Chileans’ rejection of the draft constitution endorsed by the president Gabriel Boric It has not taken the official Cuban media by surprise, but it has not ceased to provoke resentment and bitterness in them.
This Sunday, the proposal was discarded with almost 62% of the votes, and Chile chose to maintain the current text, written in 1980, and reformed after the fall of Pinochet and the establishment of democracy.
Meanwhile, in Cuba, several reports, notes and opinion articles, programmed from the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, spared no reproaches and nefarious adjectives against those who revalidated the “Constitution of the dictatorship.”
An analysis by journalist Oliver Zamora, broadcast on the National Television Newscast, described the approval of the project as “the most important political event in the country” since the end of the Augusto Pinochet government. Excited by the continental turn to the left, no matter if it is grotesque or outdated, the reporter does not hide his anguish at the defeat.
Chileans were supposed to vote to “erase the legacies of the dictatorship,” and achieve the “real, not apparent, change” that only socialism can offer. Zamora points out that Chile rejected the possibility of a “stronger state” that would guarantee rights and would not allow itself to be “conquered” by neoliberalism.
Chileans were supposed to vote to “erase the legacies of the dictatorship”, and achieve the “real, not apparent change” that only socialism can offer
They threw away, in the journalist’s opinion, a “superior” Constitution, because of the media campaign of their enemies, which is a sign that Chile is a “polarized society, trapped in the past.”
Once the result was known, another of the voices of the ruling party, the journalist Talía González, reviled the text of the current Constitution, “drafted during the military dictatorship.” “Chileans,” she lamented, “refused their support for a text written by leftist and progressive forces,” to which President Boric had given his “full support.”
So much Granma What Cubadebate they were undone in euphemisms so as not to admit the defeat of the draft. Metaphors, circumlocutions and long paragraphs were intended to cover up the “Reject option”.
“The option of maintaining a Constitution inherited from the time of Augusto Pinochet is announced as the winner”, admitted the national organ of the Communist Party. “Several experts agree that this result is the consequence of a broad disinformation campaign regarding the new Magna Carta, and of an incentive, with a lot of money, to reject the text or deliver invalid votes,” he simplified.
“Most likely,” the editors scornfully asserted, is that Chileans “wake up without the possibility of having a Magna Carta” with guarantees in health, education, the environment, and pensions.
“The option of maintaining a Constitution inherited from the time of Augusto Pinochet is announced as the winner,” admitted the national organ of the Communist Party
For Rebel Youth, the opportunity to crystallize “the popular demands of decades under the laws left by the dictator Augusto Pinochet” was lost. Previous articles by him warned, with alarm, that all the polls pointed to the “possibility of the triumph of the Rejection.”
But the “newspaper of Cuban youth” reassured its readers: “there are totally different forecasts”, “mathematical prediction studies” based on readings from social networks, which “have predicted that the victory will be of Approval.”
However, there is something on which all the official Cuban media agree. Despite not understanding the mechanisms inherent to democracy and finding it inconceivable that the government of a country does not have absolute authority over the approval of the laws it pretends to propose, as is the case on the island, every comment about Chile ends up predicting victory of Boric by any means.
It does not matter if it is the direct one, which has just failed, or the more subtle and slow one of calling a plebiscite again. “Boric needs it,” say the Cuban newspapers, in order to consolidate socialist reform in a complex country like Chile, which will not easily give up its freedom to choose its future.
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