It’s the latest attack on security forces in a region where tensions have long simmered between locals and the state.
Armed assailants have ambushed and killed three police officers in southern Chile before setting their car on fire, authorities said, the latest attack on police to revive security concerns in the South American country.
In a statement on X on Saturday, President Gabriel Boric called the attack in Arauco province’s Canete municipality “cowardly” and declared three days of national mourning to honour the officers, identified as Sergeant Carlos Cisterna, Corporal Sergio Arevalo and Corporal Misael Vidal.
“Today the entire country is in mourning. There is heartbreak, sorrow, anger. But these emotions do not paralyse us, they force us, they mobilise us,” Boric wrote. “We will find the whereabouts of the perpetrators of this terrible crime.”
Authorities said the officers responded to three false emergency calls and were attacked in their vehicle with heavy-calibre weapons. They burned inside the armoured patrol vehicle on a road near the city of Concepcion, some 400km (about 250 miles) south of the capital, Santiago.
It remains unclear who carried out the assault but a long-simmering conflict between the Mapuche Indigenous community and landowners and forestry companies in the region has intensified in recent years. The conflict forced the government to impose a state of emergency and deploy the military to provide security.
In Chile, about one in 10 citizens identify as Mapuche, the tribe that resisted Spanish conquest centuries ago and was defeated only in the late 1800s after Chile won its independence.
Large forestry companies and farm owners control large tracts of land originally belonging to the Mapuche, many of whom now live in rural poverty.
Boric, who travelled to the area on Saturday with a large contingent, including top military and congressional officials and the president of the Supreme Court, offered condolences to the victims’ families, promising the killers would be found and brought to justice.
“There will be no impunity,” he said after firefighters dousing the burning police car made the grisly discovery.
In Santiago, hundreds of people gathered outside the presidential palace to protest against the killings, which coincided with National Police Day, celebrating the 97th anniversary of the establishment of the Carabineros, Chile’s military police force. It was the second such fatal attack on the force this month.
Ricardo Yanez, the Carabineros’s general director, told reporters the officers had been dispatched in response to fake distress calls from the rural road, where they were met with a barrage of gunfire.
“This was not coincidental, it was not random,” he said of the ambush.
The spate of bloodshed has tested Boric, who came to power in 2022 promising to ease tensions in the region, where armed Mapuche activists have been stealing timber and attacking forestry companies that they claim invaded their ancestral lands.
Boric’s administration has touted its success in reducing Chile’s national homicide rate by 6 percent, according to government figures from 2023 published earlier this week.
“This attack goes against all the enormous strides that have been made,” said Interior Minister Carolina Toha, a centre-left former mayor of Santiago.
Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Toha said all ‘eyes’ are on Venezuela to act in the pursuit of justice.
Chile has announced plans to seek the extradition of two Venezuelans it considers suspects in the grisly murder of a political dissident.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Toha called on her Venezuelan counterparts to be partners in her country’s pursuit of justice.
“What happened in this crime is important for Chile,” she said. “We give it the highest gravity, but also it is important for Venezuela.”
She said there will be “eyes” on Venezuela’s behaviour in the matter. “The willingness to collaborate in this investigation has to be demonstrated in facts — firstly, by discovering those responsible, and secondly, by making it easier for them to face justice.”
Toha’s statement comes as part of an investigation into the killing of 32-year-old Ronald Ojeda, a Venezuelan dissident and former military lieutenant.
Ojeda had been imprisoned in Venezuela for alleged treason. In 2017, he escaped to Chile, where he sought and was granted asylum.
But early on the morning of February 21, surveillance footage showed three men disguised as Chilean police kidnapping Ojeda from his apartment. His body was later discovered on March 1 stuffed in a suitcase, buried under lime powder and cement in a Santiago suburb.
Chilean police afterwards arrested a 17-year-old Venezuelan suspect, allegedly linked to the Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest criminal network. Officials have said two additional suspects escaped to Venezuela.
Chilean authorities suggested on Friday that the murder was politically motivated and coordinated from Venezuela itself.
“We are talking about a victim who has participated in actions against the Venezuelan government, and secondly, he has been detained for nine months in Venezuela. He escaped and has political asylum in Chile,” said Hector Barros, a prosecutor for Santiago’s organised crime and homicide team.
“Given the profile he has, there is no other line of investigation.”
But earlier this week, Venezuela disputed the continued existence of the Tren de Aragua criminal group, with Foreign Minister Yvan Gil calling it “a fiction created by the international media”.
That prompted an outcry from the Chilean government. “It is an insult to the people of Chile and Latin America,” Toha said on Monday, referencing violent incidents credited to the group across the region.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric also announced on Thursday that he would recall his administration’s ambassador to Venezuela in response.
“The irresponsible statements from the chancellor of Venezuela, ignoring the existence of the Tren de Aragua, are worrying and constitute a serious insult to those who have been victims of this organisation and also demonstrate a lack of commitment to necessary international cooperation in matters of security,” Boric wrote on social media.
Venezuela has yet to respond to Chile’s most recent extradition requests. It has denied responsibility for Ojeda’s murder.
But the race has been marred by accusations that his government has attempted to intimidate and derail the opposition, including through detentions, arrest warrants and bans from holding public office.
Speaking on Friday, Toha, the Chilean interior minister, emphasised the need to cooperate on matters of justice.
“A case like this, with the implications it has, must have at its centre that justice is done, that the truth is found, that those responsible are discovered, and that they face sentences that correspond to [their crimes],” she said.
Governments across Latin America have rallied around Mexico after security forces in Ecuador stormed the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest a controversial politician who had been granted political asylum there.
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela sharply rebuked Ecuador on Saturday, hours after the seizure of Ecuador’s former Vice President Jorge Glas, with Nicaragua joining Mexico in severing diplomatic ties with Quito.
During the incident, which took place late on Friday night, special forces equipped with a battering ram surrounded the Mexican embassy in Quito’s financial district, and at least one agent scaled the walls to extract Glas.
The 54-year-old politician is wanted on corruption charges and has been holed up inside the Mexican embassy since seeking political asylum in December.
Following his arrest, Glas could be seen on video circulating on social media being taken by a police convoy to the airport in Quito, flanked by heavily armed soldiers. He then boarded a plane en route to a jail in Guayaquil, the Andean nation’s largest city.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador blasted the unusual diplomatic incursion and arrest as an “authoritarian” act as well as a breach of international law and Mexico’s sovereignty, while the government of Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa argued asylum protections were illegal because of the corruption charges Glas is facing.
Still, under international law, embassies are considered the sovereign territory of the country they represent, and the Vienna Convention, which governs international relations, states that a country cannot intrude upon an embassy on its territory.
Brazil’s government condemned Ecuador’s move as a “clear violation” of international norms and said the action “must be subject to strong repudiation, whatever the justification for its implementation”.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro argued in a post on X that Latin America “must keep alive the precepts of international law in the midst of the barbarism that is advancing in the world”, while his government said in a separate statement that it will seek human rights legal protections for the now-detained Glas.
The United States also said it condemns any violation of the convention protecting diplomatic missions and encouraged “the two countries to resolve their differences in accord with international norms”.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, said he was “alarmed” by the raid, and urged both sides to show moderation in resolving the dispute, according to a spokesman.
The Washington-based Organization of American States also issued a call for dialogue to resolve the escalating dispute, adding in a statement that a session of the body’s permanent council will be convened to discuss the need for “strict compliance with international treaties, including those that guarantee the right to asylum”.
On Saturday, the Mexican embassy remained surrounded by police and the Mexican flag had been taken down.
Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said late in the day that diplomatic personnel and their families would leave Ecuador on a commercial flight on Sunday, adding that personnel from “friendly and allied countries” would accompany them to the airport.
In Mexico City, about 50 demonstrators rallied outside Ecuador’s embassy, accusing Quito of being “fascist”.
In an interview with national broadcaster Milenio, Mexico’s top diplomat Alicia Barcena expressed shock at Ecuador’s incursion into the country’s embassy, adding that some embassy personnel were injured in the raid.
She added that Glas was granted asylum after an exhaustive analysis of the circumstances surrounding the accusations he faces.
Glas was vice president under former leftist president, Rafael Correa, between 2013 and 2017.
He was released from prison in November after serving time for receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks in a vast scandal involving Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. He faces another arrest warrant for allegedly diverting funds that were intended for reconstruction efforts after a devastating earthquake in 2016.
Glas has claimed he is the victim of political persecution, a charge Ecuador’s government has denied.
Former President Correa, who has been exiled in Belgium since 2017 and was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for corruption, wrote on X that “not even in the worst dictatorships has a country’s embassy been violated”.
He said Glas “was struggling to walk because he was beaten”.
An Indigenous mother rises in Chilean politics when she is caught in the crossfire of a polarised nation.
On her way to work, Fabiola Campillai was blinded when she was shot in the face with a tear gas canister by police during Chile’s 2019 uprising.
Despite having no experience in politics, the Indigenous mother and former factory worker decides to fight for justice and run for parliament.
Campillai is elected Chile’s first blind senator. The policeman who attacked her goes on trial as she meets other survivors of police brutality seeking reparations.
Campillai knows her fight is far bigger than just her case. But she faces another unexpected attack – this time from within Chile’s polarised parliament.
A Vision of Justice is a documentary film by Nancy Roberts.
Viña del Mar, Chile – Felipe Gajardo, a 27-year-old student, sits in a quiet school hallway in the coastal city of Viña del Mar, with an empty cat carrier by his side. Dozens of flyers with pictures of lost animals plaster the walls around him.
The Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins school is usually closed this time of the year for the summer holidays, which run from December to February in Chile.
But this year, the school is not empty. Instead, its classrooms are a blur of activity, as veterinarians use them to house a makeshift clinic for animals hurt in the country’s deadly wildfires.
More than 130 people have died in the blazes, which sparked on February 3. In three short days, the fires spread over 9,215 hectares (22,773 acres) of densely populated land, reducing neighbourhoods in cities like Viña del Mar to ash.
President Gabriel Boric called it the “greatest tragedy” the country has endured since a 2010 earthquake left more than 500 people dead. The United Nations noted it was likely the country’s deadliest forest fire on record.
The neighbourhood of El Olivar in the coastal city of Viña del Mar, Chile, was among those devastated by the wildfires [Charis McGowan/Al Jazeera]
Gajardo’s home was among those consumed by the flames. His parents, brother and sister managed to escape to safety in their car, but their poodle Nala and cat Max fled the house in fear before the family could catch them, running into the chaos of the fiery night.
Four days later, Nala found her way back to the ashen shell that had once been her home. She was weary, dehydrated and dust-covered, but miraculously uninjured.
But Max, a ginger cat with white paws, remains missing.
For Gajardo, finding Max is now of the utmost importance. So much has disappeared in the flames, never to return: family photos, heirlooms, items accumulated over a lifetime.
But the prospect of recovering Max gives Gajardo hope. He has shared photos of the ginger cat with online groups that popped up after the fire to reconnect lost pets with their owners.
“Max is a grumpy guy, you can see by his expression,” Gajardo said lovingly, showing Al Jazeera a snapshot of the rumple-faced cat. “I’ve missed him. I’d put him around my neck. He’d sleep in our rooms.”
A glimmer of possibility has brought Gajardo to the O’Higgins school: Earlier in the morning, the clinic had called to tell him they had recovered a cat matching Max’s description.
Gajardo arrived straightaway, anxious to see if it was indeed Max. “I hope it’s him,” he said, waiting patiently in the empty hall.
Margarita Herrera, left, holds her pitbull Nitro still for an inspection in the hard-hit neighbourhood of El Olivar in Viña del Mar, Chile [Charis McGowan/Al Jazeera]
Addressing the trauma
To the east of the clinic, on the hillsides overlooking the city, sits the neighbourhood of El Olivar, one of the areas hardest hit by the fires.
Residents there have had to sweep away piles of debris — the remains of their former houses — in order to make space for makeshift tents, made of tarpaulin sheets.
Margarita Herrera is among them. In the rubble of her home, she stood next to her pet bulldog, Nitro. In the corner of his eye loomed a pink bulb, swollen and sore: His tear duct had become infected since the fire.
As the swelling grew and grew, Herrera became worried that the toxic ash was making Nitro’s infection worse. Last week, she put out a call for help on the social media platform TikTok.
“He could lose his eye. We can rebuild our house, but we can’t bring back his eye,” said Herrera, with Nitro sitting dutifully at her feet.
Going to a pet clinic was not an option, Herrera explained as she crouched down to pat Nitro’s head. If she leaves the area, looters might rummage through her few remaining belongings: “They’d rob the little we have left.”
Kelly Donithan, the director of global disaster response for the Humane Society International, an animal welfare nonprofit, was among those who arrived to help Nitro and other animals in the neighbourhood.
She acknowledged the high death toll from the wildfire — but she added that helping injured pets is a way of caring for human survivors, too.
“Responding and helping animals is not mutually exclusive of helping people. We are not taking any resources away from the humanitarian response,” explained Donithan.
“While it’s very important to help these animals just for their own sake, it also supports human resiliency and recovery from trauma.”
Donithan ultimately put Nitro on a list for surgery at the school clinic. Hearing the news, Herrera broke into a smile, visibly relieved. “He’s our baby,” she said of Nitro.
Surveys indicate Chile has a relatively high rate of dog ownership compared with other countries worldwide [Charis McGowan/Al Jazeera]
A haven for dog lovers
Chile is known for its love of animals. A 2022 poll found that eight out of every 10 Chileans are pet owners, and the country famously has a high dog-to-human ratio.
In a country of 19.6 million people, there are 8.3 million pet dogs, according to a government “census” of household animals. Another 3.46 million are strays.
According to the Financial Times, the market research company Euromonitor even ranked Chile as having the highest percentage of dog ownership in the world, surpassing larger economies like Brazil and the United States in 2017.
While there are no official statistics on the number of pets injured in this year’s fires, Lukas Garcia, a veterinarian born and raised in Viña del Mar, said he and his colleagues have treated more than 120 animals so far.
Garcia explained he is one of five full-time veterinarians employed by the municipal government to assist with the disaster response. Volunteers from private clinics and veterinary students were also on hand to help.
He added that the number of animals they’ve attended is likely to be far lower than the total number hurt. He credited that to one simple reason: Many didn’t survive.
Deputy Interior Minister Manuel Monsalve put the number of houses damaged or destroyed as high as 14,000.
“Viña has suffered fires before, but never as big as this,” Garcia said.
Alma Ortega has taken residence in an emergency shelter with her pet dog, whose paws were burned in the fire [Charis McGowan/Al Jazeera]
Limited shelter options
As he spoke to Al Jazeera, Garcia tended to pets at the Colombian Republic School in Viña del Mar. There, the government had established an emergency shelter for residents left homeless. It is one of the few shelters that accepts pets.
Dog owner Alma Ortega had temporarily moved into the school with her partner, child and parents-in-law. They shared a classroom to sleep in with another family.
Ortega said her house in the Villa Independencia neighbourhood had completely burned down in the fires.
“It happened in a matter of minutes,” she said. “We saw ash falling from the sky, and then the house was on fire.”
She managed to escape the building with her family and two dogs. But one of the dogs, an Akita named Black, wriggled loose and ran back into the smoke.
“We found him three days later with his paws entirely burned,” Ortega said. “He was in agony. He couldn’t move.”
She watched as Garcia tenderly changed Black’s bandages. It was a trying time for her family: Students will return to classes next week, so the shelters and clinics will have to relocate soon. As of yet, new locations have yet to be confirmed.
Black lifted his bandaged paw towards Ortega, who gently took it in her hand. Despite the uncertainty, she said she felt hopeful.
“What’s important is that we’re all OK,” she said, crouching down to hug her dog.
Workers at a makeshift animal clinic in the city of Viña del Mar towel off a ginger cat recovered after Chile’s wildfires [Charis McGowan/Al Jazeera]
Searching for Max
Back at the O’Higgins school, Gajardo waits for a status update, as municipal vets and volunteers check on the ginger cat in their custody.
A clinic representative finally approaches Gajardo to reveal an unexpected hiccup: The cat is female — and she is pregnant. It isn’t Max after all.
The unknown cat will stay in the clinic until she safely delivers her babies. Hopefully, the clinic representative explains, the team can locate her owner.
Gajardo picks up his empty cat carrier and texts his mother the disappointing news. He isn’t discouraged, though. He will keep searching until Max is back with the family.
“We have to stay hopeful,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait till he shows up.”
The 74-year-old billionaire tycoon has died in a crash in the popular vacation spot Lago Ranco in southern Chile.
Chile’s former President Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire tycoon who twice held the South American nation’s top job, has died in a helicopter crash, his office said in a statement.
“It is with deep regret that we announce the death of the former president of the Republic of Chile,” said the statement on Tuesday, adding that 74-year-old Pinera had died in the popular vacation spot Lago Ranco, some 920km (570 miles) south of Santiago.
Chile Interior Minister Carolina Toha confirmed the death of the former president. No further details were immediately released about the cause of the accident.
Chile’s national disaster agency SENAPRAD confirmed that one person had been killed and three people injured. The government did not immediately name who was aboard.
Pinera, also a successful businessman, oversaw quick economic growth and a steep fall in unemployment during his first 2010 to 2014 presidency, at a time when many of Chile’s trade partners and neighbours were facing sharply slower growth.
His second presidency from 2018 to 2022 was marked by violent protests against inequality that led to accusations of human rights violations and ended with the government promising to draft a new constitution.
Pinera was the owner of the fifth largest fortune in Chile, estimated at some $3bn. He worked as an academic in several universities for almost 20 years and as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.
As a businessman in the 1970s through the 1990s, he worked in a variety of industries, including real estate. He held shares in major airlines as well as telecommunication, real estate and electricity companies. He also created one of the largest credit card companies in the country. In 2009, he handed over the management of his businesses to others.
He entered politics representing the centre right, which was the civilian support of the military regime. At the same time, he distanced himself from the 1973-1990 rule of General Augusto Pinochet, when more than 3,000 suspected leftists were killed or “disappeared.”
Pinera ran three times for president of Chile. In 2006, he lost to socialist Michelle Bachelet; then in 2010, he defeated former President Eduardo Frei. Four years after his first term, in 2018, he won a second four-year term after defeating a leftist independent.
Twelve days before the beginning of his first term, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami claimed the lives of 525 people and devastated the infrastructure of central-southern Chile.
Pinera’s government agenda was postponed in order to take on emergency reconstruction. In 2010, he also led the unprecedented rescue of 33 miners trapped for 69 days at the bottom of a mine in the Atacama desert, which captured the world’s attention.
The event became a global media sensation and was the subject of a 2014 movie, The 33.
He closed his administration having created an estimated one million jobs.
At least 10 people have died and the blaze in the tourist region of Valparaiso has forced many to flee their homes.
Chile has declared a state of emergency as it battles spreading forest fires in the centre of the country that have so far killed at least 10 people.
“All forces are deployed in the fight against the forest fires,” President Gabriel Boric posted on X as he announced the measure, adding that emergency services would meet on Saturday to assess the situation.
The fires have ravaged thousands of hectares of forest since Friday, cloaking coastal cities in a dense fog of grey smoke and forcing people to flee their homes in the central regions of Vina del Mar and Valparaiso.
At least 10 people have died, according to a state representative of Valparaiso.
“We have winds of close to 40 or 50km [25-31 miles] per hour,” said Leonardo Moder, the director of Valparaiso’s national forestry corporation.
“This wind is hard because it carries lit leaves, branches or pieces of wood, and each creates a new little fire that grows into more fires,” he added.
The blaze is being driven by a summer heatwave and drought affecting the southern part of South America caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, as scientists warn that a warming planet has increased the risk of natural disasters such as intense heat and fires.
In the towns of Estrella and Navidad, southwest of the capital, the fires have burned nearly 30 homes and forced evacuations near the surfing resort of Pichilemu.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” 63-year-old Yvonne Guzman told the AFP news agency. When the flames started to close in on her home in Quilpue, she fled with her elderly mother, only to find themselves trapped in traffic for hours.
“It’s very distressing because we’ve evacuated the house but we can’t move forward. There are all these people trying to get out and who can’t move,” she said.
Firefighters try to put out a blaze in Vina del Mar, Chile, February 2, 2024 [Javier Torres/AFP]
About 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) have already been burned in Valparaiso alone, according to CONAF, the Chilean national forest authority, which called the blazes “extreme”.
Images filmed by trapped motorists have gone viral online, showing mountains in flames at the end of the famous Route 68, a road used by thousands of tourists to get to the Pacific coast beaches.
On Friday, authorities closed the road, which links Valparaiso to the capital, Santiago, as a huge mushroom cloud of smoke “reduced visibility”.
As Chile and Colombia battle rising temperatures, the heatwave is also threatening to sweep over Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil in the coming days.
Result comes a year after Chileans rejected a progressive constitution that would have expanded Indigenous rights.
Chile has voted to reject a new conservative constitution, leaving the text drafted during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in force.
With nearly all of the ballots tallied on Sunday night, more than 55 percent of Chileans voted against the text, compared with about 44 percent in favour.
The proposed constitution, which was drafted by a committee dominated by the conservative Republican Party, would have reinforced property rights and free-market principles and included limits on immigration and abortion.
The result comes more than a year after Chileans roundly rejected a progressive constitution that would have classified the Latin American country as a plurinational state, established autonomous Indigenous territories and elevated the environment as well as gender equity.
Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric, who before the vote pledged to focus on long-term development in favour of further attempts to change the constitution, said the results showed that the country had become polarised and divided.
“I invite you to build together a new era for Chile: growth for all, social justice and citizen security,” Boric, who became Chile’s youngest-ever leader in 2021 at 35, said after the vote. “The country needs everyone.”
Republican Party leader Jose Antonio Kast expressed disappointment over the result.
“We failed in the effort to convince Chileans that this would be a better constitution than the existing one,” he said.
The push to replace the current constitution, adopted during Pinochet’s military dictatorship, was set in motion after as many as 1 million protesters took to the streets in 2019 demanding sweeping political and social change.
While Chile is one of the richest and most stable countries in Latin America, it has some of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the developed world.
In a 2020 referendum, 80 percent of Chileans voted to replace the Pinochet-era constitution, which was widely blamed for allowing companies and the elite to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor, working classes.
But the public’s enthusiasm for change waned in the years following the protests as issues such as crime, the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation took centre stage.
Opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the latest vote had predicted defeat.
“This whole process has been a waste of government money … it’s a joke,” government employee Johanna Anríquez, who voted against the new constitution, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
“Let’s keep the one we have and, please, let’s get on with the work of providing public safety.”
But now, as Chile prepares to vote on a new draft, Ñanco Antilef finds himself in a paradoxical position: hoping to keep the old version in place.
“It’s not that we are defending Pinochet’s constitution. It’s just that this proposal is worse,” he told Al Jazeera in a recent interview.
A member of the Democratic Revolution party, Ñanco Antilef was one of the few left-wing representatives to participate in the Constitutional Council that drafted the new version, which is set to go before voters on Sunday.
Rather, it was Chile’s far-right Republican Party that led the drafting process, holding 22 of the council’s 50 seats.
The result, critics say, is a draft that favours right-wing priorities at the expense of historically marginalised groups, including Chile’s Indigenous peoples.
“It is tied to a business model and favours individual interests rather than collective ones,” said Ñanco Antilef, himself of Indigenous Mapuche descent.
Now, he and other Indigenous Chileans are pushing for voters to reject the draft constitution, even if that means the country will be stuck with the Pinochet-era version for the foreseeable future.
“We are 13 percent of the population,” said Alihuen Antileo Navarette, a Mapuche lawyer elected to represent Chile’s Indigenous peoples on the council.
He argues the draft constitution deliberately “excludes” Indigenous voices from government.
“The text does not ensure that we have institutional representation, neither in Congress nor in the Senate, and it ignores our historical demands to respect our ancestral territories,” Antileo said.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric holds up a copy of the latest draft constitution, presented to him by Constitutional Council President Beatriz Hevia [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
A history of inequality
Sunday’s referendum will be the second time in as many years that Chileans have gone to the ballot box to weigh a new version of the country’s constitution.
President Gabriel Boric indicated it would also be the last opportunity to swap out the Pinochet-era constitution for the remainder of his four-year term.
“Whatever the result that the people choose, that process will come to an end,” Boric said at a summit of world leaders last month.
The history of the current constitution stretches back to 1980, when Pinochet — a ruler who oversaw the mass abduction and execution of his left-wing critics — appointed a government commission to draft a legal framework to formalise his authority.
Ñanco Antilef grew up during the dictatorship in the 1980s. “There was a strong repression. We didn’t even go out on the patio of our house because police would throw tear gas. It was a situation of fear. I remember they shot a neighbour dead. These are the memories I have of that time.”
Living in a low-income neighbourhood on the periphery of the capital Santiago, Ñanco Antilef also witnessed inequality that he now credits to Pinochet’s right-wing model of governance.
“It allowed people who had resources to maintain their privileges, and for the people who didn’t, it was difficult to obtain a higher quality of life. I was only able to go to higher education because I won grants and got help from others,” he said, adding: “Pinochet’s constitution generated a very individualistic society.”
The 1980 constitution has been criticised not only for its undemocratic origins but also for enshrining Pinochet’s rigidly conservative values in Chilean law.
Opponents say that, despite numerous amendments, the constitution still curtails social welfare programmes in favour of protecting free-market values. It also fails to acknowledge Chile’s Indigenous groups, which comprise an estimated 2.2 million people.
José Antonio Kast, leader of Chile’s Republican Party, celebrates the number of seats his party claimed on the Constitutional Council on May 7 [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
A tale of two drafts
Concerns over social welfare ultimately simmered into widespread anti-government protests in 2019. Millions of Chileans flooded the streets, voicing a spectrum of demands, including calls for better public healthcare, fairer access to education, abortion rights and pension reform.
Many protesters singled out Pinochet’s constitution as the root cause of the discontent. That prompted Chile’s government to hold a referendum in 2020 to decide whether to ditch the old charter and write a new one.
The voters came back with an overwhelming response: 78 percent approved of the proposal, and a plan to reimagine the constitution was hatched.
But the first attempt floundered. Written by a Constitutional Council comprised mostly of left-wing leaders and independents with no political experience, the 2022 draft was seen as lengthy, confusing and overly progressive. It failed at the ballot box, with 62 percent of voters rejecting it.
In May, another election was held to determine who would write the second draft. This time, voters turned to the conservative right.
“After [the] progressive movement, there was a regression and fear of change,” Claudia Heiss, the head of political science at the University of Chile, said of the swing rightward.
She believes the draft on Sunday’s ballot enshrines values and ideas that “don’t belong in a constitution”, by recognising “patriotic symbols” and protecting “the patriarchal conception of society and traditional gender roles”.
Among the most controversial additions is an article that appears to acknowledge the rights of “life of those who have yet to be born” — language that could tighten Chile’s already restrictive abortion laws.
Elisa Loncon from the Mapuche Constituent Assembly celebrates her election to lead the Constitutional Convention on July 4, 2021 [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
Draft prompts Indigenous concerns
But Indigenous rights supporters also see Sunday’s draft as a step backwards, after the promise of the first rewrite attempt.
The first draft envisioned Chile as a “plurinational” country, “composed of various nations” that recognised Indigenous rights to autonomy and self-governance.
The second version, however, defines Indigenous groups as “part of the Chilean nation, which is one and undivided”.
The number of Indigenous representatives on the second Constitutional Council was also curtailed. Indigenous candidates had to receive at least 1.5 percent of the total vote to have a seat on the council. Only one, Antileo, qualified.
By contrast, the first council included 17 seats for Indigenous groups, distributed according to population size. The Mapuche, Chile’s largest Indigenous population, were given seven seats, while the Aymara were given two. Eight other Indigenous groups — the Atacameño, Colla, Quechua, Yagán, Kawésqar, Chango, Diaguita and Rapa Nui — were given one seat each.
Experts like Salvador Millaeo, a Mapuche lawyer and academic at the University of Chile, indicated that the new constitutional draft’s shortcomings are part of a long tradition of Indigenous marginalisation.
“Chile has a terrible relationship with its Indigenous people,” Millaeo said. “We need rules that establish an equal distribution of development opportunities where ancestral grounds are recognised, and the cultural patrimony of Indigenous people is protected, respected and guaranteed.”
He explained that Sunday’s constitutional draft only mentions Indigenous rights in an “abstract” way, by saying the law “could” include Indigenous representation in Congress.
The new draft would also strengthen Pinochet’s governance model, upholding neoliberal principles that are at odds with Indigenous values, Millaeo said.
“For example, the idea that nature is not an object but a subject that needs to be cared for — that’s not in the current [constitution], but the new proposal goes even further away from that.”
Constitutional experts meet inside the National Congress to create a proposal to send to members of the Constitutional Council in Santiago, Chile, on June 5 [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
Voter fatigue high
That Indigenous viewpoint, however, runs contrary to many of Chile’s business interests.
The country is one of the world’s top copper producers, and its economy is hinged on resource extraction. Mining makes up about 58 percent of the country’s total exports.
Fernando Hernandéz, a civil engineer who works in the mining sector, said he plans to vote in favour of the new draft constitution because it protects Chile’s economic interests.
Land should “generate value, jobs and growth”, Hernandéz explained.
But like many Chileans, Hernandéz is sceptical of what a new constitution can achieve. And after nearly three years of constitutional votes and councils, fatigue is setting in.
“Chile won’t transform from one day to another by changing the constitution,” Hernandéz said. “This has been exhausting for Chile and for its people.”
Ñanco Antilef, the architect who participated in the Constitutional Council, agreed that voter enthusiasm is waning. “There’s electoral fatigue and less interest in the process this time around.”
But he insisted that voting was still important, if only to protect the status quo — and hold out hope for a better deal in the future for Indigenous Chileans.
Scientists in Chile’s Patagonia region are unearthing the southernmost dinosaur fossils recorded outside Antarctica, including remains of megaraptors that would have dominated the area’s food chain before their mass extinction.
Fossils of megaraptors, a carnivorous dinosaur that inhabited parts of South America during the Cretaceous period some 70 million years ago, were found in sizes up to 10 meters long, according to the Journal of South American Earth Sciences.
“We were missing a piece,” Marcelo Leppe, director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH), told Reuters. “We knew where there were large mammals, there would also be large carnivores, but we hadn’t found them yet.”
The remains, recovered from Chile’s far south Rio de las Chinas Valley in the Magallanes Basin between 2016 and 2020, also include some unusual remains of unenlagia, velociraptor-like dinosaurs which likely lived covered in feathers.
The specimens, according to University of Chile researcher Jared Amudeo, had some characteristics not present in Argentine or Brazilian counterparts.
A fossil at ‘Guido’ hill, where megaraptor fossils were unearthed.Reuters
“It could be a new species, which is very likely, or belong to another family of dinosaurs that are closely related,” he said, adding more conclusive evidence is needed.
The studies also shed more light on the conditions of the meteorite impact on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that may have triggered the dinosaurs’ extinction some 65 million years ago.
A team works in the Chilean Patagonia area, where feathered dinosaur fossils were found.Reuters
INACH’s Leppe pointed to a sharp drop in temperatures over present-day Patagonia and waves of intense cold lasting up to several thousand years, in contrast to the extremely warm climate that prevailed for much of the Cretaceous period.
“The enormous variation we are seeing, the biological diversity, was also responding to very powerful environmental stimuli,” Leppe said.
“This world was already in crisis before (the meteorite) and this is evidenced in the rocks of the Rio de las Chinas Valley,” he said.
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