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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
At the height of the economic boom, the regime moved to
legitimize and regularize its reforms and its tenure. Its
new
"constitution of liberty" was approved in a controlled
plebiscite
in 1980, in which the government claimed to have received
67
percent of the vote. Both leftists and Christian Democrats
had
called for a no vote. Because there were no safeguards for
the
opposition or for the balloting, most analysts expressed
doubts
about the government's percentage and assumed that the
constitution
may have won by a lesser margin. According to the new
constitution,
Pinochet would remain president through 1989; a plebiscite
in 1988
would determine if he would have an additional eight years
in
office. The document provided for military domination of
the
government both before and after the 1988 plebiscite.
The constitution's approval marked the
institutionalization of
Pinochet's political system. In the eyes of the military,
a
dictatorship had now been transformed into an
authoritarian regime,
rule by exception having been replaced by the rule of law.
When the
new charter took effect in 1981, the dictatorship was at
the peak
of its powers, politically untouchable and economically
successful.
At that moment, few would have predicted that the
dispirited and
fragmented opposition would take power by the end of the
decade.
The imposition of the authoritarian constitution cast
further
gloom on the divided and dejected opposition. The PCCh now
made a
historic reversal, claiming that all forms of struggle,
including
armed insurrection, were justified against the
dictatorship. Most
political parties on the left or in the center, however,
continued
searching for a peaceful path to redemocratization.
Data as of March 1994
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