Presidential elections in Chile are free and fair. The president is directly elected to a four-year term. Consecutive terms are not permitted. In December 2021, Chileans elected Gabriel Boric to the presidency. Boric, a leftist member of Congress, won the second round of the election with 55.8 percent of the vote, becoming the youngest elected president in Chilean history at age 35. He was sworn into office in March 2022.

The upper house, the Senate, has 50 seats, and the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, has 155 seats; all members are directly elected. Senators serve eight-year terms, with half up for election every four years, and members of the Chamber of Deputies are elected to four-year terms.

In November 2021, Chileans elected 27 of 50 senators and all 155 members of the Chamber of Deputies. No coalition won a majority of seats, and both chambers remain politically diverse.

Chile’s electoral framework is robust and generally well implemented.

A constitutional reform process was triggered by an October 2020 national plebiscite, organized in response to large-scale protests held the previous year. In May 2021, a 155-member Constitutional Convention was elected to draft a new constitution; the body published its final proposal in July 2022. The left-leaning proposed constitution was rejected by 62 percent of voters in a national plebiscite in September 2022.

In January 2023, Congress appointed a commission of 24 experts to draft the preliminary text of a new constitution. In May, voters elected 50 councilors—25 men and 25 women—to draft a new constitution based on the experts’ preliminary text. Voting in the May election was mandatory. A 51st councilor representing Chile’s Indigenous population was also elected in May, after obtaining the 1.5 percent of the total vote required for the addition of an Indigenous representative to the council. The far-right Republican Party (PLR) became the largest party on the Constitutional Council following the May elections, winning 23 of 50 available seats, while traditional right-wing parties won a further 11 seats. Altogether, Chile’s conservative political element held more than the three-fifths majority of the council needed to approve articles, while other political groupings lacked the capacity to veto them.

The conservative-majority Constitutional Council proposed the final draft in November. It was rejected in a December constitutional referendum by nearly 56 percent of voters. Following the referendum—which saw the second rejection of a new constitution in just over a year—President Boric brought the constitution reform project to a close, saying that the existing constitution would remain in place.

Chile has a multiparty political system in which parties operate freely. As of 2023, Congress includes representatives from 22 political parties, as well as several independent members.

Power alternation between parties occurs regularly, both in Congress and for the presidency.

People are generally free to exercise their political choices without undue influence from actors that are not democratically accountable. Increased political polarization in recent years, however, has seen the emergence of far-right movements such as Team Patriota and the Social Patriot Movement (MSP), as well as the creation of the far-right PLR in 2019.

The Constitutional Council elected in May 2023 featured gender parity among its 50 members, but no seats were automatically reserved for Indigenous people. However, special rules favored the election of at least one Indigenous representative of the council; Alihuén Antileo Navarrete, a Mapuche lawyer, was elected as the 51st member of the council to represent Chile’s Indigenous peoples, who make up approximately 13 percent of the country’s population.

Women are represented in government, and the electoral system includes a quota for women in the legislature. However, women have reported difficulty gaining influence in intraparty debates. President Boric has made gender parity a core focus of his administration; his first cabinet, announced in January 2022, was made up of 14 women and 10 men. Boric reshuffled the cabinet twice in 2023, and by the year’s end, it was composed of 13 women and 11 men.

The interests of the Indigenous Mapuche minority, which represents about 9 percent of the population, are present in political life, with Mapuche activists regularly making their voices heard in street demonstrations. However, this activism has yet to translate into significant legislative power.

Members of the LGBT+ community are organized in civil society organizations, but few are elected to political positions.

While lobbying and interest groups exist and work to shape policy, there is little significant intervention by actors who are not democratically accountable in policymaking processes.

Anticorruption laws are generally enforced, though high-level corruption scandals crop up with some regularity. In June 2023, a scandal involving a transfer of public funds to Democracia Viva (Living Democracy)—a civil society organization with close ties to the Democratic Revolution (RD) party—emerged. Media reports that month revealed that Democracia Viva had entered into three contracts with the government for a total of 426 million pesos ($530,000). At the time of the agreements, Democracia Viva was headed by Daniel Andrade, the partner of former RD president Catalina Pérez, while the regional minister that assigned Democracia Viva the contracts, Carlos Contreras, was Pérez’s former chief of staff, leading to accusations of impropriety. Further evidence of the misuse of public funds and the irregular awarding of contracts to NGOs with ties to political parties emerged during the year, and in August, the Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that it was investigating 32 foundations for potential embezzlement, misuse of funds, and influence peddling, among other things. Minister of Social Development Giorgio Jackson resigned due to fallout from the scandal the same month; Andrade and Contreras were arrested for their alleged roles in the Democracia Viva scandal in December.

In November, the Public Prosecutor’s Office launched another corruption investigation after the media published an audio recording of prominent criminal lawyer Luis Hermosilla discussing possible high-profile bribes of Internal Revenue Service and Financial Market Commission officials.

In March 2022, Ricardo Martínez, then commander in chief of the army, resigned one day before testifying in the so-called Milicogate case, a series of corruption scandals that involved military officers using fake procurement deals to embezzle public funds between 2010 and 2019. Martínez was indicted on eight fraud charges in April 2022, but was granted bail soon after his arrest.

The government operates with relative transparency. In 2009, the Transparency and Access to Public Information Law came into force; it increased public access to information and created a Council on Transparency. Agencies have generally been responsive to information requests.

Guarantees of free speech are generally respected, though some laws barring defamation of state institutions remain on the books. Media ownership is highly concentrated.

Several journalists have reported facing harassment and assault, including by the police. In May 2022, three journalists were injured while covering a protest in Santiago, including Francisca Sandoval, who was shot by gunmen who opened fire on the demonstration. Sandoval later died from her injuries, becoming the first journalist to be killed in the line of duty since the Pinochet era.

The constitution provides for religious freedom, and the government generally upholds this right in practice.

Academic freedom is generally unrestricted in Chile.

Chileans enjoy open and free private discussion.

The right to assemble peacefully has traditionally been respected. However, peaceful protest activity that emerged in 2019, when people took to the streets to demonstrate against the government and societal inequality, was severely disrupted by people who took advantage of the protest movement’s cover to engage in looting, arson, and vandalism; and by widespread police violence and a restrictive state of emergency imposed in response to the unrest.

Fewer protests were held during 2023 than in previous years. Though some demonstrations featured violence from both protesters and law enforcement, both civilian violence and police repression have decreased significantly since 2019.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) form and operate without interference.

There are strong laws protecting worker and union rights, but some limited antiunion practices by private sector employers continue to be reported.

The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, and the courts are generally free from political interference.

The right to legal counsel is constitutionally guaranteed, and due process generally prevails in civil and criminal matters. However, indigent defendants do not always receive adequate legal representation.

Human rights groups and the United Nations have criticized the government’s use of antiterrorism laws, which do not guarantee due process, to prosecute acts of violence by Mapuche activists.

While the government has developed mechanisms to investigate and punish police abuses, excessive force and human rights abuses committed by the carabineros (the national police) still occur, and such abuses intensified during the social upheaval that started in 2019.

The government’s National Institute for Human Rights (INDH), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Amnesty International accused the carabineros and the military of perpetrating human rights violations during the 2019 protests, including excessive use of force against protesters, as well as torture and sexual abuse of people held in detention. The Boric administration established a police reform commission and a reform advisory unit in August 2022. However, no significant progress was reported in 2023, and impunity for security forces accused of human rights violations during the social unrest has persisted. In June, the government announced that it would send a bill to Congress providing for the establishment of a separate Ministry of Public Security, which would oversee the police reform process.

Conflict between Indigenous Mapuche people and the Chilean state continued in 2023. The unrest reportedly featured violence by some Mapuche activists, including the use of arson attacks against landowners and forestry workers. In October 2021, then president Sebastián Piñera declared a state of emergency in the Araucanía and Biobío regions in response to violent clashes between security forces and Mapuche activists. The state of emergency was extended several times until President Boric took office in March 2022. In response to continued violence and road blockades, President Boric imposed a new state of emergency in the same areas in May of that year; the new state of emergency, which is more limited in scope than that under Piñera, has since remained in place.

Though Chile has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in Latin America, the country recorded an increased level of violent crime in 2022 and 2023 according to a July 2023 government report. According to police statistics, the homicide rate grew by more than 32 percent between 2021 and 2022. Violent crime related to drug trafficking is also a major public opinion concern.

Several police officers were killed while on duty during 2023. Congress responded by approving anticrime legislation that gives the police new self-defense rights—namely, if police officers use their weapons in self-defense, the law will presume that they have done so “according to professional principals,” according to Interior Minister Carolina Tohá. Human rights defenders have criticized the new law, particularly the automatic presumption of self-defense, which the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said “reduces accountability, hindering access to justice for victims of potential abuses and favoring impunity.”

While Indigenous people still experience societal discrimination and police brutality, their poverty levels have declined somewhat, aided by government scholarships, land transfers, and social spending.

LGBT+ people continue to face societal bias, despite a 2012 antidiscrimination law that covers sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2018, the president signed a gender-identity law allowing for gender identity to be changed on the civil registry.

In practice, elites benefit from systematic favorable legal treatment.

The constitution protects the freedom of movement, and the government respects this right in practice. During 2023, freedom of movement was at times impacted by the ongoing conflict between the Indigenous Mapuche people and the government in parts of southern Chile. A state of emergency, allowing the military to guard roads and transit routes in the conflict zone, has been in place since May 2022. In June 2023, President Boric launched the Presidential Commission for Peace and Understanding to try to resolve the conflict. The commission has eight members, including four representatives of the Mapuche people, who are expected to deliver a report by year-end 2024.

Individuals generally have the right to own property and establish and operate private businesses, and do so without interference from the government or other actors. However, Mapuche activists continue to demand greater territorial rights to land, ancestral waters, and natural resources.

The government generally does not restrict personal social freedoms.

Violence against children and women remains a problem. A law against femicide went into force in 2010. The government reported 42 femicides and 259 attempted femicides in 2023.

In 2017, legislation that decriminalized abortion in the events of rape, an inviable fetus, or danger to the life of the woman took effect.

In 2021, Congress approved same-sex marriage by an overwhelming majority; the law came into effect in March 2022. Previously, a 2015 law recognized civil unions for same-sex couples.

While compulsory labor is illegal, forced labor, particularly among foreign citizens, continues to occur in the agriculture, mining, and domestic service sectors.

Although there have been improvements in fighting child labor, minors still suffer commercial sexual exploitation and work unprotected in the agricultural sector. There is limited public information about forced child labor.