CHILE - THE CONSTITUTION THAT HAS NOT YET MANAGED TO BE BORN

When hope meets a concentrated Republic

In October 2020, Chile seemed to open a door that had remained closed for decades.

More than 78% of valid votes supported drafting a new Constitution. There was exhaustion, indignation, and memory, but there was also hope: perhaps it would be possible to replace an order originating under the dictatorship with rules that people could recognize as their own.

For a moment, the future seemed close.

Hope, however, encountered two rejections.

In 2022, the first constitutional proposal was rejected by 61.86% of voters. In 2023, the second proposal also failed to secure a majority: 55.76% voted against it. In August 2026, the country remains governed by the Constitution originating in 1980, although it has been amended many times and was updated again on April 16, 2026.

Chile drafted two texts, held two exit referendums, and mobilized thousands of people.

Even so, the Constitution did not manage to be born.

Perhaps a Constitution is not born when specialists finish writing it.

It begins to be born when different Body-Territories recognize that they participated in the intelligence that created its rules.

The question, therefore, is not only why two proposals were rejected.

How can a constitutional “we” be formed when wealth, communication, time, and access to the State remain so unequally distributed?

The morbid localized obesity of the Chilean State

In the BrainLatam concept, a State with morbid localized obesity is not simply a large State.

It is a State whose strength accumulates in particular functions, institutions, and groups.

It may act quickly to protect contracts, property, credit, concessions, and major economic operations.

It may act far more slowly when distributing healthcare, housing, water, territorial participation, and material security.

Chile has stable institutions and significant public capabilities. But it also carries extreme economic concentration: World Inequality Database figures indicate that the highest-income 1% received approximately 26.7% of national income before taxes and transfers in 2024.

This inequality does not remain still inside a bank account.

It becomes time.

Legal advice.

Political financing.

Institutional relationships.

Proximity to authorities.

Presence in the media.

The ability to keep particular interests before the State for years.

Research on Chilean economic elites describes revolving doors between corporations and government, the business connections of public officials, and privileged channels of influence over policy. Recent studies of South American constitutional processes have also identified highly visible public interventions by large corporations and business organizations in the Chilean case.

This does not mean that every authority is directly controlled by a wealthy family.

It means something more structural:

Some groups remain close to decisions every day; many communities arrive only when they are summoned.

The power of the super-rich does not need to appear as an explicit command.

It can appear as routine access.

As technical language accepted without challenge.

As experts moving between companies, ministries, and institutions.

As economic interpretations treated as inevitable.

Formally, everyone may speak.

Materially, not everyone has the same hours, specialists, money, and visibility to continue speaking.

When communication prepares the voting booth

Concentration also passes through the public nervous system.

Chile’s print media remain strongly concentrated around the El Mercurio and Copesa groups. The emergence of new digital media has expanded the supply of information, but it has not eliminated the accumulated power of major conglomerates over the production and circulation of news.

On social media, anyone can publish.

But publishing does not mean being seen.

Commercial platforms decide which messages will be recommended, repeated, and monetized.

During the 2020 referendum, researchers identified that highly active digital communities could produce a “majority illusion”: a position appeared dominant within a particular environment even when it did not represent the electorate as a whole.

This does not prove that the Chilean population was simply manipulated.

There were genuine disagreements over plurinationality, social rights, property, security, Indigenous peoples, territorial organization, and the economy.

But a Constitution needs time to be understood.

A campaign transforms hundreds of articles into a few seconds.

A possibility becomes a threat.

A doubt becomes certainty.

A legitimate criticism becomes mixed with misinformation.

Fear travels faster than explanation.

The Republic delivers the vote at the end.

The attention market participates in forming perception from the beginning.

There is an election.

There is procedure.

But Jiwasa has not yet been formed.

Two proposals, the same distance between rule and life

The Convention established in 2021 introduced gender parity, 17 reserved seats for Indigenous peoples, and greater participation by social, territorial, and independent movements. The 2022 proposal recognized Chile as a social and democratic State, plurinational, intercultural, regional, and ecological.

It was a moment of opening.

Presences previously kept away from the constitutional center entered the room.

But entering the room does not immediately redistribute all the power existing outside it.

An Indigenous community could gain representation while economic groups retained far greater resources to define how plurinationality would be presented to the rest of the country.

A region could defend its water while its economic survival remained dependent on mining or other extractive activities.

Following the rejection of 2022, the second process narrowed the field of possibilities. Specialists prepared a preliminary draft, institutional foundations limited the drafting process, and the elected Constitutional Council had a strong conservative presence.

Even so, the proposal was also rejected.

A text associated with transformation failed to form a majority.

A text associated with restraint also failed.

The UNDP describes a Chile that desires change but is marked by low trust, a sense of frustrated transformation, and difficult relationships among citizens, elites, and social movements. Its analysis shows that the management of change depends on the relationships among institutions, public discourse, emotions, and different social actors.

Perhaps the country tried to build a common house while its inhabitants arrived at the construction site under profoundly unequal conditions.

Tetra Solutions: protecting the Constitution on four fronts

This is where Tetra Solutions may offer greater security to Chilean citizens.

The BrainLatam hypothesis begins from an observation about complex systems: an isolated transformation may be absorbed, weakened, or cancelled by the structures that remain intact.

A Constitution may recognize water while new laws reduce its protection.

It may expand participation while money and communication remain concentrated.

It may declare equality while part of the population decides under hunger, debt, and fear of losing work.

Tetra Solutions proposes acting simultaneously on four fronts: economic security, a revisable political relationship, sovereignty, and a power capable of making visible the Time and Money accumulated before decisions are made.

1. Universal material security

Citizen Drex and Biome Income would not be forms of aid reserved for constitutional conferences.

They would be permanent structures for the entire population.

Citizen Drex would represent individual, unconditional, and continuous income distributed through a future public retail CBDC or an equivalent Chilean monetary infrastructure.

Biome Income would allow each territory to generate resources linked to the continuity of water, biodiversity, soils, and climate protection. These resources would reach inhabitants and collective territorial funds.

Neither would purchase votes.

Both would expand the material possibility of saying:

“Yes.”

“No.”

“We need to understand this better.”

“There is another alternative.”

Brazil’s official Drex does not currently possess this social function. Its present pilot uses simulated clients and assets, without the participation of real end users. Citizen Drex is a BrainLatam hypothesis, not an existing policy.

2. A revisable political relationship

Citizenship could not disappear after an election.

The original Tetra Solutions formulation mentions frequent renewal of the vote. In Chile, this principle could inspire permanent assemblies, territorial accountability, binding popular initiatives, and recall mechanisms protected against persecution and manufactured instability.

The objective would not be to keep the country in a permanent campaign.

It would be to prevent a mandate from becoming authorization to abandon the territory that granted it.

3. Territorial and informational sovereignty

A Jiwasa Constitution would need to protect more than national borders.

It would need to protect water, minerals, data, community media, and the public capacity to produce knowledge.

Biome Councils could bring together Indigenous peoples, residents, municipalities, and science to define ecological limits and assess irreversible territorial transformations.

Public and community platforms could allow territorial signals to circulate without depending entirely on the commercial logic of outrage.

The question would no longer be only:

Who governs?

It would also become:

How do we make the signals of Body-Territories and Biomes reach the decisions?

This direction also appears in the BrainLatam proposal for a Democracy of Human Quorum Sensing, in which collective decisions would respond to real signals of need and well-being rather than to consent manufactured through debt, fear, concentrated media, and algorithms.

4. The Power of Time and Money

Who observes the inequality that exists before the decision?

A fourth independent power could make visible:

political financing;

revolving doors;

cross-ownership of media;

government advertising;

corporate access to authorities;

concentration of credit;

the time granted to companies and communities during consultation processes.

A decision may be legal and still have emerged from a profoundly unequal distribution of influence.

A company may prepare a project for ten years.

A community may receive thirty days to respond.

Both were formally heard.

But they did not receive the same amount of political time.

Simulating now a condition intended for everyone

Because Citizen Drex and Biome Income do not yet exist, constitutional research could temporarily simulate this condition.

Participants from different territories would receive real, sufficient, and unconditional monetary transfers for a period preceding the deliberations.

The institutional structure would be experimental.

The well-being produced would need to be real.

Afterward, we could observe whether people gained time to understand proposals, whether they imagined previously invisible alternatives, and whether they continued to accept destruction as the only possible source of work.

The simulation would not transform a universal policy into a laboratory privilege.

The participants would be a temporary sample of a condition imagined for the entire population.

The question would not be which text they selected.

It would be:

What changes when no one has to decide under extreme need?

The Constitution we can help bring into being

Perhaps Chile does not simply need a better-organized third campaign.

Perhaps it needs to create the material, communicational, and territorial conditions for the constitutional question itself to become shared.

We can imagine a Constitution that does not arrive ready-made in the territories.

It would begin by asking how water must be protected, who remains with the losses, which activities sustain life, and what cannot be monetized.

Jurists would remain essential.

But they would help transform needs into understandable guarantees.

Communities would not merely be consulted.

They would participate in defining the problem.

The Biome would stop being scenery and begin to form part of the origin of the rule.

Chile did not fail because it tried twice.

It revealed the depth of the challenge.

A Constitution is not only the text that governs a population.

It is the experience through which a population discovers that it can create rules without surrendering attention, territory, and the future to the same centers of power.

When material security, a revisable political relationship, sovereignty, and scrutiny of Time and Money operate together, perhaps the “we” will cease to be a campaign word.

Perhaps it will become a presence.

And then Chile may be able to say:

This Constitution was not born over us. It was born among us.

Essential references

Electoral Service of Chile. Results of the constitutional referendums of 2020, 2022, and 2023.

Senate of the Republic of Chile. Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile — text updated on April 16, 2026.

UNDP Chile. Human Development Report in Chile 2024: Why Is It So Difficult for Us to Change?

UNDP Chile. Debts of Change and Democracy in Chile. 2026.

García-Montoya, L.; Manzi, P. From Economic to Political Power: Economic Elites and Policymaking During Times of Crisis. 2023.

Francés, F. et al. Economic Elites, Business Interest Groups, and Political Influence in Digital Media. 2026.

BrainLatam. Tetra Solution — Politics, Economy, Governance and National Security. 2025.

BrainLatam. Neuroeconomics: What Would the World Be Like with TetraSolution? 2020.

BrainLatam. Democracy of Human Quorum Sensing: Another Way of Deciding in Society. 2025.

BrainLatam. Chile — Fundamental Principles for a New Chilean Constitution: Decolonial Politics. 2025.