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    • A woman votes in Chile. (AP)

    A woman votes in Chile. (AP)

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    LatAm in Focus: The Democracy That Chileans Want

    By Holly K. Sonneland

    CNN Chile host and La Tercera columnist Paula Escobar Chavarría covers the parallels between Chile’s 2021 presidential race and its 1988 referendum.

    “I hope that … [we] can build a more equal society, but without destroying what we have.”

    Changes aside, for the first time in decades, many Chileans feel like “orphans” with no political home, given that neither runoff candidate hails from the traditional center of the spectrum, says Escobar. That said, she doesn’t qualify the candidates as equally extreme on their respective ends of the spectrum. “People in Chile, they really want transformation. They really want change, really want to have more social rights and less inequality. But they want that done in a way that is not scary,” she says. “They need to have some kind of certainty that … all these changes are going to be done in peace and with some kind of order.”

    For Escobar, the 2021 presidential race, which is taking place while a Constituent Assembly drafts a new constitution and two years after massive social unrest, carries the same gravity of the first election she ever voted in: the 1988 plebiscite that ultimately led to the end of Pinochet dictatorship. “I really know what Chile was like when we didn't have democracy, [what] it was like to live in dictatorship,” she says. “With all the things that we don't like about how democracy is now in Chile, we have to treasure having a democratic system.”

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    Sophia Mancilla produced this episode. The music in this podcast was performed at Americas Society in New York. Learn more about upcoming concerts at musicoftheamericas.org.

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