The Santiago winter is particularly cold, not because of the temperature, which is fairly mild when compared to that of Cambridge in the winter, but because most buildings lack central heating. It was fairly common for my host family and me to sit huddled around our portable propane heater at night, eating supper in our coats or watching Los Simpson under layers of blankets. And the absence of central heating is not due to any stereotypically lingering post-colonial poverty. It is merely that utilities tend to be incredibly expensive in this thin, stretched-out nation of 17.3 million, hailed by the political right all round the world as the successful neoliberal experiment, the Chicago Boys’ vaccine to the ills of European social democracies, Asian statists, and Latin American Chavistas.
This is a nation that has more or less seamlessly privatized everything from public transportation to pensions, whose successful harvest of natural resources such as agricultural products and copper (although, clearly, not petroleum) has helped it rocket to join the 34-member OECD rich-countries club. It’s the kind of multinational haven where you can go to the mall across from the Marriott to eat at P.F. Chang’s, T.G.I.F Fridays, or Johnny Rockets, and where the only differences on the Starbucks menus are the names of the cup sizes and the dulce de leche Frappucino.
But this large-scale economic success doesn’t obscure the inequality that looms as heavily and noxiously as the smog that, on bad days, obscured even the windows of the Gran Torre Santiago (soon to be the tallest building in South America) from my view. Traveling further from the glitzy residences at the foothills of the Andes, I passed through increasingly impoverished, crowded, and underserved comunas (the term for the most basic administrative area). One of the largest such boroughs, Puente Alto, has only one hospital for its more than 750,000 residents. And the facilities of even this and other public healthcare institutions are far inferior to the equipment and capacities of the private clinics visited by those who can pay more.
Education provides a similar case-in-point for the strikingly unequal status quo (Chile is the most unequal country in the OECD, with a Gini index of 52.1). The more expensive private secondary schools tend to attract wealthier students and often provide better education while no universities are free. Furthermore, the rise of explicitly for-profit educational institutions has led to a waste of government subsidies on schools that don’t invest in their classrooms, leaving those students who have chalked up the cash to pay for their education in the lurch.
But the clearest manifestation of the impact of socioeconomic inequality on Chile is the rise of far-reaching and large-scale protests, which have renewed in vigor during the current presidential and parliamentary election season during my time there. In June and July alone, there was a day of union-led strikes and marches, numerous nationwide student protests, and a series of student-led takeovers (“tomas”) that shut down schools and universities of weeks on end. Even as I returned to the United States at the end of July, a garbage collector strike left piles of refuse in sectors of the capital city.
Partially, at least, the social discontent apparent in Chilean protest movements is a product of the nation’s unique history and the legacy of the right-wing dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who governed the country from 1973 to 1990, after abducting, exiling, and murdering thousands on the political left, establishing the tradition of neoliberal economic policy that continues today, and signing a Constitution that entrenched military interests and created an electoral system that secures parliamentary seats both for winners and runners-up, thereby essentially guaranteeing political gridlock in a sphere already characterized by harsh divisions between the various parties on the right and the left.
Two results of this history are evident in the comportment of the protesters. First, they perceive seemingly insurmountable political animosity between the (largely left-wing) movements and the (usually right-wing) upper socioeconomic classes. (Even Pinochet’s legacy is a point of contention—on a bike tour, my guide got in a heated argument with a furious passerby, who accused him of poisoning my mind.) Second, they evidently believe that traditional means of securing political change are exceedingly difficult, due to the provisions mentioned in Pinochet’s 1980 constitution.
However, Chile also exhibits characteristics shared by the other protest movements that have faced Latin America (and even North America and Western Europe) recently, as I found when I studied police protest policy as part of my internship for the Justice Studies Center of the Americas (Centro de Estudios de Justicia de las Americas), a think-tank affiliated with the Organization of American States. In the past five years, for instance, there have been widespread student protests not only in Chile, but also in nations such as Canada, Mexico, and the UK. Other movements have included Occupy in the United States, the movimiento 15 de Mayo in Spain, the wave of protests during the 2013 Venezuelan presidential elections, the cacerolazos against Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, protests during G20 summits in London and Vancouver, and the gigantic Brazilian marches this summer that were sparked by an increase in bus tariffs.
All of these incidents wrestle with the theme of socioeconomic inequality and a lack of political representation. And protesters in many of these nations employ the same methods: although marches and chants certainly are still in vogue, there has also been a surprising rise, not in sit-ins, but in what I call “camp-ins”. Occupy Wall Street, 15 de mayo, and even Latin American tomas all involve, not merely the occupation of a place of protest, but its residency: the place itself becomes a tool of protest, as people essentially live there and use the public forum to voice their grievances. And, increasingly, laws that regulate protest do so by manipulating space in such a way that often hinders speech, as Timothy Zick of William and Mary Law School writes.
Furthermore, state response to protest across the region has shared multiple traits. Nearly all the countries of South America, in addition to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain, have passed substantial police reforms in the past 20 years, which often updated the policies and laws regulating officials’ conduct during protests. However, as I found in my research, the laws establishing the rights of protesters are often vague enough to permit police abuse in the name of “public order”, and policies frequently fail to provide for adequate communication with the public or coordination within a police force. In some countries, officers themselves receive insufficient training, and an adversarial relationship has emerged between police and marchers, with both sides essentially expecting confrontation and police misinterpreting their mandate to facilitate peaceful protest as permission to control it. As a result, there occur incidents of police brutality that, if not caused, are certainly supported by their respective legal, political, and cultural frameworks.
The portrait of Chile that we then see is that of a place sculpted as much by its own unique predicament as by the international forces that surround it. The country fits into the global pattern of wide-ranging protests over socioeconomic inequality and representation, but only in the context of a nation still fiercely divided over the legacy of dictatorship and the wisdom of the neoliberal economic model, where politicians win elections on platforms of fairness, and where the normative foundation of the government is in flux, swirling together in a smoggy miasma with the propane trucks that chug through the winter streets, delivering their tiny yellow tanks to heat every household.
