Abstract

Neoliberal principles were codified in a constitution and implemented during a right-wing military dictatorship (1973-1990) in Chile producing important social inequalities, as well as cultural and ecological destruction. Resistance against the arrangements inherited from that period and deepened thereafter has been paramount to recent politics. In October 2019 considerable street protests were institutionally channelled into a constitutional process where a referendum mandated to replace the dictatorship’s constitution. There were two attempts to write a new charter; one under a Constitutional Convention which took a decolonial character, and a second one dominated by a far-right Council. Drawing on Loughlin’s ‘constitutional imagination’ the article poses that the Convention was a world-making exercise where social movements, independent candidates, indigenous representatives, and their allies engaged in efforts for designing a pluriverse where many worlds could fit. I claim the Convention was a space where utopia and ideology met allowing for different worlds to work together for the first time in the political arena creating an incipient intercultural politics. As a text with world-making capacity, the draft from the Convention, although rejected in 2022, materialises a process from which stronger intersectional solidarity amongst feminist, indigenous, and ecological movements should be forged.