It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history as Chile is also at war over the relevance of its preëminent poet, Pablo Neruda. In December, fifty years after the coup d’état that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution to replace the heavily amended one adopted by the dictator’s regime. It was the second plebiscite aimed at doing so in two years. The first time, in September, 2022, voters rejected a left-wing reform in a landslide. In December, a right-wing alternative was also soundly rejected, underscoring the extent to which, as the writer and political commentator Patricio Fernández told me, “building agreements” has become “extremely difficult” in Chile.
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