AUGUSTO AND EVERYTHING AFTER:

Populism has cast a particularly long shadow in Latin America. Crowd-pleasing orators proclaiming a new utopia pepper its recent history.

General Juan Domingo Perón spawned an eponymous movement in the 1940s so powerful it has dominated Argentine politics ever since. More recently, Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian revolution" in Venezuela and Andrés Manuel López Obrador's "Fourth Transformation" in Mexico have seduced voters with magical promises that belied the authoritarianism of their respective leaders.

In this unpromising political landscape, Chile's decision in a referendum on Sunday to reject decisively an impossibly utopian constitution stands out as a remarkable example of civic maturity. This is a setback for leftwing president Gabriel Boric, the former student protest leader who had staked much political capital on the now-rejected radical draft.

Voters were, almost literally, promised the earth (the draft would have granted constitutional rights to nature). Attractive-looking carrots abounded among the 388 articles drawn up by a specially elected assembly after a year of sometimes raucous debate.

The draft constitution obliged the state not only to provide health, education and housing, but also to ensure the production of healthy food and the promotion of Chilean national cuisine. Bizarrely, in a country where millions still lack broadband internet services, it would have guaranteed a right to "digital disconnection".

Yet Chileans saw through the utopian vision amid an altogether more prosaic reality of rising inflation, a slowing economy and myriad economic challenges. Nearly 86 per cent turned out to vote, and almost 62 per cent of them voted against the new constitution.

Such electoral maturity is highly unusual anywhere, let alone in a middle-income country. According to a global study by two American academics, Zachary Elkins and Alexander Hudson, voters have approved 94 per cent of the 179 new constitutions put to them since the French Revolution of 1789.

But Chileans did not abandon a desire to shed the sin of origin of the current constitution, drawn up under Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship from 1973-90. Colombia's leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, tweeted after Sunday night's result that "Pinochet has come back to life". 

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