Chile Protests: “They stole so much from us, they even stole our fear”
The protests began on Monday October 14th in Chile’s capital, Santiago, as a coordinated fare evasion campaign by high school students which led to spontaneous takeovers of the city’s main train stations and open confrontations with the Chilean Police. While the reason for these protests was a fare hike for public transportation by the government and the transit companies, this was only the tipping point in a much larger and diffuse situation of economic precarity.
Chile has experienced an unprecedented uprising in recent days. Starting with the increase in ticket prices for the metro, the uprising spread rapidly and targeted the entire system in a country that has been a laboratory for the toughest neoliberalism since the Pinochet coup in 1973 and where inequalities are among the most massive in the world.
Chile is experiencing popular uprisings of an intensity that has not existed for decades. What triggered the uprising?
The trigger for the uprising was the fight against the price increase of the Metro in Santiago. A journalist from Agence France Presse, who is still a good researcher, has just discovered that the Santiago de Chile subway is the most extensive in Latin America and that the capital is completely overloaded by traffic jams. It would be more appropriate to say that this movement, initiated by precarious students and high school students, is typical of a situation analyzed by the Italian Autonomia Operaria through the concept of militant investigation. At a time when the entire city has become a factory, and thus the entire urban social space is involved in value creation, it is only logical that the metro price should become a radical theme in the struggles. If we think of the movements in South America in recent years, we can make a comparison with the struggles in São Paulo in 2013 and claim that there are hardly any public buses in this city. Similar to Brazil, the movement began with a militant group that was independent of workers’ parties and trade unions and spread from the capital to other major cities throughout the country. The most surprising thing is the speed of the expansion of movement in the Chilean case. On Friday it began in Santiago. On Saturday it was implemented in all the major cities of the country, from north to south.
How did the fight against rising fares become a widespread uprising?
These forms of contemporary struggles, in which the metropolis itself becomes a political object, have become increasingly present in Chile in recent years. This is certainly not the first attempt to politicize the “right to the city” in Chile, be it in Santiago or elsewhere. Other previous struggles have already taken place, with similar results. Likewise, insurgency practices are not new here. And we must remember the courage of feminist activists in the face of police repression, be it during the feminist movement in 2018 or during the 8 March of this year. If there is a social explosion of such magnitude this time, one of the reasons, in my opinion, is the new, much more offensive forms of struggle that have been developed in Santiago since day one.
What forms of struggle are practised?
The movement began with the idea of a “massive fraud” (“evasión masiva”) at several metro stations in Santiago to criticize this price increase. The idea is simple and of course reminds us of the self-reduction practices of the Italian Settanta: if the subway becomes too expensive, we won’t pay for it anymore, and we will invade with several hundred people so that no security guard can prevent us from entering. But in the face of oppression, self-reduction quickly turned into sabotage and rupture. Showcases, distributors and broken displays, information screens were thrown on the rails, then fires were set in subway stations and in several buses.We see the continuity between self-reduction and sabotage: if we exclude the most precarious from using the subway, and if the subway is not for everyone, it is not for anyone and must be destroyed. The rejection of the restriction of one’s own options for action leads directly to sabotage. From that moment on, everything went on. The police actions used against the action in the subway led to unrest. The riots led to attacks and looting of supermarkets. The next day’s demonstrations in the various cities of the country also triggered unrest and looting, to which the state responded by imposing a state of emergency in all these cities and the subsequent military curfew.
What kind of repressive reaction has the state carried out? This is perhaps one of the most surprising things about this event in terms of the speed of its expansion. With the declaration of a state of emergency and then a military curfew, right-wing President Piñera delegates the restoration of (civil) order directly to the army and not just to the police. In a country like Chile, which is forever marked by 15 years of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, this has a very special meaning. It seems to me that this is a dangerous option because the rights in Chile, as in other post-dictatorial countries (e.g. Spain), are the direct child of the former dictatorship. Just as the politicians of the People’s Party in Spain are former Frankists who, at the time of the fall of the regime, suddenly found out that they were now conservative democrats, so the Chilean right-wing party is essentially made up of ex-pinochists. Some of Piñera’s ministers were, among others, the main leaders for the “yes” in the 1988 referendum, i.e. politicians who fought against Pinochet’s dismissal and against his return to a parliamentary democratic regime. Consequently, the deployment of the army in this situation naturally means threatening the population with the same methods as in the 1973 Pinochet coup and making it clear that it was itself part of the coup. This can be dangerous for the right, because, as in Spain, there has been some form of agreement between the ex-Pinochists and the left. The right stopped being fascist and sharing power with the left in the late 1980s, and the left stopped being revolutionary and abandoned all plans to prosecute the crimes of the dictatorship. It also accepted the 1980 Pinochet Constitution, which is still in force.
Using the army today means breaking this consensus and thwarting the hypocritical attitudes that have led to the belief in the sincere democratic transformation of the Chilean right. In order to win with this strategy, the ruling right is trying to present itself as being between the rioters and looters on the one hand and the honest citizens on the other, in other words to criminalise this uprising. We are not willing to see how the permanent injustice towards a large part of the population is expressed in the riots, and we make it a simple question of crime. This reminds us of the attitude of Sarkozism at the time of the uprising of the French suburbs in 2005. I think it is a risky decision for the government in such an unequal country, but with media propaganda it can work for a while.
Which social segments are most mobilized?
Answering this question helps to understand the repressive strategy of the state. Like many contemporary uprisings, the movement is interclassist. For the time being, it ranges from the progressive middle class to workers and precarious workers, students and high school students to the lumpen proletariat. And it is this reality, typical of many Latin American countries, that determines this movement, both in its sudden spread and in military oppression. The revolt began with precarious youth, students and high school students. A left middle class supports them as well as the more traditional militants of the workers movement. In my opinion, the presence or absence of the possibility of action by organized workers will be crucial to counteract the attempt by the right to criminalize and depoliticize the revolt. The victory of this already historical movement probably depends in part on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZHcP84MTS4
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