06/03/2022
The result, 78 percent in favor of a new constitution, is a damning indictment on the neoliberal system adopted under the right-wing junta in 1973 that was used as a launch pad for similar programs around the world.
On Sunday, almost exactly a year after protests over inequality erupted in the country, Chileans voted in a landslide to adopt a new constitution that will ditch the one enshrined in 1980 under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
As Robert Packenham and William Ratliff wrote in a 2007 Hoover Institution paper, “The first country in the world to make that momentous break with the past – away from socialism and extreme state capitalism toward more market-oriented structures and policies – was not Deng Xiaoping’s China or Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s United States in 1981, or any other country in Latin America or elsewhere. It was Pinochet’s Chile in 1975.”
