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Those of us who want profound social and political changes for Chile frequently maintain that the social outbreak and the constituent plebiscite are proof that the majority of the population defends democratic principles and human rights in Chile.
I allow myself to question this statement or this optimistic sentiment. President Piñera extended the State of Constitutional Exception for the third time for another 90 days, without any inconvenience. The Plebiscite of October 25 will be held under these extreme legal and political conditions that prohibit all public demonstrations and suspend all the basic rights of people.
We will serve more than 300 days in a State of Constitutional Exception, with a curfew and military surveillance included. However, a debate about the acceptance of extreme legal conditions that give full power to the State and seriously limit the meaning of the Plebiscite, where we must decide to accept or reject a new Constitution and indicate who should draft it, does not appear in the public space.
On the contrary, the voices of the political leaders of the center, left and right have been the total silence or the underhanded justification of this third period of Constitutional Exception. Neither does “civil society” seem interested or aware of the issue. This is dramatic for any population that believes or supposes that it lives in a democratic situation. Instead of gaining freedom, we practice a society of subject to a biased and repressive government and state.
If Pinochet’s own Constitution, which many of us want to change, because it restricts democratic values, remains in a state of exception, and we keep complicit silence, we enter a level of submission to authority. In this case it is accepted that the authority takes better care of our health than we do ourselves. This is not consistent with our own perception that Chileans do not accept political tutelage, or repression, or injustices or the deprivation of our basic rights.
With the Piñera government we have come under the command of the most extreme military, police and health authorities, which deprive the entire population of the country of their most elementary human rights, such as to circulate freely and express their social and political demands fully. .
Hundreds of thousands of people are prohibited, on the grounds of caring for our health, from attending their secondary residences or visiting their relatives and friends. We are deprived of the right to work. Consider that there are prohibited activities such as tourism and restaurants and that there are tens of thousands who have lost their jobs due to the political measures taken by the pandemic.
Neither does the State of Constitutional Exception have the validity of the freedoms to demonstrate against the authority, except for the truck drivers who interrupt the free movement and circumvent the curfew and then their economic and political demands are satisfied. On the other hand, for the millions of unorganized Chileans we are instructed on how many people we can receive at national holidays in our homes.
We cannot travel to other cities. We cannot make public demonstrations of any kind. The rights to attend to bury our dead or perform religious services are limited. You must ask the virtual commissary for permission to leave the house for a limited time. We are deprived of our income given the business crisis and we must wait for the generosity of the State to make up for this loss. And now the Plebiscite must be done almost clandestinely and dependent on the good will of a government that is mostly for the rejection of the new Constitution.
If all this scenario that we live, does not fill us with concern and we accept, without question, to continue in states of constitutional exception, for as long as this government can think of, which shows discretion in the use of force and which has squalid support Social, it means that instead of being vigilant we are asleep or sick of the mental virus that prevents us from calibrating our own social and political circumstances. We would be losing the sense of personal and social reality.
The truth is that I am puzzled by the degree of submission to authority that Chileans have reached, without realizing the depth of the loss of our human rights, and by the impotence that we show in the face of such loss of freedoms that also threaten future aspirations.
Who in Chile defend our basic rights? Faced with the State of Exception that takes away all freedoms and rights, no one appears leading the resistance and the void of responses is the reality of today in our country. Between the attachment to freedoms and acceptance and authoritarian submission, this last drive is predominant.
Or am I very wrong? Chile is or seems to be a “strange country” as the Minister Paris said, quoting Gabriela Mistral. We raise a tremendous expectation with the changes to the Constitution, but we are silent in the face of the oppressive violence of the State of Constitutional Exception decreed by a biased government with low social and political credibility. Will we be healthy?
- The content in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The counter.
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