Alexis Cortés

Alexis Cortés Morales (born 2 December 1983) is a Chilean sociologist, academic and politician, member of the Communist Party of Chile. He was a member of the Expert Commission created to draft a preliminary constitutional text during the 2023 Chilean constitutional process.

Biography He was born in Santiago in 1983, the son of Héctor Cortés Aliste and Olga Morales Castro. He is the grandson of Víctor Hugo Morales, a union leader who was detained and disappeared on 9 August 1976.

Cortés studied at the Instituto Nacional before earning a degree in sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in 2007. He later pursued graduate studies in Brazil at the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the Rio de Janeiro State University (IESP-UERJ), obtaining both a Master’s and a PhD in Sociology.

Professional career Since 2014, Cortés has been professor in the Department of Sociology at the Alberto Hurtado University, where he also served as director of the Master’s program in Sociology. He was vice president of the Colegio de Sociólogos y Sociólogas de Chile (A.G.).

He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Latin American theory, political sociology and social movements. In 2022, he was awarded the Ibero-American Prize in Social Sciences by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has authored several books and academic articles in his field.

A member of the Communist Party of Chile, he took part in its Constitutional Commission during the 2021–2022 process and is a member of the party’s Central Committee.

Constitutional process In January 2023, Cortés was appointed by the Chamber of Deputies of Chile as a member of the Expert Commission, established by Law No. 21.533, responsible for preparing a draft for a new Constitution to be submitted to the Constitutional Council. Within the commission, he joined the Subcommission on Economic, Social, Cultural, and Environmental Rights.