Social Movements and Student Protest in Chile: the Beginning of a Post-Pinochet Order?
While post-authoritarian Chile is often depicted as a depoliticized society, for the last few months thousands of Chilean university students have been engaging in regular, mass protests. They are denouncing the neoliberal model inherited from Pinochet’s dictatorship and demanding free high quality education so that middle and working class families can send their children to the university without suffering huge debts. Moreover, the students have been extending their demands beyond the domain of education and have received the support of the labor movement. While this mass mobilization of the Chilean middle class is surprising in itself, it also seems to be opening cracks in the predominant institutional strategies that the Chilean left has been pursuing since the return of democracy in 1990. Now that it is in the opposition for the first time in twenty years, the Chilean left may be gradually elaborating strategies that are not strictly conditioned by the legacies of Pinochet’s dictatorship. This panel will look at these protests from different angles and relate them to other, ongoing protests.