Earlier this month, the people of Chile voted to reject the new draft constitution that promised to be the most progressive constitution of any country on the planet, and which was the fruit of the popular uprisings in the country that in December also swept the left wing approved dignity coalition into government. Earlier this year I spoke with Camila Vergara, who argued that for all the potential benefits of the new constitution, it also risked canalising popular ferment in the country in ways that were more acceptable to the chiles economic and political elite, and she also expressed serious reservations about Gabriel Boric's new government, which even before the electoral victory had tacked to the centre in order to win business confidence and support within Chile's divided congress. In today's conversation we talked about why Chileans voted to reject the draft constitution, the failure of the government to popularise understanding of what the new document actually contained, and we also discussed the scale and effectiveness of the right's campaign of misinformation.
