The crisis begins when a panel of experts modifies the public transport rate in Santiago, reducing the price of the ticket in some sections and raising it to $1 in other cases. 07.
Encouraged by extremist agitators and social networks, thousands of citizens went out to protest for everything and against everything.
They demanded that the government reduce the price of fuel, water, electricity and medicine, better pensions, salaries and public services, shortcomings that they attributed to a discredited and indolent political class, if not to the neoliberal model, to the exploiting right and to North American imperialism. .
Violence erupted to inexplicable levels. 118 of 136 subway stations and numerous cars were damaged or destroyed.
Several churches, including the 150-year-old La Concepción, were burned and hooded criminals entered the temples to destroy religious images and take them out onto the track to serve as barricades.
Looting occurred in 200 supermarkets, pharmacies and stores. The statues of the conquerors were pulled down by Mapuche protesters. Military barracks and 400 police stations were attacked with firearms and Molotov cocktails. Neither the curfew nor the state of emergency calmed the angry protest.
More than 3 billion dollars and 200 thousand jobs were lost, the currency was devalued, the GDP was reduced by one point and the stock market fell 13%. There were 34 dead, 9,000 arrested, 12,000 injured and 3,400 hospitalized, including 800 carabineros.
The desperation to solve the crisis led President Piñera, his cabinet and all parliamentarians to unusually support the marches, which at a peak moment gathered one million 200 thousand people. He also failed in his attempt to calm the angry insurgents, announcing a 20% increase in pensions and salaries, not increasing the price of electricity tariffs, reducing legislators’ allowances and creating a 40% tax on rents. more than 9 thousand dollars per month.
Cornered, without a political floor, the government and parliament had to call a referendum for a Constitutional Convention, an approach that was approved by 78% of confused and frightened voters.
Thus, in three years, the assembly members gave birth to a tome of 388 articles and 48 transitory provisions, which did not solve anything and complicated everything, beginning with their claim to replace the unitary Chilean state with a multinational one, inspired by the guiding thought of the coca grower Evo Morales, with courts of justice and special laws for the native peoples.
The proposed text also established, in its sixth article, that at all levels of public administration there must be parity of the sexes, considering in the same category “men, women, diversities and sexual and gender dissidents.”
A very low-class Constitution, added to the barbaric acts committed by vandals and extremists, made it possible for 62% of the people to ruin the deplorable project.
Chile, thus, is back from hell to the satisfaction of all the democracies of Latin America and the mournful lament of the left in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and Colombia. In the latter country, its president – Gustavo Petro – did not repress his fury by launching the nonsense that “Pinochet had returned”. In Peru, we have no doubt that Castillo and the leadership of the pencil will not insist for a while on convening an illegal Constituent Assembly, but they will persevere in their efforts.
Published in Infobae.com Saturday, September 10, 2022.
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