Page 8 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, DECEMBER, 2021

Drafting of the Chilean Constitution in a Crucial Phase
The newly elected authorities of the Constituent Convention will be responsible for the most arduous part of the Magna Carta, because the projects that will go to the plenary session for final approval will finish being forged.
A very important front that the new President-elect of Chile, Gabriel Boric, will have to address is monitoring the process of drafting the new Constitution.
Through a national plebiscite, on October 25 th, 2020, citizens approved the drafting of a new Fundamental Charter and as an executing body, a Constituent Convention was created, a political entity of great relevance, which coexists with the powers of the State, composed of 155 representatives, half men and women, since it is the only parity in the world, elected through direct suffrage, without the participation of representatives of Congress.
In that institution, the first minority are the independent members, followed by the coalition of President Gabriel Boric, Apruebo Dignidad, formed by the Frente Amplio and the Communist parties.
The installation of the Convention occurred on July 4th, 2020, when the 155 citizens elected in a plebiscite went to the former National Congress, in Santiago, to occupy their positions. The first president was Elisa Loncon, a Mapuche activist and doctor in Humanities, who was in charge of leading, between July and October 2021, the development of the regulations under which the body would operate. In that period, the substantive debate on the constitutional norms began, and it was established that the articles of the new text should be approved by a two-thirds majority (104 seats), which implies great consensus.
The New Presidency
In accordance with the established norms, both the presidency and vice-presidency of the Constituent Convention were recently renewed, an event that took place in a very complex session that
led Augustin Squella to the National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences of Chile to say: “We did not give a good image with votes that revealed the ineptitude, but you have to stay with the good outcome ”.
And this outcome came after 18 hours of the previous day’s debate and nine votes without a winner; a winding path to the left to elect his board of directors.
During this election, the Frente Amplio did not reach an agreement with the members of the Communist Party (PC) and, finally, its candidate, Beatriz Sanchez, was rejected. However, the new president, the dentist María Elisa Quinteros Caceres, arrived at the port thanks to the support of the PC, the Indigenous Peoples and the Non-Neutral Independents, replacing the Mapuche academic, Elisa Loncon.
The new president studied Dentistry at the University of Talca. Currently, she works as a researcher and academic in the Department of Public Health of the same house of higher studies. Quintana was one of the 33 constituents who signed last June a declaration of principles that included requesting the release of the prisoners for the looting and excesses of October 18th, 2019. The document requested: “Put an end to the political prison in Chile, liberating all the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche ”. As conventional, it agrees to establish a plurinational State with regional autonomy that incorporates inclusive language into the Constitution. In the process of discussing the regulations of the Convention, she participated and coordinated the Provisional Ethics Commission. She later she joined the Commission on Fundamental Rights.
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