translated from Spanish: Government seeks to calm investors over new Constitution

Chile faces a long year of negotiations ahead as it moves forward to replace a Constitution drafted during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. However, investors need to be sure that their pro-market orientation will remain the same, economics minister Lucas Palacios said.
Chileans will vote in April whether and how the Constitution would be rewritten, which many on the right consider to be critical in achieving more than three decades of rapid economic growth.
In the face of this, Palacios told Bloomberg that the new version would preserve the elements that helped make Chile the model of stability of the region, including full respect for private property.
“The main problem that our constitution has is its origin: The Pinochet dictatorship,” Palacios said in an interview in Washington. But “there are some things that are not at risk.”
Investors are going to require more collateral. And it is that after Congress passed the schedule and rules for the drafting of the new magna letter, Senator PPD Guido Girardi described the process as the beginning of the end of Pinochet’s constitution.
“You’re going to end up a society where private property is above any other value,” Girardi said.
After a previous rejection this week, the Chamber of Deputies passed clauses that will ensure gender parity in the Constituent Convention and seats for indigenous communities and people not aligned with any political party.
It is worth mentioning that Chile, one of the richest nations in Latin America, has been rocked by massive street protests since October. The protesters have called for a review of the country’s free-market system designed by a group of U.S.-trained economists, known as the Chicago Boys, during the Pinochet dictatorship. After years of hearing that they were living in an economic miracle, protesters want to see better pensions, education, health care and wages.
The riots forced hundreds of companies to close and significantly harmed tourism revenues in the fourth quarter, according to Palacios. The Chilean peso fell to an all-time low last month, although it has since recovered amid the intervention of the central bank.
Palacios said the nation’s unemployment rate could rise to 10%, its highest level of the past decade, adding that turmoil had damaged the country’s pro-market reputation. Still, the Chileans will move forward, he said.
“Those wounds will heal as soon as we can regain peace in the streets,” Palacios concluded.

Original source in Spanish