big media, when not – that the State itself would award these benefits to its closest circles and would expropriate many people’s homes. This suspicion is not anchored in the text of the constitutional reform, but that mattered little or nothing to the electorate: in the post-truth era, what the supposedly independent newscasts repeat like parrots must be what happens or something of the sort .
The only truth is reality, said Juan Domingo Perón. And the reality is that we have missed a great opportunity to initiate profound change. Because the real changes are those that come from the people. Hopefully we become aware of this and can soon reverse a scenario that is now becoming more uphill. It is useless to have a more progressive president if we then tie his hands when he tries to favor the conditions for a new way of doing politics to be born.
I began by acknowledging that God is Argentine, but now, after reading the latest headlines Clarion y The nation, I doubt it. I don’t think he’s Chilean either. Nationalities no longer matter, I doubt their existence. He is not going to save us a god, a messiah or a superhero. The other day, the image of a little Superman circling around a hacked president who was not properly listened to went viral. As we well know, that Superman was a child who was simply playing. But in our imagination the idea of a superhero who will come to save us is still valid. No matter how much power we assign to a president or a superhero, it will be useless if we then hide our heads like ostriches instead of putting what needs to be put into the polls so that we can be the architects of a real change in our lives and in our suffering. country.