The latest tricks of Pinochet: the consolidation of chilean democracy in front of constitutional authoritarism

Abstract

The present work seeks to understand how the consolidation of Chi-lean democracy took place in 2020, through the legislative acceptance of the requests for changes that the country’s Constitution needed to dispose of some of its remnants of the old dictatorial regime led by Pinochet. The analysis that we propose to carry out goes through the important conceptualization of what can be considered an authoritarian government, observing through the argumentation of the theorist Norberto Bobbio, how he defines authoritarianism in its various forms and characteristics, many of which are visible in the Pinochet government. Thus, we aim to understand not only the history of Pinochet’s domination in Chile, but its constitutional reflexes that until the year 2020 remained part of the Chilean Magna Carta. In addition, we seek to understand how the processes for legal changes went that buried the dictatorial vestiges that still haunted contempo-rary Chilean legislation. Therefore, it can be concluded the factor of difficulty in changing legal realities and the remnants of an authoritarianism.

Keywords

• pinochet’s dictatorship
• constitutional authoritarianism
• democracy
• chile