The Pinochet Legacy and the New Constitution

In October 2019, violent protests emerged in Chile, demanding solutions for the institutionalised social and economic inequality, a legacy of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Because of the human rights violations that occurred during the protests, several international human rights organisations (IHROs) went on missions to Chile and published reports including recommendations addressing the Chilean government. In December, President Sebastián Piñera signed a decree for a new Chilean constitution. The aim of this research is to find out how the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship influenced the role of IHROs in the development of a new Chilean constitution. This was done by the application of a directed content analysis to reports of the IHROs covering the years 2006, 2011, and 2019, and to news articles published by the Chilean government between October 19 and December 27, 2019. The Multiple Streams Framework, Historical Institutionalism, and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory were combined in a conceptual framework to identify the different actors, objects, and processes in the development of a new constitution. Furthermore, the limitations of the theories were assessed and, based on the data, confirmed or contradicted. The results illustrate that inequality and rewriting the Constitution were central topics in the reports of the IHROs. The IHROs and the protestors put targeting the persisting inequality on the agenda of the Chilean government, leading to the constitutional change. However, the data show that even though the Chilean government invited the IHROs to assess the situation during the protests of 2019, they are not addressed in the news articles. The thesis concludes that the Pinochet legacy influenced the reports and specifically the recommendations of the IHROs to the Chilean government. Especially the institutionalised inequality in the constitution of 1980 was a central topic addressed by the IHROs. The role of the IHROs in the development of a new Chilean constitution, however, was limited to putting the issue on the political agenda.