We save ourselves together or we sink separately

There are those who say that, in the final stretch of every campaign, the spoils are in the center. Today it is difficult to define it, and I suspect that in our case there is something else. We’ve been in the middle of the storm for a long time. We are tired. We carry too many accumulated emotions and long for calm. 
They have been very intense years. We ended 2019 with a social explosion that shook the entire country in different ways. We know of earthquakes, and this one was grade 9. There were nights when fire spread everywhere, on the surface and in the subways, citizens looting supermarkets, women demanding an end to patriarchy, schoolchildren demanding an end to adultocracy; spell armies fighting against carabinieri, day after day, on the same corner; young people who found a reason for being, desperate patients, neglected generations, revolutionaries in search of lost heroism.
One part of the cataclysm dwelt among the ruins, while another danced on them imagining a magnificent future. Confusion and fear coexisted with encounter, fraternity, town halls, the new. There were hundreds of wounded during the revolt. The special forces cylons consolidated themselves as an enemy army. They almost always chased, but we saw scenes where they fled the mob. For weeks they attacked the eyes. The dreamers mixed with criminals and those fighting for a more supportive community, with whom they no longer believed in anything. The walls were filled with colorful and pop graffiti. Sometimes it read: “Until dignity becomes customary” or “We do not know each other, but we need each other.” Others: “Make homeland and kill a Paco”. At that time there were cries of terror, sorrow, fury and happiness. Party and anguish.
The outburst continued to beat privately when the pandemic locked us up. Their last mass demonstration was the women’s march on March 8, 2020 and, a week later, we were in quarantine. The disease was imposed, the daily numbers of dead and infected, the time detained inside our homes, families who for the first time became intimate, couples who did not resist, children without friends, virtual loves, unemployment, common pots; ministers fell, relatives went crazy, we saw doctors and nurses on the verge of collapse, old men who disappeared without sorrow or glory, deaths and solitary burials. Many small businesses did not survive. The plague finished retiring an entire generation. Agustín Squella, commenting on crazy opinions, often says: “we should not underestimate the effects of the pandemic.” 
There is a migration crisis in the north, clashes in the south, many guns going around and crime that is more violent than usual. In the networks there is a permanent confrontation. Constructive encouragement is not abundant and finding the reason for another, unless it is to confirm an accusation, seems an act of weakness. Live tough times.
As if that were not enough, so far, the Convention has been seen as another space of litigation and uncertainty. But just as the candidacy of Gabriel Boric sought to get out of its original generational complicities to seek others, nuancing certainties, welcoming differences, experiences, knowledge, concerns and fears, not only to win the election, but also to build governability in the difficult times that lie ahead, the Convention, already dedicated to the discussion of constitutional norms, live a similar moment.
While the commissions continue to receive hearings, each convention with its advisors, separately and within their respective caucuses, is working on the content of the new Constitution. Among the closest groups there is an intention to present norms together and, informally, there are many constituents who try to cross borders asking for opinions or directly support for their own initiatives. The formation of the 2/3 necessary for a norm to be sanctioned will not always be achieved with the votes of the same sector, nor does the citizens seem willing to approve a fundamental partisan charter. It is enough to see the results of the last votes to conclude it. The Socialist Collective, the INN and the FA are the ones called to articulate this supramajority, trying to reach as far as possible towards all the edges. In the stage that has already begun, it is quite clear that they are the ones called to lead. This week, moderation prevailed on two clear occasions: taking away its support for a proposal to constitutionalize a project of thee Boric’s campaign to lower public salaries (a matter of law) and in the debate on indigenous consultation within reserved seats.
So far, eight standards initiatives have been presented by members of the Convention: on the human right to water, access to assisted reproductive techniques, the right to life and the principle of the primacy of the human person, to respect the duration of the mandate of the authorities elected by popular vote, to protect the health of persons in the execution of economic activities, to guarantee the right to a life free of violence against women, girls and sex-generic dissidents, to enshrine the right to decent housing for Chileans and a proposal of all the articles for its chapter 1, signed by the seven members of the Collective of the Apruebo, to which they propose holder Key Provisions, and that, as they establish in their justification text, “it begins with an option for human dignity as a superior value of the future constitutional order of our country.” That is, no one here is more than anyone else.
All these proposals for constitutional norms, together with the others that are presented in the future on the same issues and the others to be addressed, must be voted on in plenary and, then, those approved in general, susceptible of indications that will be voted in turn. Among other things, the installation period, during which we designed the regulations that govern our current operation, helped many of us to know and understand the procedure for making the laws. 
What few know or imagine is that there are many who are collaborating from different places in this work. While conventionalists listen to civil society organizations and show our opinions in the questions we ask them, our direct advisors, mostly young people, with the help of academics and scholars from very different backgrounds, advance in the first normative formulations. I am sure that I speak for practically all my colleagues if I say that beyond the work inside the Congress building, the meetings and meetings with lawyers who are experts in the various areas of constitutional knowledge have been multiplying. From the exposition of sensitivities and causes, we are moving to their translation into possible and coherent articles, which constitutionalize these convictions and desires. 
It is no longer a question of evidencing the debt, but of building the solution. The heroic time passed and we came to that of writing. There is no going back. The headlines of the transformations that we will carry out are quite clear: the new fundamental charter will establish that Chile is a Social State of Law that is committed to guaranteeing social rights such as health, education, pensions, housing, connectivity, without necessarily specifying the way in which public policies are forced to achieve it; consider, as any modern constitution in the West would do in times of global warming, ecological values as priorities; recognize parity and protect gender diversities as an unavoidable obligation; redistribute power between the institutions of the republic and the territory in a new way, recognizing the power of each region to make more decisions in favor of its particular development; we will become a plurinational state, which recognizes the cultures that inhabit its interior with a respect hitherto unknown, among other transformations. Already during the campaigns to elect the Convention it could be seen that there were few who did not support these changes and it is enough to spend a day inside to corroborate that they are the great motivations present. The new constitution will put an end to the neoliberal era and will have to face the challenges of a cultural change at the planetary level rarely seen. What brings us together today is not to continue shouting what we want to defeat, but the design of the future path that we will propose as an alternative. And all of us who are there will be evaluated by the ability to agree and the rigor with which we carry it out.
On Tuesday, right-wing constituents invited Leopoldo Lopez, leader of one of Venezuela’s opposition parties. Before his arrival, there were moments of agitation and copuchenteo. Some feared that there were groups that would greet him with contempt. Bad as bad, it was evident that his invitation was intended to disqualify our constituent effort by comparing it with the Venezuelan one. It was what Leopoldo did in clear and veiled ways every time they put a microphone on him, ignoring that, among many other differences with the one that happened in his country, here the procthat is being carried out under a right-wing government. The point is that nothing strange happened and the leader of that opposition that has been unable to generate the popular organization necessary to counteract the advances of Maduro, walked at a rapid pace the corridors that border the hemicycle, followed as a court by Marcela Cubillos and other conventional little friends of the Convention. As one colleague told me, “You should ask us how to overthrow dictators, instead of coming to teach us lessons.”
We know that we have an obligation to update Chilean democracy. Future stability is not possible by going back. We require a new social pact and it is increasingly evident that the great national majorities want to live it in peace, not as a clean slate, not with contempt or with anger or as revenge, but as progress. Not marginalizing, but including. We are tired and it is urgent for us to find in the other a support rather than a threat, because enormous efforts and difficulties still await us. Polarization is not a local particularity. You see it in the world everywhere. What has made us a point of attention in international politics is the path we chose to solve it. The Constitutional Convention was born as an effort to respond democratically to this tension. That is precisely its task: to become a meeting place. In this difficult and uncertain navigation that awaits us, we are saved together, or we sink separately.
And that will should not change, whoever wins the next election. 
 

Original source in Spanish

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