III.
The next day the country exploded, with “oasis” becoming a popular meme ridiculing Piñera. The spark was a fare increase on Santiago’s public subway system. Santiago has one of the most expensive public transit systems in the world, with an accumulated 40 percent increase in fares between 2010 and 2015 in real terms. Building on an infrastructural bed of militancy first established through high school rebellions in 2006 – affectionately known as the revolt of los pingüinos, given students’ black and white uniforms – and university uprisings in 2011, the first actor set in motion was the student movement, which organized a “mass evasion.” Demonstrators would not pay the subway fare in a collective act of resistance. Police responded with gratuitous violence, stoking far-flung contempt of their actions among the public and correspondent levels of support for the evaders.
As protests exceeded the bounds of the subway dispute, the president declared a state of emergency, suspending constitutional rights and introducing a curfew, first in Santiago and then later in many of the country’s other cities. The military was sent into the streets with heavily armoured vehicles for the first time since 1990. In a further gesture to the Pinochet era, Piñera announced that his regime was “at war” with a powerful internal enemy.
Majoritarian anti-dictatorial sentiment was galvanized, and the population came alive, violating the curfew and the state-of-emergency attempts to squash assembly and mobility rights. A motley amalgam of popular classes and the massively indebted and downwardly mobile middle class erupted in unison. A dialectic of movement massification-state repression swept the country over a two-week period. The revolt far transcended a 30-peso fare increase. As one viral slogan has it: It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years!
A whole order of polity and economy – seemingly so well-entrenched – had been called into question. Virtually no official institution in the country retained any credibility among the populace. The curtain was drawn back on the actually-existing flaws of Chilean neoliberalism; its entire edifice had once again been made to rest openly on military and police coercion.
Demands in the streets converged around the necessity of a ground-up Constituent Assembly, while a socio-economic agenda outlined the need for nationalization of resources such as water, copper, and lithium, alongside social services such as transportation (as noted, formally public, but obedient to market diktats) and the private pension system, plus a significant hike in the minimum wage.
Mass marches and pot-banging ran alongside riotous insurrection of a scale unprecedented in recent Chilean history. A class logic targeted subway stations, supermarkets, malls, high-end retail outlets, and energy company headquarters for looting and burning, while small stores were protected. Barricades were erected in cities and running battles with the security forces displayed a ferocity of anger from below decisively at odds with Chile’s officialist self-image. By some estimates 1.2 million marched in Santiago in what was until then perhaps the largest demonstration in the country’s history, and across the national territory an incredible two million joined in marches out of a total population of 18 million.
The recent revival of popular feminism in Chile – as in much of the rest of Latin America – converged with the combativeness of students, indigenous movements, and labour (especially dock workers).
Political parties were marginal to the unfolding of the quasi-insurrection in October 2019, including those parties on the Left. The only ones with any credibility among the poor and disenfranchised are the traditional Communist Party and the much newer Broad Front – a coalition of various currents of Chile’s new Left, itself an outcome of the 2011 process of mobilization initiated by university students. While militants from these parties were heavily involved in the unrest, the anti-party sentiment of the mobilized seemed to extend to them as well, making it impossible for either one to provide leadership or coordination.