Chile’s political parties from the left to the right have agreed to try again to replace the constitution imposed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship four decades ago.
The accord was announced in the former Congress building, the same place where Chile’s entire political firmament — except for the Communist Party, which wouldn’t join them — agreed in 2019 to begin the constitutional process that wound up being rejected on September 4 by 62 percent of the voters.
That rejection was a stinging setback to President Gabriel Boric, who had argued that the document would usher in a new progressive era. Chile’s current constitution is a market-friendly document that favors the private sector over the state in aspects like education, pensions and health care, and makes no reference to Indigenous people who represent nearly 13 percent of the population.
Most Chileans favor changing the constitution, but across the country of 19 million, polling showed wariness with the process, which resulted in an unwieldy 388-article charter that would have introduced rights to free education, health care and housing and established autonomous Indigenous territories, among other things.
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