The elite, with the signatures of people of all tendencies included, consummated their agreement with their backs to the people.
The new constitutional reform in Chile, with prohibitions, with “designated experts”, with minimum elected quotas to exclude diversity and ambit of protection, so that, if everything fails, the changes will be stopped.
Felony is at the heart of this pragmatic agreement approved by the elites and ratified by their “civil servants” installed in the apparatus of power.
Surely, they will get around all the difficulties and succeed in drafting a new constitution.
How long will it be before the new generations, as has already happened, overturn the belief that nothing can be changed? Coherent humanists are called upon to leave at least a testimony that this is not what Chile demanded in the streets. Undoubtedly, free humanists will differentiate themselves by learning from previous experiences. If the political class repeats the recipe for a new kitchen with its back to the people, we will not repeat the recipe of participating in this process, which by the way is stillborn and widely rejected. We will not step on the stick this time. We will concentrate our strength on what we really need: mobilising and organising the territories for a real Sovereign Constituent Assembly, even if it takes us years to do so. In the meantime, let them continue to play at sustaining a defunct democracy and political system.
We will not continue to put our energy in the direction that political parties have today, and we will strive to make “something more than a party” a reality because that is what is required. To make politics from the possibilities we have, within the activity of the territorial, of the organisations and social movements. History says that those who announced their desire to “change from within” always became part of what they wanted to change.
Neoliberalism or a dignified society is the Chilean crossroads.
We will aim at relentless clarification, the evidence is there for those who want to see it, no government programme publicised in the election processes of our references of each moment (Aylwin, Bachelet and today that of Boric) has ever been fulfilled, because it is a question of the model, of the untouchable neoliberalism. Faced with the alignment of the political class with the anti-democratic leadership of the right, in which popular sovereignty is unceremoniously snatched away in the constituent process forced on the streets; reviled in chorus with the thesis that the failure of the constitutional convention is attributed to citizen participation, without assuming its responsibility in the degradation of politics into politicking, which places the majorities in an understandable distrust in the failed institutionality that we suffer, from the point of interest and need of the salaried, contracted, independent, unemployed and retired strata.
In today’s terms, we are talking about structural gaps in key areas of daily life:
Education: 140,000 per “váucher” (a public school is over 400,000). Tens of thousands of children and adolescents dropping out of the education system by 2022.
Health: Prices have had an increase of 70%, including medicines. The lack of hospitals, CESFAM, Centres and specialised medicine, have gigantic and stagnant lists of surgeries, and black figures of deaths due to precarious or lack of attention.
Housing: there is a recognised deficit of 650,000 homes, and a construction rate of no more than 55,000 per year, if we are lucky. The cost of mortgage loans, combining all the variables (rates, CPI-UF, construction values) has increased fivefold.
Justice: On average, a prosecutor receives 1600 reported cases, and only prioritises the cases of blood, or the one that is on TV; leaving the majority of victims defenceless.
Work: 80% of the country’s salaried workers have salaries that do not cover the costs of living. This systemic state failure has no solution, regardless of the party in power, because the agreement is that neoliberalism is not to be touched. It is the “agreements or edges” on the basis of the “enacted agreement”. And people know it and do not believe it any more, because it cannot be believed.
In this context, the Humanist Party assumes to turn its back on the power of the political elite and to place itself among and with the common people, with a discourse that reveals this situation and that prioritises going towards local power and support for all citizen organisations; to move forward in the creation of a popular power rooted at the community level, which in the future can build a new moment of real democracy and an institutionality whose meaning is the prioritisation of social and human rights.
Those who represent no one want us to discuss secondary issues.
The argument that it should be 100% elected is not enough for us; we have already seen what happened with the failed Convention. It is real participation that we as citizens need, that the people feel that it is all of us who write our new constitution. Who do we want power for? For the parties? For the Congress? For the government? No, we want power for the organised people.
The “agreement”, with all its variants, offers nothing good, not even apparently. It only offers distracting exercises to capture the attention of politicians of all colours… because their strategy is timeless, without time, and they have all it takes to move from one illusion to another. With more or less artifice and colour, but illusion all the same. They, the elite, will never loyally play a game in which the real thing is to change the way of distributing the wealth that they do not produce and appropriate, with the support of the inertia of the sleepy citizens.
The changes are out of the equation, they are not possible because the elites and those who get there are playing the field, defining alone, without the people, without the 12 dissolved parties, what is “as far as possible”. We will not accept the degradation of a clear direction, which is that we do not want power for the Party but for the people, which is the only thing that really matters.
All this is yet another episode in the familiar way of defending their privileges by a bicentenary elite, and we should not be surprised. What we will be proposing, in the face of this attempt by the elite, which does not feel coherent or glorious, is the concrete image that there are alternatives, to promote the Sovereign Constituent Assembly, with parity and with the inclusion of the original peoples.
Beyond all crises and struggles of intentions, we highlight the necessary centrality of the Human Being. Because that is what is needed today. And we dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s without calculation or bending. We put all the necessary faith in the organisation of citizens, and in the diversity of intentions, without fear, towards the “terra incognita”, which is the future.
Up to now, the only thing known is the manipulation of the elite, be it political, financial, religious or academic. If today it is recognised that there is no way out, united we have to tear down the wall that stops the construction of the dignified society that every Chilean man and woman deserves.
Collaborative writing by Natalia Ibáñez Donoso; M. Angélica Alvear Montecinos; Natalia Canto Novoa; Guillermo Garcés Parada; César Anguita Sanhueza; Ricardo Lisboa Henríquez and Juan Enrique Prieto Urzúa. Political Commission
