Chile’s constitution gives outsize power to indigenous citizens, but it could backfire on them | Opinion

Chile has written a new constitution that — if approved in a Sept. 4 plebiscite — will give extraordinary political powers to indigenous minorities. But there are growing concerns about whether it has gone too far and will hurt the very people it’s supposed to help.

Several Chilean experts, including some human-rights activists, tell me that the new constitution gives indigenous people a disproportionate share of political power, and would effectively turn them into the key voting bloc in Congress. If the new charter leads to chaos or a populist authoritarian state, as critics fear, many Chileans would blame the country’s downfall on the “minority rule” of indigenous people, they say.

Former President Ricardo Lagos, a Socialist Party leader who is one of Latin America’s most respected elder statesmen, has echoed fears that the new constitution’s enshrining a “pluri-national” state could lead to greater polarization.

“Chile needs a Constitution that leads to consensus,” Lagos wrote in a statement urging the country to improve parts of the current charter. “A Constitution cannot be partisan.”

The draft constitution, which officially was submitted to leftist President Gabriel Boric earlier this week, is one of the longest ones in the world. It has 388 articles and an additional 57 “transitory rules” to ease the transition to the new charter.

It was written by a Constitutional Convention made up mostly of progressive and leftist members, elected by an overwhelming majority of Chileans after the massive 2019 street protests.

While Chile has been Latin America’s most developed country in recent decades, many Chileans feel they have not benefited from the nation’s macro-economic success. The proposed constitution enshrines a large wish list of social, gender and environmental rights.

Indigenous leaders who support the new constitution say its content is representative of the Chilean people’s will, because 78% of voters approved writing a new Constitution in 2020, and a 2021 election appointed the 155 drafters of the new charter.

But skeptics note that the constitution’s proposed creation of a “pluri-national” country would further divide it. In addition, the constitution’s rules would politicize the justice system and weaken judges’ independence, they say.

“This is an authoritarian constitution,” José Miguel Vivanco, the former head of the Human Rights Watch advocacy group’s Americas division, told me. “The way it’s written, it will necessarily lead to more conflict, and more instability.”

Vivanco, who like Lagos supports replacing the previous Chilean constitution that dates from the time of late dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, told me that giving long-neglected indigenous people designated seats in Congress is not a bad idea, as long as it’s done — as in New Zealand — taking into account the real number of indigenous voters.

But the proposed constitution would create a huge over-representation of indigenous people in the new Congress, Vivanco says. It would automatically give them about 17 designated congressional seats, which would amount to a swing vote and veto power, based on 2017 census figures that may overestimate the size of the country’s indigenous population.

The proposed constitution is based on the assumption that there are 2.2 million indigenous people in Chile, or about 12% of the population. But many experts say the real figure is closer to 500,000, because many Chileans falsely identified themselves as descendants of indigenous people in hopes of getting government handouts.

Sen. Ximena Rincon, a centrist who served in Chile’s center-left government of former President Michelle Bachelet, told me that the proposed constitution gives each indigenous voter three times more representation in Congress than a non-indigenous voter.

“If the proposed constitution is approved, Chile will cease to be a united nation, and would become a group of several nations,” Rincón told me, “You really don’t need to disintegrate the country in order to recognize the plurality of cultures.”

Although current polls show that 51% of Chileans lean toward voting against the proposed constitutional text in the September referendum, the vote’s outcome is far from clear. Boric is supporting the constitution’s approval, under the premise that its shortcomings can be corrected later though implementing regulations.

But that’s a tricky proposition. Chilean constitutional lawyers tell me that the text has ambiguous clauses that, if the constitution is approved, would make it extremely difficult to change.

The best outcome for Chile would be that voters reject the proposed constitution in the upcoming plebiscite and draft a new charter that increases indigenous rights without dividing the country. The current text is a recipe for further polarization, violence, capital flight, economic stagnation and greater poverty.

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