On a crisp spring day in 2019, Cote Cumplido took up a banner and joined more than a million people marching through the streets of the Chilean capital Santiago to demand greater equality and major changes to its political system.
Now the 33-year-old is handing out flyers with her own name on them on, hoping to be elected this weekend to a body of representatives who will over the next year lead an historic rewrite of the Andean country’s constitution.
“Those protests were like an avalanche, the expression of a fury that built up over years at the neoliberal system,” said Cumplido, a historian at Chile’s National Library who describes herself as a feminist and says she wants greater citizen representation in politics.
“We need to deepen democracy, make it more agile, more in tune with what’s happening today and that has really driven my conviction that we need a new constitution.”
On Saturday and Sunday, Chileans will vote to pick 155 constitutional assembly members to draft a new constitution to replace Chile’s charter, which was drafted during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The historic process is being eyed nervously by investors who have found safe haven in a turbulent region in Chile’s free market system, and with high hopes by the 78% of the people who voted in favor of such change in October last year.
Cumplido is among 1,278 prospective candidates, who include politicians, activists, academics, fashion models, TV personalities and journalists.
Half of the assembly will be male and half female, while 17 seats are reserved for representatives of Chile’s indigenous communities. Often living in the margins on society far from the capital, they are unrecognized in the present charter and are seeking changes including the teaching of indigenous history in schools and greater recognition for traditional medicine.
