Augusto Pinochet Archives - Public Seminar

Chile Tries to Write a New Constitution

Progressives in the nation’s Constitutional Convention see an opportunity for creating a more just society

October 13, 2021 • by Jennifer M. Piscopo

In a national referendum held on October 25, 2020, nearly 80 percent of Chileans agreed that the country should have a new constitution, to be written at a convention attended by specially elected delegates. The vote was the climactic result of weeks of paralyzing demonstrations in 2019, as students, feminists, workers, Indigenous peoples, pensioners, and thousands of others had taken to the streets to protest economic and social injustice. With resounding majorities choosing change, Chileans ...

A Tale of Two Democracies

How a movement that claimed to be democratic undermined the rule of law

June 28, 2021 • by Sidney Tarrow

_____ “Democracy,” wrote Charles Tilly, “does not resemble an oilfield or a garden, but a lake. A lake,” he continues, can come into being because a mountain stream feeds into a naturally-existing basin, because someone or something dams up the outlet of a large river, because a glacier melts, because an earthquake ...

Lessons for Democrats from 1970’s Chile

The striking parallels between the Chilean media polarization leading up to Pinochet’s coup and our current journalistic and political schisms

October 2, 2018 • by Jay Blumler

On September 11th, 1973, Chile’s Popular Unity government led by President Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet. One year earlier, in autumn 1972, I had conducted 25 interviews with media and political personnel in Santiago and Valparaiso. The Catholic University of Chile had ...