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Editorial
We invited Marcela Prieto and Sergio Verdugo, I*CON's Associate Editors, to write a Guest
Editorial.
Understanding Chile's constitution-making procedure*
For good or bad, Latin America has seen several constitution-making processes in the
past decades, including the cases of Brazil (1988), Colombia (1991), Peru (1993),
Ecuador (1998 and again in 2008), Venezuela (1999), and Bolivia (2009). It is now
Chile's turn.
In October 2020, close to 80% of Chileans voted in favor of initiating a constitution-
making process through a Constitutional Convention. The Convention's members will
be elected in May 2021. The pressure for constitutional change was largely the result
of the 2019 mass protests, which were primarily demanding social rights expansions
across the country. In response to this pressure, political parties approved a multi-
partisan agreement (the Agreement) aimed at initiating a process to replace the cur-
rent Constitution.'
Chile's constitution-making process can be analyzed in various ways. We argue
that, as it was designed in the Agreement, Chile's constitution-making process can
be understood from the perspective of aversive constitutionalism. Aversive constitu-
tionalism focuses on the negative models that are prominent in constitution builders'
minds.2 Those models later operate as building blocks of a new constitutional
order, thus incorporating a sense of rejection of a particular constitutional possi-
bility.3 Using this perspective, the Chilean constitution-making process can be under-
stood as showing a dual aversion: Pinochet's constitutional legacy and the Bolivarian
prescriptions of constitution-making.
The rejection of Pinochet's constitutional model is not an obvious choice. After all,
the current Constitution-originally imposed by the Pinochet regime in 1980-has
been amended several times, and Chile has a competitive-though polarized and
gridlocked-democratic regime. However, public opinion and politicians associate
Pinochet's Constitution with legislative inaction in areas Chileans care about, such as
healthcare, social security, and education. Although there is no academic consensus
* This editorial presents a short version of the main arguments included in our essay entitled The Dual
Aversion of Chile's Constitution-Making Process, in this issue of the journal.
1 Acuerdo por la Paz Social y la Nueva Constitucion [Agreement for Social Peace and the New Constitution],
Nov. 15, 2019.
2 Kim Lane Scheppele, Aspirational and Aversive Constitutionalism: The Case for Studying Cross-Constitutional
Influence Through Negative Models, 1 INT'L J. CONST. L. 296, 300 (2003).
3 Id. at 300.
I-CON (2021), Vol. 19 No. 1, 1-5 doi:10.1093/icon/moab025](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/injcl19&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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