Authoritarianism in Chile
On Monday, I had the privilege of hearing a lecture from Elisa Loncon, the president of the Chilean Constitutional Convention, which had it’s constitutional proposal rejected in a referendum in September 2022. This proposed constitution was the left-leaning proposal and would have resulted in the codification of 100 rights. This lecture brought up many ideas about democracy, human rights and the position of the state in different aspects of life in Chile, particularly considering it’s depiction as becoming increasingly democratic, and significantly less ideological. As well as this, how statistics and the ideas of democratic vs. authoritarian or even totalitarian may not align, particularly when you begin to take into account the perspective of different cultures or communities within a nation.
Whilst Chile is increasingly democratic from an external perspective, the referendum on constitutional change, and more importantly the lead up to this referendum tell a different story. Elisa Loncon talked of the labelling of her indigenous group, the Mapuche people, as terrorists. She spoke of how this idea was spread through Chile, by both people and promoted by the media, as all media in Chile is privatised, therefore more easily subject to censorship. This arguably takes away from the concept of fair elections, as there was not fair promotion of the constitutional proposal to the majority of the Chilean population. The majority of the population were seeing the proposals concept of plurinationalism promoted as a threat to national security and social order. As well as this the idea that the new constitution would threaten the current privatisation of certain industries was also presented to the public. This idea of the media only presenting one side of the story, creates an inherent bias, detracting from fair elections.
It is also an inherently authoritarian strategy, whereby people can have these alternative views, or views which would require significant societal change, but it is near impossible to gain traction with these ideas, due to the overarching ideology taking the dominant media position. This is also reflective of the idea that in authoritarian society, the ruling party and their ideologies bleed into all areas of society, including both public and private spaces.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/04/world/americas/chile-constitution-no.html
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