The News Roundup — International

WAMU 88.5

Published October 29, 2020 at 3:00 PM CDT

A boy holds a Mapuche indigenous flag as people celebrate while waiting for the official results of the referendum for a new constitution in Santiago, Chile. The approval for the new constitution won with 78% of the votes. After months of protests, Chileans voted between writing a new charter or keeping the existing constitution that was drawn up during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

Three people were killed in a knife attack in a church in the French city of Nice in what authorities described as an act of “Islamist terror.” Now, thousands of members of the country’s anti-terror security force have been deployed.

As Canada’s coronavirus case numbers rise, officials in the country are linking Canadian Thanksgiving gatherings with a spike in the COVID-19 infection rate. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that gatherings over Christmas may be in jeopardy if these trends continue.

Last weekend, Chileans voted overwhelmingly to write their country a new constitution. A rewrite of the constitution, which dates back to the legacy of brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, was a central demand for over a million protesters in Santiago last fall.

From Daniel Alarcón’s reporting from Chile in The New Yorker:

After the 1973 coup, Pinochet’s military junta consolidated its power through state terror, operating outside any legal framework to disappear and torture thousands and send thousands more into exile. The U.S. Congress responded by blocking arms sales to Chile, an embargo that continued for more than a decade. Meanwhile, Pinochet’s campaign against his enemies went global, with political assassinations carried out in Buenos Aires and even in Washington, D.C., just a couple of miles from the White House. The 1976 election of President Jimmy Carter, who placed special emphasis on human rights, put the Chilean dictatorship in an even more precarious international position, with the country in danger of being considered little more than a rogue state, known worldwide for its brutality.

Shortly after taking power, Pinochet appointed a commission to write a new constitution, and in August, 1980, he announced that the work was complete. There would be a referendum just a month later, on September 11th, not coincidentally the anniversary of the coup seven years earlier. At the time of the 1980 vote, all political parties were illegal, all television stations were controlled by the regime, and there was no opposition press. The country remained in a state of emergency.

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