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Donoso, Sofía & Vonbülow, Marisa (Eds.) (2016) - Social Movements in Chile. Organization, Trajectories and Political Consequences PDF
Donoso, Sofía & Vonbülow, Marisa (Eds.) (2016) - Social Movements in Chile. Organization, Trajectories and Political Consequences PDF
Donoso, Sofía & Vonbülow, Marisa (Eds.) (2016) - Social Movements in Chile. Organization, Trajectories and Political Consequences PDF
trajectories
& political
consequences
edited by
Sofia Donoso &
Marisa von Blow
Social Movements in Chile
Sofia Donoso Marisa vonBlow
Editors
Social Movements
in Chile
Organization, Trajectories, and Political
Consequences
Editors
Sofia Donoso Marisa vonBlow
Universidad de Chile and Pontificia Department of Political Science
Universidad Catlica de Chile Political Science Institute
Santiago, Chile Universidade de Braslia
Braslia, Brazil
The idea for this book emerged when we organized a panel on social
movements in post-transition Chile, for the 2013 Latin American Studies
Association (LASA) annual conference. The objective was to bring together
ongoing and empirically rich research on the fate of social movements after
the return of democracy in 1990. While acknowledging that there was a
renewed interest in the study of collective action in Chile, especially after
the massive protests of 2011, we lacked a more systematic analysis of the
possibilities and constraints faced by social movements when mobilizing for
long-dormant policy reforms in a country that has been widely acclaimed
for its economic prosperity and political stability. This debate continued in
a second panel at the 2014 LASA meeting, in which we explored the inter-
twined relationships between social movements and institutional actors in
contemporary Chile and in other Latin American countries. This book is
the result of these discussions. It contributes to a better understanding of
the role of social movements in democratization in Chile and elsewhere.
As we were preparing to send this books proposal to potential presses,
we heard that Rodrigo Avils, a member of Marisas research team and an
activist in the student movement, had suffered severe injuries after being
hit at close range by a police water cannon while participating in a rally
in Valparaso, and was in critical condition. All through the process of
signing the contract, contacting authors, writing chapters, and sending
the manuscript, we followed Rodrigos difficult but thankfully impressive
path to recovery. He is a reminder that, even in democracies such as the
Chilean one, participating in social movements can be a dangerous act. We
dedicate this book to Rodrigo and to our students.
v
vi Preface
vii
viii List of Contributors
xi
xii Contents
Index281
List of Figures
xiii
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Provinces where student and Mapuche protests took place
(Chile, 20002012) 51
Table 2.2 Distribution of tactics by social movement (%)
(Chile, 20002012) 52
Table 3.1 Summary of the Student Movements strategizing during
its main protest waves, 20012011 82
Table 4.1 Number of imprisoned Mapuche activists
(condemned or in preventive detention) 115
Table 8.1 Three generations of anti-neoliberal protest in Latin America 233
xv
PART I
In 2011 and the years that followed, old and new forms of mobilization
emerged in various parts of the world. From the Middle East to Europe,
and from North to South America, we witnessed the revolts of Quebecois
students against tuition hikes and market-driven austerity, Mexicos Yo soy
132 pro-democracy student movement, the rise and fall of the Egyptian
revolution, Spains Indignados movement, Occupy Wall Street in the
United States, and the massive 2013 Brazilian protests, among many other
episodes of mobilization. Social movement scholars are still struggling to
The authors contributed equally to this chapter and to the organization of the
book. We thank Germn Bidegain and Rebecca Abers for useful comments to
an earlier version of this chapter. Support for this research was received from
CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009, CONICYT/FONDECYT/Regular/1130897,
and CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular/1160308. Marisa von Blow also thanks
the support of Milenio Project RS130002, Iniciativa Cientfica Milenio of the
Ministerio de Economa, Fomento y Turismo, Chile.
understand the meanings of this new era of protest, which is at the same
time global and deeply rooted in specific political and economic contexts.
In this book, we focus on a less studied country, which nonetheless has
become a key reference in this recent wave of protests: Chile. This coun-
try had, until recently, been characterized by its conspicuous absence of
contentious politics.1 To the surprise of scholars and the political estab-
lishment alike, in the past few years, Chile has become the stage for wide-
spread demonstrations, on a scale that had not been seen since the protests
against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet during the 1980s.
In 2011, environmentalists staged protests against a five-dam hydropower
project in Patagonia, miners went on strike, the Mapuches intensified their
historical grievances against the Chilean state, feminist groups mobilized
around old and new demands, protests were organized against the rise of
gas prices in remote regions, and, most visibly, high school and university
students led massive rallies across the country.
The protest wave initiated in 2011 has had a profound impact in
Chilean politics. By questioning the institutional legacy of the military
regime, pointing out many of the shortcomings of the governments
since the reinstatement of democratic rule, and criticizing key pub-
lic policies, these social movements have repoliticized many aspects of
Chiles development path, and forced a debate on pending political
reforms. While mobilizations abated after 2011, in the 2013 general
elections the Nueva Mayora, the center-left coalition that backed the
presidential candidacy of Socialist Michelle Bachelet, was elected on a
platform that included some of the key demands of social movements.
It proposed an overhauling of the education model, a more progres-
sive tax system, and a new, more democratic Constitution. Whereas it
is still early to pass judgment on these promises, a new tax reform bill
was approved six months after the elections.2 Moreover, some of the
leaders who spearheaded the protests in 2011 gained parliamentary
representation. So, whether the political impact of social movements
is understood as the adoption of a policy which is inspired by their
demands,3 or increased representation,4 it is clear that the political sce-
nario changed after 2011.5
This book offers an analysis of the upswing of contentious politics in
Chile, which will be of interest to a wide audience: scholars who study
Latin American politics and contentious politics in general, as well as those
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INCONTEMPORARY CHILE 5
honked their car horns to show their rejection of the military regime.56
The demand for democracy was also expressed by students, shantytown
dwellers and other social actors.57
Crucially, the initiation of this protest cycle also reactivated Chiles
opposition parties, some of which later would form the Concertacin de
Partidos por la Democracia (henceforth, Concertacin), the center-left,
four-party coalition that spearheaded the countrys reinstatement of dem-
ocratic rule, and that won the presidential elections in 1989.
While social movements played a key role in enabling the transition
from authoritarian rule, once the democratic transition had been com-
pleted and electoral democracy installed, social mobilization tended to
wane.58 The intricate ties between political parties (some new, some inher-
ited from the authoritarian period) and social movements explain part of
this process of demobilization. The restoration of party politics and elite-
level compromises frequently came at the expense of social movements
demands.59
The path of gradual demobilization of social movements after the
reinstatement of democracy was also largely molded by the experience of
polarization and political deadlock that had preceded the military coup in
1973. The assessment of the democratic breakdown made by prominent
Concertacin leaders was that an excessive pressure from popular sectors
had contributed to the military coup. This reinforced the Concertacins
aversion toward popular mobilization.60 In general terms, the political
parties of both the left and the center no longer sought to base their con-
stituency on political mobilization.61 Paradoxically, if one characteristic of
the political system before the democratic breakdown in 1973 was that the
predominant mode of political action was based on the organization of a
social base in order to link it to a party structureand, through this, exert
pressure over or take control of the state62the transition to democracy
paved the way for the opposite route.
It would take some time for social movements to rearticulate their
demands, and build the sufficient organizational capacity to challenge this
path. This book presents a long-term approach to the analysis of these
changes, which allows us to move beyond simplistic characterizations of
the Chilean civil society as mobilized or demobilized.
16 M. VON BLOW AND S. DONOSO
The book is divided into three parts. Part I is composed of Chaps. 1 and2.
The latter is written by Nicols Somma and Rodrigo Medel, and provides
an overview of the changes in the relations between social movements
and institutional politics in contemporary Chile. Drawing from the analy-
sis of an original protest event database and extensive interview material,
Somma and Medel seek to explain how an increasing level of protest
during the last decades has impacted the political arena in spite of greater
autonomy of social movements from institutional actors. With a focus
on the student, indigenous, and environmental movements, the chapter
shows that the increase in collective protest during the last decade par-
tially results from an ongoing process of detachment of movements from
institutional politics that can be traced back to the democratic transition
in 1990. Furthermore, by comparing the impacts of the Student and
the Mapuche movements, Somma and Medel argue that movements are
more likely to shape political outcomes if they can launch massive pro-
test campaigns in visible locations with a predominance of disruptive yet
pacific tactics.
Part II of this book is comprised of five case studies that are based on
extensive and original field research. Chapter 3, by Sofia Donoso, traces
the unfolding of the student movement since 1990, with a particular focus
on how its strategy-making has evolved as a result of its interaction with
the institutional terrain. Bringing to the fore the interactions and inten-
tions that activists attribute to their actions, strategy-making is analyzed
as a relational process. Furthermore, the chapter stresses how historical
and political constraints shape the strategic options that social move-
ments undertake. Donoso argues that the accumulation of experiences
from various protest waves since 1990 has enthused the employment of
both outsider and insider strategies. While in tension, these types of
strategies complement each other in the pursuit of education and political
reforms. Furthermore, Donoso shows that the strategic choice to also pur-
sue insider strategies is a consequence of the gradual distancing between
the center-left political parties and the student movement organizations.
This is what ultimately motivated the strategic decision of engaging in
electoral competition and mobilizing the state from within with the aim
of pushing for reforms.
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INCONTEMPORARY CHILE 17
Notes
1. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, 258.
2. This tax reform is the most substantial one since the reinstatement of
democracy in 1990. It aims to gradually increase tax collection until it
reaches approximately 3 % of the gross domestic product by 2018
(which is the equivalent of approximately 8000 USD million per year).
Information retrieved from http://reformatributaria.gob.cl/noticias/
el-mapa-de-la-reforma-tributaria-la.html [accessed on February 9,
2016].
3. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest, 34.
4. Cress and Snow, The Outcome of Homeless Mobilization. The Influence
of Organization, Disruption, Political Mediation and Framing.
5. For overviews of the theoretical and empirical literatures on social move-
ments political outcomes, see Amenta and Caren, The Legislative,
Organizational, and Beneficiary Consequences of State- oriented
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INCONTEMPORARY CHILE 21
48. Roberts, Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in
Chile and Peru, 86.
49. Roberts, Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in
Chile and Peru, 89.
50. Huber and Stephens, Democracy and the Left: Social Policy and Inequality
in Latin America, 91.
51. Borzutsky, Vital Connections. Politics, Social Security, and Inequality in
Chile, 124125.
52. Posner, Local Democracy and the Transformation of Popular Participation
in Chile, 62.
53. Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile, 7377.
54. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society, 59.
55. Schneider, Radical Opposition Parties and Squatters Movements in
Pinochets Chile, 60.
56. Hipsher, Democratic Transitions as Protest Cycles: Social Movement
Dynamics in Democratizing Latin America, 159.
57. Garretn, Transicin Hacia la Democracia en Chile e Influencia Externa:
Dilemas y Perspectivas, 3.
58. Roberts, Deepening Democracy? The Modern left and Social Movements in
Chile and Peru, 1998, 85.
59. Almeida, Defensive Mobilization: Popular Movements Against Economic
Adjustment Policies in Latin America; Hipsher, Democratic Transitions
as Protest Cycles: Social Movement Dynamics in Democratizing Latin
America; Roberts, Deepening Democracy? The Modern left and Social
Movements in Chile and Peru.
60. Huber, Pribble and Stephens, The Chilean Left in Power, 80.
61. Huber, Pribble and Stephens, The Chilean Left in Power, 80; Posner,
The Chilean Left in Power, 59.
62. Garretn, Transicin hacia la democracia en Chile e influencia externa:
Dilemas y perspectivas, 12.
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CHAPTER 2
NicolsM.Somma andRodrigoMedel
Introduction
Why has collective protest boomed in Chile in the last decade? In this
chapter, we argue that this happens due, among other factors, to the
progressive detachment between social movements and political institu-
tional actorsa process beginning just after democratic restoration two
and a half decades ago. Such detachment is puzzling: Chile has histori-
cally shown a pattern of consistent alignment between social and politi-
cal forces.1 Even the long and harsh dictatorship of General Augusto
Pinochet (19731990) could not wash away this tradition. Thus, when
We thank Sofa Donoso and Marisa von Blow for their helpful and detailed
comments. We also thank Tania Manrquez and Daniela Paz Jacob for superb
research assistance with the interviews. We appreciate the support of three grants
from CONICYT Chile: CONICYT/FONDECYT/Iniciacin/11121147;
the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) CONICYT/
FONDAP/15130009; and the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research
(CIIR) (CONICYT-FONDAP 15110006).
We focus on the student, Mapuche, andin the first part of the chap-
terenvironmental movements. We select these cases because they have
staged some of the most massive and/or notorious protest campaigns and
because, despite their differences in goals, tactics, and social composition,
they all illustrate how detachment from institutional actors shapes col-
lective protest. We also present analyses of protest patterns with general
population surveys that are consistent with our argument. This does not
mean that the argument applies to every movement. Rather, we seek to
foster the development of a future research agenda. Our timeframe starts
with the transition to democracy in 1990, but we pay more attention to
the last decade. We combine secondary research produced by social sci-
entists, general population survey data, and a unique dataset which covers
thousands of protest events across the country between 2000 and 2012.
We also take advantage of 36 semi-structured interviews with leaders of
student, environmental, and Mapuche organizations. The interviews12
for each of the three groupswere carried out in 2014 in the cities of
Santiago and Temuco.
Examining the relationship between social movements and pol-
ity members, we follow Tilly, who coined that concept for referring to
contenders for political power that have low-cost access to governmental
resources on a routine basis.7 We consider the main polity members in
contemporary Chilepolitical parties, the congress, and the national gov-
ernment. Of course, not all polity members are equal. For instance, during
the period under study, the Communist Party may be considered a polity
member, but it certainly had less access to governmental resources than
the Christian Democratic Party under President Eduardo Frei or than the
Socialist Party under Ricardo Lagos or Michelle Bachelet. Additionally,
other polity memberssuch as the judicial system or the policemay be
consequential for protest but they are not part of our story. Also, we focus
on center and leftist parties because their changing relationships with
social movements are more relevant for understanding protest than those
between movements and rightist partieswhose relationships were always
very weak during this period. By institutional politics, we refer to the
structures, rules, and interactions in which polity members are embedded.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. The next section presents
two theoretical views about how relations between movements and pol-
ity members shape collective protestnamely, the closeness thesis and the
detachment thesis. After this, we document the growth of collective protest
SHIFTING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS... 33
in Chile during the last decade. Then we present our assessment of the
increasing detachment of social movements from institutional actors. But
protest and impact are different things. Based on a comparison between
the student and the Mapuche movement, we argue that in order to shape
political outcomes, movements need to be able to utilize massive, visible,
and disruptive tacticssmall and isolated protests, even if frequent and
violent, are less impactful. The last section summarizes and concludes.
How does the interaction between polity members and social movements
affect the emergence and intensity of collective protest? The literature
on this subject is vast and complex and it has not reached a consensus.
However, even at the cost of some simplification, we derive two theses
that are useful for addressing our research question: the closeness and the
detachment theses.
The closeness thesis can be derived from a considerable part of the
literature on the political process approach.8 In democratic settings, rela-
tions between social movements and polity members are not static. When
movements and polity members get close to each other, social movement
activity increaseswith collective protest being one form such activity may
take.9 Closeness means, for instance, that movements and polity members
build alliances and share goals, tactics, and organizational structures. It
may also mean that polity members support (or at least are sympathetic
to) policies that favor movement demands, that they certify the moral
stature or intentions of movements,10 or that movements explicitly adhere
to the agendas of polity members and endorse certain candidates during
electoral times. All these aspects may change across time.
When movements get close to polity members, they may be aware that
they have powerful allies they can rely on. They become less vulnerable to
stigmatization by the media and to harsh and arbitrary repression by police
forces. Movement leaders and constituencies feel more optimistic and
empowered. Hence, they mobilize moreone way of doing so is through
collective protest. Examples of this thesis abound. Part of the increased col-
lective mobilization and activity of the American Civil Rights Movement dur-
ing the 1960s has been attributed to the sympathetic Democrat authorities
34 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
of the time.11 And the increase of protest demonstrations in the Soviet Union
in the late 1980s was clearly linked to Gorbachevs openness to reform and
citizen participation.12
Of course, the political process theory is very broad, and it encompasses
important dimensions that go beyond the distance between movements
and polity members. Some of these dimensions refer to electoral systems,
state strength, forms of government, and prevailing strategies toward chal-
lengers.13 But these dimensions tend to vary little across timein general,
and in particular in Chile during our timeframe. Thus, they are less useful
for making sense of the sudden increase of collective protest in Chile than
the shifting relationships between movements and polity members.
The detachment thesis makes a different prediction: protest booms
when movements and polity members are detached from each other.
Detachment often goes hand in hand with disillusionment toward polity
members. After considerable spans of time, polity members may eventu-
ally fail to channel long-standing social demands and redress collective
grievances. Aggrieved groups thus support less and less the policies and
platforms of political elites and their electoral candidacies. Citizen confi-
dence in political institutions declines and representation weakens.14 In
this context, protest is seen as the most effective way to press for change.
We built the detachment thesis inductively from the Chilean case, but
it might also be useful for understanding protests in Bolivia in the early
2000s.15 It is also consistent with Arces Latin American cross-national
analysis, which shows that protest increases as the quality of democratic
representationembodied in political partiesdecreases.16
Below we explore the usefulness of both theses for understanding the
recent increase of collective protest in Chile. As said before, these two theses
do not capturenor aim to do sothe complexity of the literature on the
subject (which often considers nonlinear hypotheses, see e.g. Eisinger 1973).
However, they provide a straightforward way of addressing our empirical
puzzle of booming protest in Chilea puzzle we describe in the next section.
Graph 2.1 plots the evolution of the number of protest events in Chile,
both for all the claims raised by protestors and for five main claims that
account for most protest activityeducational, environmental, labor, indig-
enous, and regionalist claims.19 The main finding is that protest has been
growing steadily from 2003 to 2004 onwards. This remains true when
considering all types of claims as well as when considering each of the main
issue claimsalthough the increase is more moderate for labor claims.
But does this increase also mean that more people became involved in
collective protest? Graph 2.2, which plots the estimated number of par-
ticipants in protest events,20 shows that the answer is positive. Since 2003,
not only have more protest events taken place but more people have also
become involved in protests related to each of the claims considered as
well as in general. It is outside the scope of this chapter to explain varia-
tions across the slopes of the different claims.
2000 2004 2008 2012 2000 2004 2008 2012 2000 2004 2008 2012
year
Graph 2.1 Evolution of the number of protest events in Chile by demand type.
Source: Protest events dataset based on Chronologies of Protest produced by the
Latin American Center of Social Sciences (CLACSO)s chronologies of protest.
Figures for 2012 were estimated extrapolating data available from January to August
36 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
2000 2004 2008 2012 2000 2004 2008 2012 2000 2004 2008 2012
year
what extent are those who participate in collective protest in Chile engaged
with institutional politics? How has this changed across time? We follow
Verba etal.s notion of political engagement, which refers to psychological
predispositions toward political objects as reflected in measures of interest in
politics, political efficacy, and trust in political institutions among others.22
The closeness thesis would imply not only that those who protest are
more engaged with institutional politics than the rest but also that these
associations increased across time. This would indicate comparatively
stronger ties between movements and polity members, which should
explain the increase in protest. The detachment thesis would imply that
such associations, even if positive, decrease across time, reflecting the
growing distance between movements and polity members. Jumping
ahead, that is what we find.
To address these questions, we use the World Values Survey (WVS),
which was applied to representative samples of the Chilean adult popula-
tion in 1990, 1996, 2000, 2006, and 2012. The WVS of 1990, which cap-
tures the democratic transition period, reports relatively strong and positive
associations between several pairs of variablespairs in which one variable
relates to protest and the other refers to political institutional engagement.
Protest measures include participation in demonstrations, boycotts and
strikes, occupying buildings, and signing petitions. Institutional political
engagement measures include political interest, political discussions, impor-
tance of politics, trust in political parties, and vote propensity.23 Average
polychoric correlations are 0.37 and in many cases well above 0.50.24 That
is, those who by 1990 used to engage in a wide array of protest tactics also
used to trust more in parties, be more interested in politics, discuss politics
more, and so on than those who did not protest.
But these statistical associations decrease systematically across time.
From the average of 0.37in 1990, the average association between pro-
test and political engagement (considering all possible pairs of indicators)
drops to 0.25 in 2000, and to 0.18 in 2012. Moreover, many of these
associations lose statistical significance across time. At least at the mass
level, protest and institutional politics took increasingly divergent paths.
go to Santiago [Chiles capital] the mayor lends us the buses. Yet these
approaches remain within the boundaries of local politics. They rarely
escalate into contacts with the party the mayor belongs.
The university student movement mobilizes material resources in ways
clearly different from those employed by the environmental movement,
but both movements have in common their low reliance on polity mem-
bers. Student federationsthe highest representative body of students at
the university levelreceive many of their financial resources from their
respective universities. And student centers, which represent the students
of specific colleges within universities, are also supported by the deans
office. As these resources come from the universities students belong to,
they cannot be used with complete autonomy, but the range of activities
they support is considerable. These go beyond academic or recreational
activities and may involve public awareness campaigns on certain topics
as well as protest logistics (such as making or purchasing protest flyers,
banners, and kits for alleviating the effects of teargases in marches). Some
student leaders also noted that parties and the government have no say
regarding how to spend these resources.
Student organizations obtain the remaining resources from a wide array
of activities such as parties, music shows, raffles, and academic activities
with renowned intellectuals. Resources occasionally come from donations
from better-off adults such as parents and faculty members, who feed stu-
dents during occupations and strikes. A student leader relates that any
time there is action, or at the beginning of the year, we organize a fun-
draising campaign with friends, parents and professors. Professors tend
to be an important source of funding because we are close to them.
Some student organizations require regular money contributions from
their members. As most studentsespecially those from the so-called
traditional universitiescome from the middle or upper classes, they are
successful at extracting resources from their social networks.
Finally, student organizations engaged in protest activities often ben-
efit from the human capital of students or recent graduates. Medicine
and nursing students take care of wounded students in demonstrations,
law students work on the legal dimensions of reform proposals presented
by the movement, and music and theater students stage cultural perfor-
mances. As an interviewee put it, our advantage is our cultural capital,
the university keeps growing, and everybody donates their professional
and technical skills.
SHIFTING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS... 41
What role do political parties play in this story? Some interviewees sug-
gest that the Communist Party and the Socialist Party channel resources
to leftist student organizations, while the conservative right UDI benefits
student groups aligned with their ideologyparticularly the Movimiento
Gremial at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. We do not have
estimates about the quantitative relevance of such resources, but accord-
ing to the interviewees they seem to be just one among many sources.
Out of the three movements considered here in some detail, the
Mapuche movement perhaps relies least on institutional politics in terms
of resources (although some organizations partially do so, as noted
below). There are two broad types of Mapuche organizations and they
differ in that respect.31 Some are oriented toward cultural goals such as
promoting and preserving Mapuche identity and language, developing
intercultural educational programs, or improving the socioeconomic
situation of the Mapuche people through educational fellowships and
access to health services. Mostly based in urban areas, they feel comfort-
able within the institutional framework of the Chilean state and often
receive resources from it through the National Corporation of Indigenous
Development (CONADI), the Funds for Art (FONDART) program, and
the Indigenous Development Area (ADI) program. Although they may
also rely on self-produced resources,32 these organizations depend to a
considerable extent on institutional politics.
The situation is different for organizations with a more radical stance
such as the All Lands Council or the Coordinadora AraucoMalleco
(CAM). They do not identify with Chile as a nation and aim at political
autonomy. They heavily engage in disruptive and violent protest tactics.
Clandestine or semi-clandestine as they are, they do not receive funds
from polity members whatsoeverthey find it contradictory to be sup-
ported by an institutional order they do not want to be part of. Also, many
polity members from across the political spectrum are unwilling to sup-
port organizations which they believe commit terrorist acts. These organi-
zations rather depend on resources from the aggrieved communities. They
organize cultural festivals and receive donations from other sympathetic
groups from civil society. They also collect food and clothes for the fami-
lies of jailed Mapuche commoners or for those besieged by police forces.
These funding sources are not constant but sporadic and linked to par-
ticular situations. As one Mapuche interviewed put it, there is no funding
that endures across time there are donations at particular junctures.
42 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
and politicians are receptive to movements only when the latter man-
age to stage large and visible protests. As an environmental leader put it,
when our organizations manage to lead a social movement, then political
actors immediately start flattering usso to speak. When mobilization
recedes and they control the situation from the political structures, well,
they become less interested in dialoguing with us. Encounters between
politicians and activists may take place in private settingslike the homes
of politiciansor in public ones. They are often tense and sometimes they
end up in altercations. According to some activists, this stems from their
dissatisfaction with politicians, who continuously make promises they
rarely honor.
Thus, many student organizations are flatly detached from the politi-
cal status quo. As one student leader put it: When you say party, they
[the students] tell you no, I have nothing to do with parties. Parties
are like AIDS, in the past everybody wanted them, now nobody wants
parties. And almost the same happens with authorities. Since most stu-
dents are indifferent to or have negative views on political parties, leaders
who appear to follow the dictates of a given party rather than that of the
student body can lose their positions. Leaders tied to parties thus usually
downplay such attachments. They rather emphasize that they only follow
the will of students as reflected in assembliesto the point they call them-
selves spokesmen rather than (center or federation) presidents. This is
consistent, since the mid-1990s, with the emergence of an autonomist
wing within the student movement that emphasizes horizontal organiza-
tional structures.39 Though self-identified with the political left, this wing
rejected the moderation of Concertacin governments. Its most visible
organizations were the SurDA initially, the Front of Libertarian Students,
and the Autonomous Left led by Gabriel Boric.
In the case of the Mapuche movement, there has never been in Chile a
strong indigenous party. During the last decade, the Wallmapuwen party
has attempted to become one, but it faced insurmountable obstacles to
even acquire legal existence. This stands in sharp contrast with regional
experiences of powerful indigenous parties like the Bolivian MAS and the
Ecuadorian Pachakutik.40
This is not the whole picture, though. Going back to the interviews,
some environmental leaders seem to have relatively harmonious relations
with specific politicians of different parties, some of which become allies.
For instance, a local environmental leader explains that we have the
support of a senator that has accompanied us to present the protection
46 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
resource [a legal figure] and is always asking what we are working on, and
he is the only one that stands with the people. Likewise, seven out of
the nine presidential candidates in the 2013 elections signed a declaration
drafted by environmental activists in which they pledged to protect the
Patagonia area from large-scale projects if elected.41 This affinity between
political leaders and activists partially results from the fact that, as one
interviewee noted, many environmental leaders and most members of the
political class share a common upper-class background. They may even
have overlapping friendship and family networks. This creates trust and
eases relations despite ideological differences.
Additionally, as suggested above, some student organizations are
organically tied to the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, while oth-
ers are tied to UDI.Likewise, Mapuche organizations that value govern-
mental programs targeted at indigenous communities also establish good
working relationships with wingka (non-Mapuche) politicians that secure
the provision of state resources. These organizations are also tied to a large
number of Mapuche mayorscurrently gathered in the Association of
Municipalities with Mapuche Mayors.
In sum, while the interviews reveal that there is variation in the strength
of the links between movement organizations and polity members, these
links are generally ephemeral, instrumental, and shaped by suspicion,
all of which is consistent with our identification of the detachment of
social movements. Organic, collaborative ties do exist but seem to be an
exception.
Student protests are by all measures more massive than Mapuche pro-
tests. This is evident, first, in Graph 2.2 above. Not only do more people
participate in student protests each year but also the gap increases across
time. Also, student protest events are much larger than Mapuche events
(respectively, an average of 10,187 vs. 698 participants). Excluding events
with more than 15,000 participants (which may disproportionately affect
averages) also yields average student protests about five times larger than
Mapuche protests (2507 vs. 542 participants, respectively). This is consis-
tent with common wisdom. Both in 2006, but especially in 2011, student
marches gathered dozens of thousands of protestors. During some days
in the winter of 2011, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people took
the streets across the country. These were the most massive marches in
Chile since those that, in the late 1980s, contributed to the transition to
democracy.
Why were student protests so massive? In part, as noted below, because
the number of youngsters with access to higher education is also massive.
Also, as most students require a loan for studying, the collective action
frames spread by movement leaders regarding free education resonate
among a wider group of people. Why were Mapuche protests smaller? The
Mapuche people represent a small proportion of the population (about
4% according to the 2002 census).54 They are geographically segregated
about half of them are concentrated in Regions IX and Xand have lower
levels of education, employment, and income than the non-Mapuche pop-
ulation, as well as higher poverty rates.55 All these factors tend to depress
protest participation.56
Student protests are not only more massive but also more visible than
Mapuche protests. An indicator of visibility is the population size of
the province where the protest takes placelarger provinces have more
bystanders and typically more media coverage. Table 2.1 shows the six
provinces with the largest proportion of protest events for educational
and Mapuche demands and the respective province population. A total of
71% of all student protests took place in the highly populated province
of Santiago, the central province in the countrys capital, which comprises
the downtown and La Moneda (the Presidential Palace). By contrast, only
19% of Mapuche protests took place in Santiago. Beyond Santiago, about
15 % of student protests took place in Valparaso and Concepcin, two
other central and populous localities. Yet most of the Mapuche protests
outside Santiago are scattered across less populated provinces (particularly
Cautn, Malleco, and Arauco, in the center-south of the country). Thus, it
SHIFTING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS... 51
Table 2.1 Provinces where student and Mapuche protests took place (Chile,
20002012)
Student protests Mapuche protests
Source: Protest events dataset based on CLACSOs chronologies of protest. Population figures come from
http://www.ine.cl/cd2002/
is harder for Mapuche protests to capture the attention of the public, the
media, and ultimately political authorities.
The high visibility of student protests did not prevent police repression,
which was hard at times and about which there were innumerable com-
plaints by human rights organizations. Yet high visibility forced under-
cover police operations and possibly limited the brutality of repression, at
least compared to Mapuche repression in the countryside. Bystanders and
the media could easily notice and register police excesses against students.
Moreover, nowadays most students have cell phones that allow them to
take pictures and record video. Yet many Mapuche protests took place in
rural areas (landed estates or fundos), where police repression is less likely
to trigger the mass media and public opinion dynamics that end up harm-
ing governmental approval.
Finally, student and Mapuche protest also differ in their tactical rep-
ertoires. Table 2.2 shows the percentage distribution of tactics employed
in student and Mapuche protests. We identify five types of tactics: pacific
(e.g. marches or demonstrations), artistic (e.g. music or theatrical perfor-
mances), disruptive non-violent (e.g. strikes, blockings roads, or occupying
buildings), self-destructive (e.g. hunger strikes), and violent (e.g. damag-
ing public or private property, setting things on fire, engaging in lootings,
or attacking police forces). Both movements essentially rely on pacific and
non-violent disruptive tactics, but the latter are proportionally more prom-
inent among students (40.1% vs. 31.7%). Also, students rely slightly more
52 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
on artistic tactics (4.8% vs. 3.1%), while Mapuche protest depends more
on self-destructive (7.5% vs 2.5%) and violent (18.3% vs 11.5%) tactics.
Why do these tactical differences matter for understanding movement
influence? Student protests were very disruptive, actually more than sug-
gested by Table 2.2. Student marches in the main city avenues impeded
the routine activities of many citizens and institutions. The seizing of edu-
cational buildings halted the normal teaching of classes. This was amplified
by the large numbers of participants, as seen above. Moreover, students
often resorted to strongly ludic and carnivalesque tacticsfrom parades in
underwear to collective dances and kiss-inswhich increased the sympa-
thy from the general population to the movement. In fact, opinion polls
during the 2006 and 2011 campaigns showed that a large majority of the
population approved of student demands.57 Also, because student actions
were not overly violent, governments could not react to the disruption
with indiscriminate repression. And violence during student protests was
often displayed by very small groups of hooded individuals (encapucha-
dos), which destroyed public and private property and confronted the
police. Yet student leaders emphasized repeatedly in their media appear-
ances that encapuchados were not part of the movement but just oppor-
tunists, therefore reducing the stigma attached to the movement, which
presented itself as peaceful.
Compared to students, however, the tactical repertoire of Mapuche
resistance emphasized violent tactics (such as the seizing of land estates or
setting trucks and ranches on fire) or self-destructive ones (typically hun-
ger strikes). In fact, more than one quarter of all Mapuche tactics belong
to these groups combined. Although Chileans support many demands of
Mapuche organizations,58 violent tactics do not elicit the kind of massive
public sympathy that force governments to take movements seriously into
Conclusions
This chapter aimed at offering an overview of the relations between social
movements and institutional politics in contemporary Chile. We presented
four main claims. First, collective protest has been growing in Chile dur-
ing the last decade. Second, when it comes to mobilizing resources and
crafting collective action frames, social movements are considerably (and
possibly increasingly) detached from polity members such as parties, gov-
ernments, and political elites. Third, such detachment partially explains
the increase in protest. As institutional politics do not deliver the changes
that movements demand, collective protest becomes a more attractive
and plausible political strategy. Fourth, the rise of protest does not ensure
social movement impact. In order to be influential, movements need to
stage massive protests in visible places using predominantly disruptive and
artistic tactics. We believe our analysis provides insights that go beyond
the Chilean case. Specifically, that protest booms in a context of dete-
riorated (and deteriorating) party-movement linkages defies some well-
established predictions.
This chapter has limitations that must be addressed in the future in
order to deepen our knowledge on the topic. First, although we empha-
sized the changing relations between social movements and polity mem-
bers for understanding protest increases, other factors also matter. Some
of them are the expansion of tertiary education, the consolidation of a
new middle class with some degree of material well-being, and the sud-
den eruption of digital networks, which dramatically reduced the costs
of transmitting information and coordinating collective actions. Second,
important social movements that we ignored in this chapter need to be
considered. They include the labor, squatter, sexual diversity, feminist, and
54 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
Notes
1. Scully, Rethinking the Center: Party Politics in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
century Chile.
2. Roberts, Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in
Chile and Peru.
3. Bao (1985), Lo Social y lo Poltico, un Dilema Clave del Movimiento
Popular.
4. Hipsher, Democratization and the Decline of Urban Social Movements
in Chile and Spain; Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors
and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile; De la Maza, Los Movimientos
Sociales en la Democratizacin de Chile and Sociedad Civil y Democracia
en Chile; Garretn, La Redemocratizacin Poltica en Chile. Transicin,
Inauguracin y Evolucin.
5. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
6. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution.
7. Ibid.
8. For a review, see Meyer, Protest and Political Opportunities.
9. In this chapter, we are puzzled by changes in collective protestand in that
respect we follow major works in this theoretical tradition such as Eisinger,
The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American cities, Tilly, From
Mobilization to Revolution, McAdam, Political Process and the Development
of Black Insurgency, 19301970, and Kriesi etal., New Social Movements in
Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. However, it is important to keep
SHIFTING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS... 55
in mind that the political process theory has been used for understanding
other kinds of social movement activity such as court actions, voter regis-
tration initiatives, economic boycotts, organizational founding, number of
movement organizations, and even policy outcomes (Meyer, Protest and
Political Opportunities: 133).
10. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 121.
11. McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency,
19301970.
12. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,
7475.
13. Ibid.
14. Arce (2010), Parties and Social Protest in Latin Americas Neoliberal Era.
15. Arce and Rice (2009), Societal Protest in Post-stabilization Bolivia,
9094.
16. Arce, Parties and Social Protest in Latin Americas Neoliberal Era.
17. Tricot, Movimiento de Estudiantes en Chile: Repertorios de Accin
Colectiva Algo Nuevo?; Somma, The Chilean Student Movement of
20112012: Challenging the Marketization of Education; Gmez
Leyton, La Rebelin de las y los Estudiantes Secundarios en Chile.
Protesta Social y Poltica en una Sociedad Neoliberal Triunfante.
18. The dataset was collected as part of FONDECYT grant 11121147 The
Diffusion of Collective Protest in Chile, 20002012 (Principal Researcher:
Nicols Somma). A team of four social sciences students coded the descrip-
tions of all protest events appearing in the Chronologies of Protest pro-
duced by the Latin American Center of Social Sciences (CLACSO), which
in turn are based on a wide array of information sourcesfrom main-
stream newspapers and radios to websites of social movement organiza-
tions. Inter- rater agreement levels were around 90 %. Our study
followedand adapted to Chilethe Dynamics of Collective Action
project, carried out for the United States by Doug McAdam, John
McCarthy, Susan Olzak and Sarah Soule. Unfortunately, as of October
2015, the Chronologies of Protest are not available anymore via CLACSOs
internet website (http://www.clacso.org.ar).
19. The all category includes the five claims shown in the figure plus several
others like transport, health, housing, human rights, womens rights, and
sexual diversity.
20. We logged this variable for reducing the impact of very massive events.
21. This section is based in Somma and Bargsted, La Autonomizacin de la
Protesta en Chile.
22. Verba et al., Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics,
272.
23. See Somma and Bargsted, La Autonomizacin de la Protesta en Chile,
for details.
56 N.M. SOMMA AND R. MEDEL
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SHIFTING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS... 61
Case Studies
CHAPTER 3
SofiaDonoso
Introduction
The protest wave spearheaded by students in recent years has shaped the
political agenda in Chile in ways that few would have anticipated. From
2011 onwards, nation-wide demonstrations triggered a debate on educa-
tion and political reforms, which even today still has not ebbed. Crucially,
the demands of the student movement were integrated into the political
platform of President Michelle Bachelet (20142018). The most impor-
tant tax reform since 1990, explicitly linked to the funding of the new
educational policies, came to be a key pillar of the Bachelet administra-
tions legislative agenda. The call for a new Constitution, which important
sectors of the student movement heeded, also became part of the national
agenda.
Research for this chapter has been supported by the following grants from
CONICYT Chile: CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009, and CONICYT/FON
DECYT/Regular/1160308. The author is grateful for useful comments by Marisa
von Blow and Cristbal Rovira.
S. Donoso (*)
Universidad de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile,
Santiago, Chile
around demands, tactics, arenas, and targets, throughout the three most
significant waves of protest since 1990, namely, those of 2001, 2006, and
2011. Showing how the accumulation of experiences motivated student
organizations to push for the movements agenda both from outside
and inside the political establishment, in the final section, I examine the
complications involved in this mixed strategy. Through this account, I seek
to contribute to the analysis of the build-up of the most influential social
movement in Chiles post-transition era and to a more complex under-
standing of the relationship between social movements and institutions.
that encourage them to use their internal resources to form social move-
ments. The political process model suggests that social movements define
their strategies based on existing access to participation, evidence of politi-
cal alignment within the polity and splits within the elite, the appearance of
influential allies, and/or a decline in the states capacity or will to repress
dissent.14 Hence, when the political system is open, social movements will
tend to work with existing institutions to advance their goals.15 On the
contrary, when the political system is closed to social movement demands,
they are more likely to adopt confrontational strategies that go beyond
existing institutional channels for participation.16
Nevertheless, the political process model does not help us to explain the
process through which strategies are constructed. As Goodwin and Jasper17
avow, [p]rocess theorists tend to wash the meaning and fluidity out of
strategy, agency, and culture so that they will look more like structures.18
In a recent contribution, Rossi19 offers two concepts to better grasp the
process behind the development of strategies and their historical and
political embeddedness. Arepertoire of strategy is defined as the [] his-
torically constrained set of available options for non-teleological strategic
action in public, semi-public (evolving across specific groups), or private
arenas.20 This concept encompasses the most contentious and publicly
manifest repertoires. It therefore complements Tillys21 extensively applied
concept of repertoire of contention, which refers to protest forms such
as boycotts, strikes, and petitions that we have come to associate with
modern social movements. Yet, in contrast to repertoires of contention,
which change slowly through the development of states and regimes, rep-
ertoires of strategies shift in response to the dynamic interplay between
social movements and the responses of the political system that take place
in the medium and short term.22 This involves taking into account how
strategies constantly shift as a result of ongoing internal debates, the inter-
action with political authorities, and how historical drivers guide changes
in the structure of political opportunities.
The concept of stock of legacies, in turn, addresses the question of how
the accumulation of past experiences shapes social movements future for-
mulation of strategies. It is defined as the concatenation of past struggles,
which, through the sedimentation of what is lived and perceived to be
lived as well as what is intentionally learned, produces an accumulation of
experience that adds or eliminates specific strategies from the repertoire of
strategies as both a self-conscious and oblivious process.23 Emphasizing
how historical legacies influence the adoption of strategies, this concept
70 S. DONOSO
on a decree created by the military regime, and was therefore often con-
demned for its illegitimate origin.31 Rather than engaging in political
issues, the ACAS fulfilled social functions such as organizing anniversaries,
parties, and the like. Many leftist groups criticized the ACAS for its depo-
liticized nature.32
An alternative space was provided by the Federacin de Estudiantes
Secundarios de Santiago (Federation of High School Students of Santiago,
henceforth FESES), an umbrella organization of high school student fed-
erations.33 The organization struggled to define an identity for the new
democratic era and was criticized for its domination by the Communists
and its hierarchical decision-making structure.34 As many interviewees
note, the lack of resonance with the student base was expressed in the
FESES struggle to garner support, and the low turnout when it called for
a demonstration or any other event.
Without a strong social movement that could push for reform, the pros-
pects for introducing major changes to the education model bequeathed
by the military regime were slim. Especially because the Concertacin,
early on in the new democratic era, made clear that the structural pillars of
this education system would remain untouched. This is not to say that the
governments of the center-left stayed passive in the policy field of educa-
tion. Public expenditure as a percentage of GDP increased from 2.4 % in
199035 to 4 % in 2012.36 Importantly, it allowed a significant expansion of
education at all levels. The percentage of Chileans with secondary school
education increased from 79.8 % in 1990 to 96.5 % in 2006.37 Participation
in higher education, in turn, grew from 16.8 % in 1990 to 59 % in 2012.38
These improvements reaffirmed to the Concertacin of the benefits
of keeping the education model introduced during the military regime.
At the same time, this complicated the prospects for alliance-building
between the student movement and leaders of the center-left coalition in
the pursuit of reforms that challenged the main premises of the education
system.
As for high school education, these premises are rooted in the voucher
system, which was locked in through the instatement of the Ley Orgnica
Constitucional de la Enseanza (Constitutional Law of Education,
henceforth LOCE) just a few days after the military regime left power.
Following the neoliberal prescriptions, the educational voucher, paid out
to schools by the Ministry of Education, sought to promote the growth
of a private market of education39 and drive down the costs of education.40
OUTSIDER ANDINSIDER STRATEGIES: CHILES STUDENT MOVEMENT... 73
coalition and the delicate power balance that supported the reinstatement
of democratic rule in Chile.
In light of the above, student organizations redirected their attention
to their internal reconstruction. This is not to imply that student organiza-
tions abandoned street demonstrations.46 Yet, aware of the weakening of
their mobilization capacity, the building-up of student organizations and
the construction of an agenda that resonated with the student base were
prioritized.
High school students would spearhead the first significant mobilizations
in 2001 based on this strategic orientation. Their organizational renewal
had a defining moment with the creation of the Asamblea Coordinadora
de Estudiantes Secundarios (Coordinating Assembly of High School
Students, henceforth ACES) in late 2000 by students belonging to some
of Santiagos magnet high schools.47 The foundation of this new orga-
nization responded to a shared diagnosis among students of these high
schools about the pressing need to bring together the diverse autonomous
political and cultural groups that were mushrooming across the capital
city. These so-called collectives were usually composed of students who
identified with the inorganic left, that is, a left that was neither rooted
in the parties of the Concertacin nor in the Communist Party. As one of
the founding ACES leaders explains:
The objective of ACES was to politicize high school students social expe-
rience, and thereby to construct a political platform based on students
everyday concerns.49 The strategy built on widespread disgruntlement
with the quality of the school infrastructure and the authoritarian manner
of many school directors, among other issues.50 Although ACES also had
a critical view on the education model as a whole, its agenda focused on
very specific demands, such as infrastructure improvements, access to IT,
leisure time facilities, permission for male students to wear long hair, fewer
OUTSIDER ANDINSIDER STRATEGIES: CHILES STUDENT MOVEMENT... 75
Table 3.1 Summary of the Student Movements strategizing during its main
protest waves, 20012011
2001 Mochilazo 2006 Pingino Student movement
movement in 2011
Source: Own elaboration based on interview material, organizational documents and newspaper data.
OUTSIDER ANDINSIDER STRATEGIES: CHILES STUDENT MOVEMENT... 83
of forminga coherent plan that could guide the different partial reforms
toward a common objective was particularly criticized.104 The ambigu-
ous stances toward public education within the Nueva Mayora, especially
among Christian Democrats, revived the worst memories of the 2006
Pingino movement. If anything, the period since the start of the Nueva
Mayora government has deepened students wariness with the political
parties of the center-left.
written its education bills. He has also been a fierce defender of a constitu-
ent assembly as a mechanism to draft a new Constitution.
A different version of this insider strategy was followed by former
student leaders Camila Vallejo and Karol Cariola, both members of the
Communist Party and elected into Congress in 2013 with 43.77 % and
37.14 % of the vote, respectively. Time and again in 2011, they publicly
voiced their criticisms to the Concertacin in general and to the first
presidency of Michelle Bachelet, in particular. In spite of that, soon after
Bachelet announced that she would run for a second term in office, the
Communist Party was invited to take part in the Nueva Mayora. Because
this new coalition included many of the most heartfelt demands of the
student movementin its platform, joining it, some reasoned, was a way of
achieving the goals that had not been obtained during the Piera adminis-
tration or in the Concertacin governments. As Karol Cariola107 put it, as
[part of the] Communist Party we have sought different mechanisms to
defeat this system. We have done it from outside the institutional sphere,
through the social struggle, and we decided to enter now because we
found that the best way to change it is from within.
Mobilizing theState
As a growing body of literature has stressed, recognizing the heterogene-
ity that always is part of social movements signifies that we cannot, a priori,
dismiss certain actors from a social movement because they work for the
government.108 People that form part of the state bureaucracy to advance
the policy agenda of the social movement that they belong to have been
referred to as institutional activists.109
In the case of Chiles student movement, a second insider strategy
pursued by many of those who actively had participated in the student
mobilizations in the years prior to the 2013 elections was to seek to influ-
ence the pace and content of the Bachelet governments policy program
from within the state apparatus. Again, one case in point is Revolucin
Democrtica. Soon after the electoral campaign in 2013, Revolucin
Democrtica announced that it would seek to critically collaborate with
the new Bachelet administration, both from Congress and the state. In
other words, while Revolucin Democrtica would not form part of the
government coalition and intended to carefully examine its proposals, it
would support many of the reforms on the Nueva Mayoras agenda. An
illustrative example of this support is Miguel Crispi, one of Revolucin
86 S. DONOSO
After the four former student leaders were elected into Congress, they
were all quick to declare that they would have one foot on the street and
another in Congress. The public and media alike started to refer to the
newly elected deputies as the Bancada Estudiantil (Student Legislators).
Yet, the differences between the four deputies soon emerged. While they
share a history of mobilization, the fact that two of them belong to the
Nueva Mayora has marked a clear divide. As Gabriel Boric,113 deputy and
member of the Izquierda Autnoma, underscores, I think that there still
is a lot of convergence in the subject of education [] but when it comes
to voting, they [the Communist former student leaders] are subject to a
logic of coalition while we [] are not.
The Communist student leaders have also faced criticisms in the stu-
dent base. In 2013 when the Communist Party announced its intention
to join the Nueva Mayora, its youth section lost the elections in many
university student federations.114 In 2015, the party only headed four
student federations.115 Indeed, as Meyer and Staggenborg116 contend,
[r]elationships with one set of actors, such as elite allies, can threaten
those with another group such as grassroots constituents.
Likewise, while not forming part of the Nueva Mayora, Revolucin
Democrtica has also been criticized for occupying government posi-
tions. The fact that members of the political movement worked at the
Ministry of Education at the same time as other members criticized the
education reform has been particularly condemned by the Nueva Mayora.
Revolucin Democrtica has also had to cope with the resignation of many
members. In an open letter, some of them explained that their decision to
leave the newly established political party was because the revolutionary
has been undermined by prioritizing the power of the dominant institu-
tions to the detriment of the power of the people.117 Without a doubt, as
Abers and Tatagiba118 affirm, social movement networks put constraints
on the actions of institutional activists that other public officials do not
face. As the cases of Revolucin Democrtica and the Communist Party
show, although the networks that activists belong to serve as a source of
guidance and inspiration to defend particular priorities, unfulfilled expec-
tations can also provoke the loss of those networks.
Since the massive protests in 2011 and following years, the employ-
ment of insider strategies has led to this dilemma. Whereas the expan-
sion of the student movements repertoire of strategies is the result of
the assessment of previous protest waves, the ever unfolding interaction
between the movement, its opponents, and other actors of the field has
created new tensions to resolve in the coming years.
88 S. DONOSO
Conclusion
Although the emergence of social movements often surprises observers,
they very rarely start from scratch. In this chapter, I analyzed how his-
torical legacies shaped the strategic options of the student movement, and
how experiences of mobilization accumulated during the protest waves
of 2001, 2006, and 2011 and broadened the repertoire of strategies it
employed.
The relationship between the student movement and the political par-
ties on the center-left has been of critical importance in this analysis. I
argued that student activists strategic focus one organizational recon-
struction in the early 2000s was a response to the lack of affinity with the
traditional left and an effort to reconstruct a movement from below that
resonated with the student base. In 2006, grounded in this initial organi-
zational development, the strategies of the Pinginos centered on educa-
tional inequalities and targeted the Concertacin governments. The way
in which the demands of the Pinginos were channeled, in turn, deepened
dissafection with the center-left coalitions willingness to pursue structural
reforms of the education system. Therefore, in the 2011 protest wave, the
student movements strategy directed the political and economic elites
and introduced political demands such as a new Constitution that could
enable the reforms envisioned by the students, that is, free, quality educa-
tion as a social right.
The political systems reaction during and in the aftermath of the 2011
mass mobilizationslack of response from the Piera administration, on
the one hand, and embracement of most of the student demands by the
new government coalition, on the otherpartly explains the deployment
of new insider strategies from 2013 onwards: electoral competition and
the attempt to push for reform from within the government coalition.
Pursuing parliamentary representation and joining the government after
having spearheaded a major social movement, student leaders followed the
path undertaken by many other politicians in Chile and elsewhere. Yet,
the speed with which they transitioned from the streets to the institutional
terrain is arguably a novelty. In any case, their experiences showcase the
very often blurry boundaries between movement politics and institutional
politics. Indeed, as McAdam and Tarrow119 argue when calling for bridg-
ing different forms of contention, turning into political parties or joining
electoral coalitions is one of the mechanisms through which social move-
ments can exert influence over domestic politics. However, by no means
OUTSIDER ANDINSIDER STRATEGIES: CHILES STUDENT MOVEMENT... 89
Notes
1. In June 2016,Revolucin Democrtica became a political party.
2. Rossi, Conceptualizing Strategy Making, 15.
3. Mahoney and Snyder, The Missing Variable, 24.
4. Here I am following Meyer and Staggenborg, Thinking about Strategy,
4.
5. Soule etal., Protest Events.
6. E.g. Banaszak, The Womens Movement and Inside and Outside the
State, Abers and Keck, Practical Authority and Pettinicchio,
Institutional Activism.
7. For some important exceptions, see Jara, Democratic Legitimacy under
Strain; Guzmn-Concha, The Students Rebellion in Chile; and Bellei
etal., The 2011 Chilean Student Movement.
8. Tansey, Process Tracing and Elite Interviewing, 767.
9. Taylor and Van Dyke, Get up, Stand up, 266.
10. Maney etal., An Introduction to Strategies to Social Change, xiv.
90 S. DONOSO
46. For a historical account of the 1997 protests spearheaded by the FECh,
see Thielemann, La Anomala Social de la Transicin.
47. Magnet high schools are municipal schools the majority of them in
Santiago that historically have had top performance in educational mea-
surements. High competition defines who can enter one of these
institutions.
48. Interview with Julio Reyes (15/11/2011).
49. Interviews with Vctor Orellana (6/5/2011) and rsula Schler
(3/11/2011).
50. Interviews with rsula Schler (3/11/2011) and Daniela Moraga
(8/11/2011).
51. Interview with Vctor Orellana (6/5/2011).
52. Revista Punto Final, Entrevista a Lucas Castro.
53. Interviews with Vctor Orellana (6/5/2011) and rsula Schler
(3/11/2011).
54. This name is derived from mochila, which is the Spanish word for
backpack.
55. Interviews with Daniela Moraga (8/11/2011), Vctor Orellana
(6/5/2011), Julio Reyes (15/11/2011), and rsula Schler
(3/11/2011).
56. ACES 2001.
57. Sebastin Vielmas (16/1/2014).
58. MINEDUC, Indicadores de Educacin en Chile 2006, 29.
59. Burton, Hegemony and Frustration, 37.
60. OECD, Education at a Glance. Country Note, 2.
61. UNDP, Expansin de la Educacin Superior en Chile, 49.
62. Interviews with Almeyda 2012, Cuevas 2012, Traverso 2011.
63. Donoso, Dynamics of Change in Chile.
64. Convocatoria es a una movilizacin pacfica, El Mercurio [accessed
January 3, 2016].
65. OECD and World Bank, Revisin de polticas nacionales de educacin,
29.
66. FromLatinobarmetros online data.
67. Interview with Mara Jess Sanhueza (28/7/2009).
68. Interview with Pedro Montt (20/8/2009).
69. Interviews with Pilar Romaguera (14/8/2009) and Pedro Montt
(20/8/2009).
70. Interviews with Sebastin Vielmas (16/1/2014) and Isabel Salgado
(27/2/2014).
71. Interviews with Giorgio Boccardo (17/8/2009) and Federico Huneeus
(29/4/2013).
92 S. DONOSO
72. Interview with Federico Huneeus (29/4/2013), and Melo and Grau,
La FECh 20042006, 13.
73. Interview with Federico Huneeus (29/4/2013).
74. Interview with Giovanna Roa (25/1/2014).
75. Personal communication with Joaqun Walker.
76. Interview with Joaqun Walker (28/1/2014).
77. Interviews with Miguel Crispi (25/1/2014), Marcos Lozano
(28/3/2014), Paul Floor (25/2/2014), and Joaqun Walker
(28/1/2014).
78. Interviews with Chilet (27/2/2014) andMiguel Crispi (25/1/2014);
Jackson, El Pas que Soamos.
79. Meller, Universitarios, El Problema no es el Lucro sino el Mercado!, 63.
80. Interviews with Miguel Crispi (25/1/2014) and Joaqun Walker
(28/1/2014).
81. Interviews with Lagos 2014, Miguel Crispi (25/1/2014).
82. Interviews with Miguel Crispi (25/1/2014) and Joaqun Walker
(28/1/2014).
83. Interviews with Miguel Crispi (25/1/2014), Camila Cea (4/3/2014),
and Paul Floor (25/2/2014).
84. For a conservative estimate of the numbers of participants based on the
figures registered by the police, see Ramrez and Bravo, Movimientos
Sociales en Chile, 20.
85. Adimark, Evaluacin de Gobierno 2011.
86. In 2010, the ACES was re-founded to better reflect new decision-making
mechanisms. While the original ACES from the early 2000s followed the
rule one school, one vote, the new ACES changed to one political collec-
tive, one vote. Bidegain, Autonomizacin de los Movimientos Sociales, 212.
87. For more details about the digital strategy of the Student Movement, see
Garca et al., What Can Twitter Tell us about Social Movements
Network Topology and Centrality? and Ponce Lara, El Flash Mob.
88. Presidente promulga Ley que disminuye tasa de inters del CAE de un
6% a un 2%, La Tercera, September 26, 2012 [accessed January 7,
2016].
89. Bidegain, Autonomizacin de los Movimientos Sociales, 291293.
90. Since 1984, the CONFECH has brought together the student federa-
tions of the traditional universities. In 2011, private universities were also
allowed to take part in the umbrella federation.
91. As Bidegain documents in Autonomizacin de los Movimientos Sociales
(294), at the beginning of 2011, the first group represented 20 federa-
tions and the radical left 15. At the end of the year, this had been reversed:
the radical left had 24 federations and the group of center and left-leaning
organizations had 15.
OUTSIDER ANDINSIDER STRATEGIES: CHILES STUDENT MOVEMENT... 93
References
Abers, Rebecca, and Margaret Keck. 2013. Practical Authority: Agency and
Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics. NewYork: Oxford University
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Abers, Rebecca, and Luciana Tatagiba. 2015. Institutional Activism: Mobilizing
for Womens Health from Inside the Brazilian Bureaucracy. In Social Movement
Dynamics: New Theoretical Approaches from Latin America, eds. Federico Rossi
and Marisa von Blow, 73104. London: Ashgate.
Abers, Rebecca, and Marisa von Blow. 2011. Movimentos Sociais Na Teoria e Na
Prtica, Como Estudar o Ativismo Atravs Da Fronteira Entre Estado e
Sociedade? Sociologias 13(28): 5284.
ACES. 2001. Estudiantes en Pie. Opinin sobre Parlamento Juvenil. Available at
http://www.nodo50.org/aces/documentos/opinion_sobre_parlamento_
juvenil.htm
Adimark. Evaluacin de Gobierno 2011. Santiango de Chile. Data available at
www.adimark.cl.
Austin, Robert. 1997. Armed Forces, Market Forces: Intellectuals and Higher
Education in Chile, 19731993. Latin American Perspectives 24(5): 2658.
Banaszak, Lee Ann. 2005. Inside and Outside the State, Movement Insider
Status, Tactics, and Public Policy Achievements. In Routing the Opposition,
Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy, ed. David S.Meyer, Valerie
Jenness, and Helen M. Ingram, 149177. University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis.
. 2010. The Womens Movement Inside and Outside the State, 2010.
NewYork: Cambridge University Press.
Bellei, Cristin, Cristian Cabalin, and Vctor Orellana. 2014. The 2011 Chilean
Student Movement against Neoliberal Educational Policies. Studies in Higher
Education 39(3): 426440.
OUTSIDER ANDINSIDER STRATEGIES: CHILES STUDENT MOVEMENT... 95
GermnBidegain
Introduction
In 2010, the bicentennial anniversary of Chilean independence, a collective
hunger strike of 32 imprisoned Mapuche activists attracted both national and
international media attention. The strike, which lasted more than 80 days,
forced the government to withdraw the anti-terrorism lawsuits against the
strikers and to make some minor amendments to the Anti-terrorism Law1 that
had been invoked against them. The hunger strike provides a good example of
the radical strategies used by the Mapuche movement in its attempt to impact
public policy. It also showcases the tension that has characterized the relation-
ship between the movement and the Chilean state for more than a decade.
I am very grateful to Marisa von Blow and Sofa Donoso for all their insightful
comments on this chapter. Research discussed in this publication has been
supported by the project RS130002 of the Iniciativa Cientfica Milenio of the
Ministerio de Economa, Fomento y Turismo and the Centro de Estudios de
Conflicto y Cohesin Social (COES), CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009.
G. Bidegain (*)
Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI), Montevideo,
Uruguay
The picture was quite different 20 years ago. During the first demo-
cratic government, the Mapuche movement was actively involved in the
government- led process of creating new indigenous institutions. This
cooperative dynamic resulted in the 1993 Indigenous Law,2 and the
creation of the Corporacin Nacional de Desarrollo Indgena (National
Corporation of Indigenous Development, CONADI), a state agency
tasked with the implementation and supervision of indigenous policies
such as land restitution, cultural recognition, and socioeconomic develop-
ment, among others. Many of the most important leaders of the Mapuche
movement at the time participated in this institution.
Nonetheless, this cooperative dynamic rapidly changed. At the end of
1997, an important autonomist strand developed in the movement and
the demand for some form of political autonomy gained prominence.3
This strand gradually overshadowed the most cooperative sectors. Direct
actions, such as land takeovers and the burning of forestry plantations,
trucks, and logging industry machines belonging to companies operat-
ing in claimed lands, were employed by some Mapuche communities and
organizations. The Chilean state has responded with harsh measures. The
application of existing emergency legislation4 against the accused Mapuche
leaders became a common practice, and reports of police brutality against
activists and Mapuche communities were published by Human Rights
Watch5 and the National Human Rights Institute.6
How can the shift from a predominantly cooperative strategy to a more
confrontational one be explained? What consequences has this change
produced in terms of the impact of the Mapuche movement? These two
questions guide this chapter, which provides an overview of the main char-
acteristics of the movement between 1990 and 2014.
I argue that the answers to these enquiries are intertwined, and that
one element is of particular importance: the nature of the demands raised
by the Mapuche movement. As has been widely acknowledged in social
movement scholarship, the types of issues promoted by social movements
affect their capacity to have a political impact.7 Kriesi etal.8 have argued
that we need to distinguish between high-profile and low-profile issues.
While high-profile issues put at stake the most important cleavage struc-
tures of a polity and the authorities conceptions of the role and inter-
ests of the state, low-profile issues concern less relevant (and more easily
attainable) topics.9
In this chapter, I show that the demands of the Mapuche movement
involve high-profile policy domains. The demands for the recognition
FROM COOPERATION TOCONFRONTATION: THEMAPUCHE MOVEMENT... 101
and evidence from secondary sources. The first section offers an overview
of the Mapuche population in Chile, the demands of the Mapuche move-
ment, and an outline of the main characteristics of the cooperative period.
In order to understand the switch from cooperation to confrontation, the
second section analyzes two specific episodes that can be considered trans-
formative events.14 The third section then sketches the main characteristics
of the Mapuche movement and its impacts during the conflictive period
that lasts until today.
apply for subsidies. Second, in cases of conflict over land titles, the Fund
resources could serve to mediate between the communities and the occu-
pants of the lands. As the law did not allow for expropriation, the solution
had to be reached through an economic arrangement with the non-
indigenous occupant. The law also created an Indigenous Development
Fund to foster the development of indigenous persons and communities
(Article 23).32 Finally, one of the most important points of the law was the
creation of CONADI, the institution in charge of developing policy rec-
ommendations to improve the living conditions of the countrys indige-
nous communities. In accordance with Mapuche demands, this institution
included indigenous representation (through elections). Nonetheless, the
government kept control over the institution by directly appointing 9 out
of the 16 members of its National Council. Many of the most influential
Mapuche leaders formed part of the new institution as indigenous coun-
cilors or as staff members.33
The Indigenous Law and the creation of CONADI are institutional
outcomes of the cooperative period that signaled significant changes from
the statusquo during the dictatorship. Nonetheless, the demands that I
previously defined as high-profile policy issues, that is, the constitutional
recognition of indigenous peoples and their political and territorial rights,
were not achieved. In terms of substantive policy outcomes, in turn, the
efforts of CONADI to restore indigenous lands were important changes
from the policies implemented during the dictatorship. However, as it
will be shown, they were considered insufficient or too slow by many
communities and organizations. Moreover, according to critical interpre-
tation, the Concertacin governments were not really committed to the
promotion of indigenous rights. These critical sectors progressively gained
importance inside the movement, especially when the limits of the new
institutional setting in affecting high-profile issues became evident. We
turn in the next section to this important change in the Mapuche move-
ment, which accounts for the beginning of what commonly is referred to
as the Mapuche conflict.
more critical stance toward what was referred to as insider tactics. The All
Lands Council,34 the most active organization of the cooperative period,35
for example, spearheaded several peaceful land takeovers in 1991 and
1992. Against a backdrop of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary
of Americas discovery, these actions still attained a considerable media
impact.36
Besides its confrontational tactics, two other important features dis-
tinguished the All Lands Council. First, it expanded the movements
demands, invoking self-determination and political autonomy rights to
their ancestral lands for the Mapuche people.37 Second, at the orga-
nizational level, the Council gave a major role to traditional Mapuche
authorities such as the lonkos (chiefs), and the werken (spokespersons).
From an autonomist stance, this option aimed both to reinvigorate the
Mapuche culture and to avoid the occidental organization model followed
by most Mapuche organizations (which elected a president, vice president,
treasurer, etc.).38
The Council was unable to challenge the dominant cooperative dynamic
of this period. However, as Adolfo Millabur, an important Mapuche leader
states, its autonomist discourse and practice facilitated young Mapuche
generations to develop an independent interpretation of reality, divorced
from that promoted by political parties; a very suspicious and skeptical
one.39 In this sense, it has been argued that the Council sowed the
autonomist ideology in the Mapuche movement.40
In any case, as we will see below, two specific events were crucial in
watering the seed and fostering the development of the autonomist strand
inside the movement, putting an end to the cooperative phase that char-
acterized the transitional years. These events can be considered transfor-
mative events, which have been defined in the literature as turning
points in structural change, concentrated moments of political and cul-
tural creativity when the logic of historical development is reconfigured by
human action but by no means abolished.41
This particular event pushed into the publics eye the conflictive situ-
ation between the Mapuche communities and the logging companies,
which have a strong presence in Mapuche territory. Since the beginning
of the dictatorship, the military regime actively fostered the development
of this industry in the south of Chile, a policy that was continued post-
democratization. As a result, there was an explosive growth of forestry
plantations.44 The poverty and lack of land of Mapuche communities con-
trasted with the development of this economic activity. Furthermore, the
forestry plantations caused serious environmental problems that directly
aggrieved the neighboring indigenous communities.45
Thus, the burning of the logging trucks took place in an already tense
context between some Mapuche communities and the logging companies
operating in their surroundings.46 These communities first followed the
institutional path, resorting to CONADI and regional political authorities
to present demands related to pieces of land reclaimed as ancestral prop-
erty but legally owned by logging companies.47 Many argue that insuffi-
cient response to their demands motivated a more radical course of action.
The land occupation led to confrontations with forestry private guards
and the police, which finally resulted in the burning of the trucks.48
A key organizational consequence of the process triggered by the
burning of the trucks was the creation of a new Mapuche organization
that quickly gained public relevance: the Coordinadora de Comunidades
en Conflicto Arauco-Malleco (Coordination of Arauco-Malleco
Communities in Conflict, CAM).49 After the Lumaco events, representa-
tives of Mapuche communities and organizations met to analyze the new
scenario. There was no agreement regarding the use of violent means to
protest. Ultimately, this disagreement motivated the creation of CAM,
an organization that embraced disruptive protest tactics.50 Besides, this
case exposed the difficulties faced by many poor communities in obtain-
ing a satisfactory response to their land demands through the mecha-
nisms of the Indigenous Law. After Lumaco, the movement increasingly
integrated disruptive protests into its repertoire of action, which in some
cases included the legitimization of political violence.
The second important conflict to be outlined is the Ralco conflict. This
case put the Mapuche movement in opposition to the Chilean govern-
ment and ENDESA Chile,51 which promoted the construction of a hydro-
electric plant on the Biobo River. According to the 1993 Indigenous
Law and the 1994 Environmental Law,52 the Ralco project had to be
approved by the National Environmental Corporation (CONAMA) and
FROM COOPERATION TOCONFRONTATION: THEMAPUCHE MOVEMENT... 109
governmental economic policies that could violate them. From the per-
spective of Mapuche activists, the executives intervention in CONADI
showed the Chilean states unwillingness to defend indigenous rights
when they clashed with powerful economic interests.61
The distrust toward the whole political system by the autonomous sec-
tors of the movement was reinforced, and the position within the move-
ment of the pro-Concertacin Mapuche leaders who had privileged a
cooperative strategy after transition was seriously affected.62
These two transformative events showed the limits of the cooperative
strategy for pursuing the Mapuche demands and deepened the divide
between the movement and the state. As a consequence, autonomist
expressions gained importance and progressively overshadowed the more
cooperative wing of the movement.
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Year
90
80
70 Mapuche population
Protest events
60
Percentage
50
40
30
20
10
0
Historical Metropolitan Rest of the
Mapuche Region country
Territory
Geographical location
stagnated, but it then increased again after 2007.81 However, from a more
general point of view, the budget for indigenous policies remained mar-
ginal. While the indigenous population represents 11 % of the Chilean
population,82 the indigenous budget never surpassed 0.4 % of the public
budget between 1994 and 2008.83
The Programa Orgenes has been the most ambitious plan created during
the period. This program was instituted by the government of Ricardo Lagos
and involved the economic collaboration of the Inter-American Development
Bank and the Chilean state, injecting large amounts of resources into social
and cultural programs between 2001 and 2012.84 The objective of the pro-
gram was to contribute to the holistic, community-led development of
peoples of Aymara, Atacameo and Mapuche identities in rural areas.85 The
Programa Orgenes implied the allocation of more resources but the mainte-
nance of the governmental focus toward indigenous policy: a culturally sensi-
tive approach aiming to overcome indigenous poverty without questioning
their lack of political recognition as indigenous peoples.86
Regarding land devolution, between 1990 and 2013, CONADI bought
and delivered 142,48487 hectares of land to the Mapuche communities
through the application of Article 20b of the Indigenous Law (which
deals with pieces of land where there is legal conflict between indigenous
and non-indigenous owners). The budget allocated to the Indigenous
Land and Water Fund (FTAI) has increased over the years. During the
19972002 cycle of protests, it experienced a significant boost. As a share
of the national budget, the FTAI budget passed from 0.06 % in 1997 to
0.12 % in 2002 (see Graph 4.3). Yet it has been insufficient to respond
116 G. BIDEGAIN
0.18
0.16
0.14
Percentage of total public budget
0.12
0.1
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0
1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013
Indigenous Land and Water
Fund budget
Graph 4.3 FTAI budget evolution as part of the public budget (19952014)
Source: Own elaboration using data of the Direccin Nacional de Presupuestos
procedures created in Chile have received severe criticisms for not meet-
ing international standards.97 Notwithstanding, the ratification of the ILO
Convention No. 169 is a major institutional step that provides the Chilean
indigenous people with important legal tools for fostering respect for their
rights. It is, however, too early to assess its long-term impact.
Conclusion
During the cooperative phase analyzed in this chapter, the Mapuche move-
ment relied on external resources to foster its demands, namely, an explicit
alliance with government actors. The Indigenous Law and the creation of
CONADI were important outcomes of this cooperation and represented
significant improvements to the situation experienced during the dictator-
ship. These institutions allowed the successive democratic governments to
meet low-profile demands such as the extension of indigenous education
coverage, the promotion of economic development plans in rural commu-
nities, and fostering policies of cultural recognition. Nonetheless, the new
institutional setting also defined the limits on political and territorial rec-
ognition. Moreover, as the Ralco dam case made clear, CONADI quickly
hit institutional limitations in protecting indigenous rights.
While significant, the results of the cooperative phase frustrated some
sectors of the movement that progressively gained importance, proposing
an autonomist discourse and privileging confrontational tactics to show
their discontent.
The autonomous turn limited the external resources of the movement
to form political alliances. The lack of external resources has forced the
movement to rely on its internal resources, but these resources are also
scarce, as has been shown in this chapter. The Mapuche protest has been
constant, disruptive, and intense, but has involved low numbers of pro-
testers who are concentrated in Mapuche territory. These characteristics,
in combination with the low media attention they usually get, have seri-
ously limited the capacity of the movement to achieve significant institu-
tional impact with their high-profile demands. However, it has proven
successful in affecting the allocation of resources inside the established
institutional setting. In fact, the governments reaction has combined
repression and investment in low-profile issues like cultural recognition,
education grants, social and economic development plans, and the return
of land through the Indigenous Land and Water Fund.
FROM COOPERATION TOCONFRONTATION: THEMAPUCHE MOVEMENT... 119
Notes
1. Ley 18314. Determina conductas terroristas y fija su penalidad.
2. Ley 19253. Establece normas sobre proteccin, fomento y desarrollo de
los indgenas, y crea la Corporacin Nacional de Desarrollo Indgena.
3. There is a wide range of autonomous positions inside the movement. See
Marimn, Autodeterminacin. Ideas Polticas Mapuche en el Albor del
Siglo XXI.
120 G. BIDEGAIN
24. Collective rights are defined by Sanders as the rights of groups that have
goals that transcend the ending of discrimination against their members
for their members are joined together not simply by external discrimina-
tion but by an internal cohesiveness. Sanders, Collective Rights, 369.
25. Kriesi etal., New Social Movements in Western Europe.
26. Aylwin et al., Entre El Desarrollo y el Buen Vivir. Recursos Naturales y
Conflictos en los Territorios Indgenas.
27. Toledo Llancaqueo, Pueblo Mapuche.
28. This commitment was not included in the Nueva Imperial agreement but
was part of the electoral promises of the Concertacin. See for instance
Concertacin de los Partidos por la Democracia, La Concertacin de
Los Partidos Por La Democracia a Los Pueblos Indgenas, 14.
29. Authors translation. The Nueva Imperial Agreement is available at:
http://www.politicaspublicas.net/panel/biblioteca/doc_view/21-acu-
erdo-de-nueva-imperial-1989.raw?tmpl=component [Accessed 30
January 2015].
30. Comisin Especial de Pueblos Indgenas, Congreso Nacional de Pueblos
Indgenas de Chile, 1213.
31. Aylwin, Los Conflictos en el Territorio Mapuche: Antecedentes y Per
spectivas; Aylwin, Materializaciones y conflictos.
32. In 1995, CONADI created the Culture and Education Fund to protect
and develop indigenous cultures.
33. Interview with Gonzalo Toledo Martel (20/11/2013).
34. Auki Wallmapu Ngulam in the Mapuche language or Consejo de Todas
las Tierras in Spanish.
35. Like many other organizations, the Council also resulted from the
breakup of Ad Mapu in the eighties. Nonetheless, it developed a very
critical discourse towards the Chilean political parties and their linkages
with the most important Mapuche organizations.
36. Additionally, some particular conflicts, like the land dispute of the
Quinqun communities or the protests sparked by the construction of
the Pangue hydroelectric plant, also disrupted the environment of general
cooperation and called media attention. See e.g. Bengoa, Historia de un
Conflicto; Haughney, Neoliberal Economics, Democratic Transition, and
Mapuche Demands for Rights in Chile.
37. Martnez Neira, Transicin a la Democracia, Militancia y Proyecto
tnico. La Fundacin de la Organizacin Mapuche Consejo de Todas las
Tierras (19781990); Marimn, Autodeterminacin. Ideas Polticas
Mapuche en el Albor del Siglo XXI.
38. Interview with Lautaro Loncn (13/12/2013).
39. Interview with Adolfo Millabur (20/11/2013).
40. Pairicn Padilla, Sembrando Ideologa.
41. McAdam and Sewell, Jr., Its About Time: Temporality in the Study of
Social Movements and Revolutions, 102.
122 G. BIDEGAIN
93. Comisin Verdad Histrica y Nuevo Trato con los Pueblos Indgenas,
Informe de La Comisin Verdad Histrica y Nuevo Trato con los Pueblos
Indgenas, 535.
94. Fortin and Pairicn, 20 Aos de Desencuentro. Las Demandas del
Movimiento Mapuche y una Posible Solucin al Conflicto.
95. Donoso, Documento de Trabajo No8. Convenio 169 de la OIT:
Implicancias de una Ratificacin.
96. Interview with Domingo Namuncura (03/12/2013).
97. See e.g. http://mapuexpress.org/2015/02/05/los-vicios-de-la-consulta-
en-chile-y-el-incumplimiento-del-estandar-de-derechos#sthash.jVLzV0Yx.
dpbs [Accessed 19 February 2015].
98. The courts have not yet been able to find who was responsible for the
shot, and the Mapuche argue that he was killed by friendly fire.
99. A machi (Mapuche religious authority) has been found guilty of the crime.
100. Centro de Estudios Pblicos, Estudio Nacional de Opinin Pblica
No63. Noviembre-Diciembre 2010.
101. Interview with Eugenio Tuma (20/08/2014).
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CHAPTER 5
ColombinaSchaeffer
Introduction
In May 2011, people took to the streets to protest against the approval
of HidroAysn, a mega-dam complex proposed in the Region of Aysn,1
Chilean Patagonia. Observers and the media alike were quick to note that
such a citizen movement had not taken place since the mobilizations in
the 1980s against General Augusto Pinochets dictatorship (19731989).2
It was just the beginning. A few weeks later, secondary and tertiary stu-
dents (and then their teachers and parents) organized strikes and protests
against the neoliberal education system, with five major demonstrations
taking place in only three months.3
Mobilizations against HidroAysn started on the day of the projects
approval by the regional environmental commission in Coyhaique (Aysn,
Southern Chile) on 9 May 2011. Later that day, people also took to the
streets in cities all over the country: Iquique, La Serena, Valparaso, Santiago,
Rancagua, Talca, Concepcin, Valdivia, and Temuco. In Santiago, a rally
was organized on May 9. There were also three massive demonstrations
C. Schaeffer (*)
Callao 3417, dpto 51, Santiago, Chile
(on May 13, 20, and 28) and a cultural act on May 21. Each of these dem-
onstrations had parallel rallies in other cities. There were also rallies abroad,
for instance, in Madrid, Hamburg, Paris, Rome, Melbourne, and Sydney.4
The campaign against HidroAysn, the project to build five dams in
Chilean Patagonia, became the largest environmental campaign in Chilean
history. In 2014, Patagonia Sin Represas (Patagonia Without Dams,
henceforth PWD) gathered more than 80 local, national, and interna-
tional organizations and fostered a public debate on the proposed dams as
well as on other issues such as regionalization, electricity markets, citizen
participation, and a constitutional reform. The PWD achieved its climax in
May 2011. Then, in 2014, in a decision that was qualified as historical and
a crucial victory for the environmental movement, HidroAysn was finally
rejected by the Comit de Ministros (Committee of Ministers),5 which
makes the final decision regarding the environmental licenses of projects.6
The events that unfolded after 2011 opened up a series of questions:
How could an environmental issue and, more specifically, an environmen-
tal campaign against the construction of dams in Aysn gain so much
traction and become the starting point of broader and massive demonstra-
tions? What are the main features of the PWD, and in which ways did they
facilitate the impact of the campaign? What does the PWD tell us about
the Chilean environmental movement?
In this chapter, I focus on the PWD as an entry point to furthering our
understanding of the Chilean environmental movement. There is a dearth
of scholarly attention to the recent history of Chilean environmental-
ism. Apart from publications by environmental NGOs,7 interviews,8 and
El Factor Ecolgico (The Ecological Factor), a book by Carlos Aldunate9
published in the early 2000s, there are few exhaustive accounts of this
movement. In the case of the PWD, there are a handful of scholarly publi-
cations.10 However, these studies have focused mainly on the controversy
over HidroAysn, and not specifically on the PWD and the Chilean envi-
ronmental movement. The analysis presented in this chapter advances our
knowledge of Chile in particular, as well as of environmental politics and
movements in general by delving deeper into the dynamics of movements.
I rely on the distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic assemblages
to further unpack these dynamics. The Chilean case shows how they are
crucial to understanding the history, evolution, challenges, victories, and
losses of not only the environmental movement, but also movements in
general.
DEMOCRATIZING THEFLOWS OFDEMOCRACY... 133
Various metaphors have been used to grasp the elusive nature of move-
ments. According to Mario Diani:
Rhizomes are a type of root system that does not send up just one sprout or
stalk; rather, they spread underground and emerge in a variety of locations.
Rhizomes connect in a way that is not visiblethey cross borders and reap-
pear in distant places without necessarily showing themselves in between.19
there is no insistence on one singular point of view, one point that will solve
all problems, or one tactic to be used in all battles. There is no one environ-
mental justice, minority, or grassroots view of the environment.22
Fig. 5.1 Map showing the Aysn Region and the Baker (two proposed dams)
and Pascua River (three proposed dams). Source: Google Maps, adapted by author
The construction of these five dams would have flooded 5900 hectares;
the dam complex having an installed capacity of 2750 megawatts. The energy
produced was not intended for local consumption. A 2000-kilometre power
line had to be built to bring the electricity from Aysn to Santiago, and
DEMOCRATIZING THEFLOWS OFDEMOCRACY... 141
to the northern regions of the country, where various mining projects are
located.49 The exact route of the power line was unknown, and it was not
confirmed whether some sections would have been submerged.
Information andOrganization
The creation of HidroAysn in 2006 triggered a process of information
gathering and organization in Aysn. With the aim of socializing infor-
mation among local organizations and the wider public about the stakes
involved in HidroAysn, a group of organizations located in Aysn held a
series of workshops.50 The result was the creation, in January 2006, of a
coalition of organizations, the Coalicin Ciudadana Aysn Reserva de Vida
(Citizen Coalition Aysn Life Reserve, henceforth, the Coalition) and the
issuing of a public statement with a critical position on the p rospect of
building dams in the region.
Shortly, other organizations joined the Coalition, such as a local orga-
nization based in Cochrane, called the Defenders of the Spirit of Patagonia
and the National Outdoor Leadership School Patagonia, and, from Puerto
Tranquilo, the Chamber of Commerce and Tourism. New organizations,
dedicated to the defense of the territory, were also created. These new and
old organizations joined networks of organizations such as the Coalition,
created their own networks, or participated in the opposition to the build-
ing of dams independently.
Reaching Out
Groups opposing the dams also established alliances with organizations
outside Aysn, particularly with organizations based in Santiago and
abroad. There were previous experiences of activists from Aysn working
with some of the main environmental organizations in Chile (for instance,
in the case of the campaign against Alumysa, an aluminum plant pro-
posed near Puerto Aysn). One of these organizations was Ecosistemas.
Its director, Juan Pablo Orrego, was also an emblematic figure in the cam-
paign against the Pangue and Ralco dams in the late 1980s and 1990s.
142 C. SCHAEFFER
Crystallization
The process of organizing and building of networks crystallized in 2007.
That year, and as a way to generate synergies between organizations and
individuals critical to the construction of dams in Patagonia, the Consejo
de Defensa de la Patagonia (Council for Defense of Patagonia, henceforth
CDP) was established by local and regional activists, well-known activ-
ists, and environmental organizations. The CDP brought together local,
national, and international organizations in a loose network of organiza-
tions. It is the main organizational structure behind the PWD campaign.
Since 2007, more than 80 organizations have joined the CDP. The
founding document of the CDP states that it is not a new institution, but
an inter-institutional agreement to further common objectives defined as
the protection of Chilean Patagonia.51 The CDP is a non-legal entity
with material resources of its own; it acts through the corporations, foun-
dations, community organizations, and individuals that belong to it.52 To
work in the CDPs Executive Secretariat or General Assembly is under-
stood as voluntary work. This means that it is a role an activist takes while
working at an environmental organization (or another kind of job) as a
full-time professional (thus, the salary is paid by the organization).
For instance, organizations such as Greenpeace Chile participated
with cyber actions or by organizing media-oriented protest events at
HidroAysns buildings. Chile Sustentable (Sustainable Chile), on the
other hand, has always worked on energy and water policies, closely work-
ing with parliamentarians and the president to provide alternative techni-
cal expertise. In general, this kind of work is described as the way in which
each organization contributes to the PWD.
The CDP has been one of the main networks of organizations behind the
PWD campaign. However, as time passed and dams in Patagonia became an
issue of widespread concern, the PWD turned to something more than a cam-
paign restricted to environmental organizations, as the next section will show.
The Actors
Actors participating in the PWD range from environmental organizations,
through organizations concerned with local development, culture, work,
and even religion, to political authorities and philanthropists like Douglas
and Kris Tompkins. These actors are also located at different scales and
work at different levels of action. The PWD can thus be understood as
multi-scalar, operating locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. It has
employed jumping scale processes,53 as well as the combination of
DEMOCRATIZING THEFLOWS OFDEMOCRACY... 143
Environmental Organizations
As noted above, the process of organizing and building networks crystal-
lized in 2007, when the CDP was founded by local and regional activ-
ists, well-known activists (e.g. Sara Larran, Juan Pablo Orrego, Hernn
Sandoval), and national and international environmental organizations.55
In Chile, environmental organizations are usually located in Santiago.
They are considered national because of their scope; they are interested
in environmental issues at the national level and work on diverse issues
such as water, biodiversity, forests, pollution, citizen participation, fishing,
mining, and so forth, particularly through analyzing and advising in mat-
ters of public policy and monitoring the legislative process.
In Aysn, that is, at the regional level, there are organizations that
can be classified as environmental. However, they usually do not consider
themselves or present themselves as such. They address a broad set of
issues (local development, decentralization, promotion of arts and culture,
etc.) that activists understand in terms of civil society or social issues. They
do not see themselves as environmentalists, although environmental
issues can be predominant in their actions.
Finally, there are organizations at the local level, but they work dif-
ferently. These organizations lack the permanent funding necessary to
constitute a more formal organization like the national environmental
organizations (with permanent, full-time paid staff, an office, etc.). They
rely on small grants from the national, regional, or local government,
foundations, and the work of volunteers.
144 C. SCHAEFFER
Religious Organizations
An actor that gradually became involved in the PWD is the bishopric of
Aysn. Bishop Infanti56 has had an active role in the PWD and in the
struggle for the recovery of water in Chile, so that water stops being a
private good. The bishop has written high-profile ecclesiastical documents
and letters,57 organized seminars and activities and has served as a spokes-
person for the PWD at the national and international levels.
Political Authorities
An example of a political authority involved in the PWD is Senator Antonio
Horvath.58 In 2011, in the midst of protests against HidroAysn, he was
an important supporter of the PWD.
There are other political authorities that have joined the PWD, par-
ticularly since 2011 and during Congress review of certain bills proposed
by the executive. These bills (e.g. the Ley de Carretera Elctrica or Public
Electricity Highway Bill), according to the PWD, would facilitate the
building of the dam complex and would give more power to electricity
corporations. Representatives close to the PWD have stopped some of
these bills.
During the general elections in 2013, the CDP established the initiative
Vota Sin Represas (Vote Without Dams).59 Candidates could sign a decla-
ration that stated their commitment toward the protection of Patagonia
from large-scale projects of the kind proposed by HydroAysn. From
the nine presidential candidates, seven signed the commitment (Marcel
Claude, Marco Enrquez-Ominami, Ricardo Israel, Toms Jocelyn-Holt,
Roxana Miranda, Franco Parisi, and Alfredo Sfeir).60 Michelle Bachelet
and Evelyn Matthei did not sign the commitment. They were the can-
didates of the two largest party-coalitions in the country: the center-left
Nueva Mayora (New Majority), a new pact of parties that belonged to the
Concertacin (Agreement, Pact), and the center-right Alianza (Alliance).
However, before the runoff election between them, and to receive the sup-
port of Alfredo Sfeir (who run for the Ecologist-Green Party), Bachelet
publicly stated that she would not proceed with HidroAysn if elected.61
International Donors
A key actor has been the Pumaln Foundation. It is a Chilean-based foun-
dation established through an international trust based in the United
States.62 Douglas Tompkins and Kris Tompkins created the foundation.
DEMOCRATIZING THEFLOWS OFDEMOCRACY... 145
[To have the backing of] the same Douglas [Tompkins] or Sara Larran
is important, because they are trustworthy people, it makes a difference,
because they dont only support this [the campaign and movement] with
resources. However, beyond all the money, the main wealth of the cam-
paign, and this you could actually value in economic terms, is all the vol-
untary work. Or, how much do you think it costs us what Residente66 did?
Nothing!67
Regarding energy politics, for the first time since the dictatorship the
private model of electricity generation was questioned and challenged by a
broad range of actors that included academics, citizens, activists, and poli-
ticians from the opposition and the governing coalition. A couple of days
before the approval of HidroAysn, then President Piera (20102014)
announced the establishment of a government commission69 to analyze
the electricity sector and to set the basis for a new electricity framework for
Chile.70 After the approval of HidroAysn, organizations and parliamen-
tarians participating in the PWD announced the establishment of a parallel
citizen-parliamentarian commission,71 arguing that the government com-
mission was comprised of those representing the interests of the electricity
sector.72 These two reports73 were delivered to the president in a public
ceremony and widely discussed in various forums and public events, allow-
ing for a broader debate regarding electricity to take place.
According to Juan Pablo Orrego, to understand these developments
one must first understand Ralco:
Sara Larran makes a similar analysis.75 She explains that Aylwins admin-
istration promoted and passed key legislation regarding the environment;
laws were based on the preventive principle and what has been referred
to as a model of coordination.76 The environment was understood as a
transversal dimension of development, and thus it could not be reduced to
one, sectorial authority. However, in practice, the model was transformed
into one that subordinated environmental concerns and authorities to the
ministries of production (Agriculture, Economy, Energy, Finance, Mining,
etc.). This was not evident, however, until Freis administration. In 1996,
Frei issued a document, which was sent to all public services. It stated that
DEMOCRATIZING THEFLOWS OFDEMOCRACY... 149
Conclusion
Environmental discourses and practices have changed over time in Chile.
The case of the PWD is relevant, as it shows some of the key learning
experiences of the Chilean environmental movement. These organizations
have learned to work together (organizational learning), what to expect
from the state, and how to relate to it (political learning). In the case
of the PWD, environmental organizations converged around a common
cause (to stop the dams in Patagonia) in the largest environmental cam-
paign in Chilean history.
During the dictatorship, environmentalism flourished in Chile. It was
one more force that opposed the military regime. However, once democ-
racy was reestablished and the former opposition was in power, the main
tenets of the Chilean model of development were not changed, particularly
regarding natural resources and environmental politics. Furthermore, and
in line with international trends, the environment became an institutional-
ized space, with technocrats and experts in charge of administering it.
There is a prevalent tension between rhizomatic and arborescent pro-
pensities when looking at past and present environmental conflicts and
campaigns in Chile. Resolving this tension has entailed finding a balance
150 C. SCHAEFFER
Notes
1. Regions are Chiles first-level administrative division.
2. Kuzmicic (personal communication); La Tercera, Con incidentes and
Enfrentamientos entre manifestantes y carabineros en varias regiones tras
aprobacin de proyecto HidroAysn; Fernndez, Interview and La Calle
Me Distrajo.
3. See Donoso in this volume.
4. See the following for various media reports on these mobilizations: Flores,
Protestas; El Mostrador, Treinta mil personas; Jofr and Yaikin,
Carabineros dispersa a manifestantes; La Tercera, Con incidentes termina
masiva manifestacin en contra de HidroAysn and Enfrentamientos;
Labrn et al., Tercera marcha; Meganoticias, Manifestantes contra
HidroAysn; Radio Cooperativa, Manifestaciones contra HidroAysn
DEMOCRATIZING THEFLOWS OFDEMOCRACY... 151
49. Segura, HydroAysen and Energia Austral; Romero Toledo etal., Agua,
Poder y Discursos.
50. Segura and Bourlon, Represas en Aysn.
51. Consejo de Defensa de la Patagonia Chilena, Consejo de Defensa de la
Patagonia Chilena, authors translation.
52. Ibid., authors translation.
53. Urkidi and Walter, Dimensions of Environmental Justice.
54. Escobar, Territories of Difference, Chap. 6.
55. National organizations include, among others, Chile Sustentable,
CODEFF, Fiscala del Medio Ambiente, Greenpeace Chile, Terram, and
Oceana. International organizations include, among others, the Association
for the Study of America Latina (Italy), Vaino Auer Foundation (Argentina),
International Rivers (USA), and the Natural Resources Defense Council
(USA). The complete list of organizations can be found at the PWDs
website.
56. Luis Infanti, interview with author, 10 February 2013.
57. Infanti, Danos hoy el agua de cada da.
58. Antonio Horvath, interview with author, 2 January 2013.
59. Consejo de Defensa de la Patagonia Chilena, Vota Sin Represas.
60. Ecosistemas, Vota sin Represas Cierra Campaa.
61. Rivas, Alfredo Sfeir oficializa apoyo; El Diario Financiero, Hidroaysn
se toma el debate; Consejo de Defensa de la Patagonia Chilena, Vota Sin
Represas.
62. The Conservation Land Trust.
63. The distinction between NYC and VyQ is important here. NYC means
nacido y criado (born and raised) and VyQ venidos y quedados (the ones
who came and stayed).
64. See note 63.
65. Jones, Ecophilanthropy.; McAllister, Pumas with Cameras.
66. Residente is Calle 13s leader and singer, a celebrity who publicly opposed
the building of dams in Patagonia.
67. Patricio Segura, interview with author, 2 May 2013. Authors translation.
68. See the following surveys: Diego Portales University & Feedback,
Encuesta Jvenes y Participacin; Ipsos, Estudio de Opinin Pblica:
Octubre 2009 and Estudio de Opinin Pblica: Abril 2011; La Tercera
Surveys Centre, 74 % rechaza HidroAysn.
69. Comisin Asesora para el Desarrollo Elctrico (CADE) (Government
Commission for Electric Development).
70. Iriarte, Gobierno crea comisin asesora.
71. Comisin Ciudadana-Tcnico-Parlamentaria (CCTP) (Citizen-Technical-
Parliamentarian Commission).
154 C. SCHAEFFER
References
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158 C. SCHAEFFER
NicoleForstenzer
Introduction
During 2015, the Chilean Congress undertook a heated debate on the
legalization of abortion in specific situations (danger for the mothers life,
severe fetal malformations or pregnancy as a result of rape), thus shining
the spotlight on President Michelle Bachelets ability to deliver on one
of her many campaign pledges. Womens rights and, perhaps more tell-
ingly, womens reproductive and sexual rights, have reached center stage
in the political debate. This could potentially put an end to a long period
of stalemate on fundamental issues for womens agency. An era during
which feminist voices were muffled and gender policies turned a blind eye
to often life-threatening situations of illegal abortions and lack of effective
access to birth control seems to have been partially overcome.
Indeed, since Chiles transition to democracy in 1990, the femi-
nist movement went from being a vibrant and plural social movement
committed to bringing Pinochets military dictatorship down alongside
other social movements (trade unions, university and secondary-student
N. Forstenzer (*)
UMR Dveloppement & Socits, Paris, France
illustrate how the political context and power relations within the feminist
movement have interacted and led to divergent policy outcomes. Lastly,
I contend that the last decade has gradually spurred a re-politicization of
gender and therefore a new role for feminist voices in the public debate,
alongside the overall protest dynamics initiated by other social movements
(see the analysis by Somma and Medel in this volume).
The analysis in this chapter is based on fieldwork carried out between
2004 and 2009in Valparaiso, Chile. The approach chosen for this research
follows the general premise of this volume, namely, the need to go beyond
the traditional divide in social sciences between public policy studies and
social movement theory. This involves incorporating a longitudinal and
cross-sectional perspective to analyze the complex interplay of collective
action and gender public policies.
The choice of the research site, Valparaiso, proved fruitful: Valparaiso
is a port which left the height of its glory behind when the Panama Canal
opened at the beginning of the twentieth century and is now one of
Chiles poorest cities. Nonetheless, it is an energetic political and cultural
landscape, namely because of its significant student population, with many
small grassroots organizations, such as artists squats or work cooperatives,
alternative media outlets or more traditional student unions or environ-
mental and right-to-the-city groups. With approximately 275,000 inhab-
itants, Valparaiso is also the third largest city in Chile. It is located only
120km from Santiago and is home to the Chilean Congress, which ties the
city into the closer loop of political debates and policymaking. Regarding
the feminist movement, there is a small but nonetheless significant num-
ber of feminist and womens groups in Valparaiso and its province, which
are mostly grassroots organizations. The Casa de la Mujer de Valparaso
(Womens House of Valparaiso) as well as the Foro Red de Derechos
Sexuales y Reproductivos (Forum Network for Sexual and Reproductive
Rights) played a crucial role in the 1990s bringing organizations together
and welcoming new activists. The Casa de la Mujer de Valparaso was shut
down at the beginning of the 2000s due to lack of funding, whereas the
Foro Red fell prey to a series of internal conflicts which impelled many
member organizations and activists to leave it. The Colectiva Feminista
Las Sueltas was created in 2005 as a result of these events by five feminists
who had previously been Foro Red participants but no longer felt that was
the space for their activism. As a member of the Colectiva, I worked along-
side other local feminist groups (Colectivo Belm de Srraga, Catlicas por
el Derecho a Decidir) and participated in network organizations such as the
164 N. FORSTENZER
will explain hereafter, after the return to democracy the womens move-
ment disappeared and the feminist movement shattered into a myriad
of different organizations. Feminists in Chile do not consider that these
organizations put together actually constitute a movement anymore, not
since the 1990s.
Since its second wave, the feminist movement has developed in a similar
way at the global level, namely as a reaction to the United Nations action
in favor of womens rights and gender equality. Indeed, the Decade for
Women (19761985) and the UN Conference for Women in Mexico in
1975 were the starting point for a series of major international confer-
ences which reached a climax at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing. As I argue in this chapter, Fougeyrollas-Schewebels
conclusion can easily be applied to Latin American and Chilean feminism:
() international pressure has furthered the cause of womens rights but
has led to less radical feminist movements. They are henceforth meant to
behave as non-profit organizations working on womens behalf. ().13
The characterization of the current period as the Chilean post-
dictatorship rather than the Chilean post-transition is a key compo-
nent of the theoretical framework developed in this research. As Joignant14
points out, the transition narrative is aimed toward the present and the
future, conveniently turning its back on Chiles murkier past. At mid-
term, the first democratically elected President Patricio Aylwin stated
that the transition had ended and that Chile had successfully renewed its
longstanding republican and democratic tradition. This was only the first
of a long series of political operations which sought to define the transi-
tion as the very short period between the end of the military regime and
the beginning of the first democratically elected governments term even
though the democratic recovery was painstakingly slow and frequently
called into question by the military or Pinochet himself.15 Despite these
attempts, the Chilean transition has constantly resurfaced in political
debates and social protest, especially at the time of Pinochets arrest in
London.16 The narrative of post-transition Chile now bent on consolidat-
ing democracy, modernizing the state, and public governance also carries
the implication that the past is past and canand shouldbe put to rest.
However, this narrative is ceaselessly contradicted by social demands for
truth and justice (Verdad y Justicia) on human rights violations and the
location of disappeared peoples remains, the obstinate memory17 of a
past that simply will not be allowed to pass quietly into history.18
FEMINISM ANDGENDER POLICIES INPOST-DICTATORSHIP CHILE (19902010) 167
These issues have been thrust onto the political agenda and are far-
reaching: as a candidate in the 2013 Presidential elections, Bachelet
pledged to do away with the 1980 Constitution, to make education
public and free (see Donosos chapter in this volume), and to continue
reforming pensions and the social welfare system. Indeed, as pointed out
in the introduction, the 1980 Constitution included a series of lock-in
provisions that made it nearly impossible to make radical changes. These
marked authoritarian constraints on the newly reinstated democracy have
led many analysts and observers to characterize the Chilean regime of the
1990s as a protected,19 limited20 regime, or as a democracy under
guardianship.21
Thus, some scholars challenge the prevailing label of post-transition
used by many.22 In this sense, I have chosen to refer to this period as the
post-dictatorship: the teleological implications of the transition narra-
tive contribute to concealing the crucial role the dictatorship has played in
the current political contexts genesis.
Importantly, feminists are currently divided around this main challenge
of how to deal with the post-dictatorial political landscape. These divi-
sions are based on political beliefs and loyalties (reformists vs. radicals)
as well as the individual belonging to different generations of activism.
The Concertacins gender policies have relied heavily on professionalized
feminists who have chosen to tone down some of their own demands and
have in turn requested thismore or less explicitlyof other feminists as
a precondition for any unity or action as a movement.
As I show in the following pages, the institutional provisions estab-
lished by the dictatorship as well as the right-leaning center of gravity in
Chilean politics have made some crucial feminist claims, such as the right
to autonomous decision-making and physical integrity or womens social
and economic rights, impossible to address in the framework of public
policy.
many female UP militants had to flee their country and came into contact
with European and North-American second-wave feminism while in exile.
Others were forced to take their political activity underground and cau-
tiously endeavored to organize the resistance to the brutal new regime.
Women were at the forefront of the resistance, as the military tended to
perceive them as less political. As Franceschet23 has argued, in Chile gen-
dered citizenship patterns are based on masculine versus feminine spheres
for public participation. Political crises in Chile have involved a blurring
of the distinction between political and social activism, allowing women
to step out of their traditionally assigned social roles and into more tra-
ditionally masculine politics while asserting that they are bringing in
something different. Baldez24 stresses the key condition of political
party realignment for women to mobilize as women in Chilean politics,
portraying themselves as outsiders beyond party divides. The extreme
political situation of the 1980s therefore carved out a space for women to
organize as women, claiming to be above and beyond partisan politics and
in favor of fundamental principles such as life or concern for loved ones.
During the 1980s, women organized in three main fields.25 They orga-
nized as mothers, wives, daughters, or sisters of disappeared victims of
the dictatorships repression. Second, women from Chiles shantytowns
bearing the brunt of the economic crisis also created new organiza-
tions and led mobilization efforts. Lastly, specifically feminist organiza-
tions were created. In all of these different settings, women organized
politically as women, staging new and often ambiguous forms of militant
motherhood.26 Women seized this characterization and stepped out of
the traditional frame, in an exercise in gender-bending, politicizing and
subverting the motherhood frame and stretching it to include fundamen-
tally political claims.27
The womens and feminist organizations created during the 1980s were
diverse. They included Indian womens organizations, women workers,
pobladoras (such as MOMUPO, Movimiento de Mujeres Pobaldoras), and so
on.28 Some were avowedly feminist whereas others were wary of the feminist
label because it has been construed as an expression of educated, middle-
class or even bourgeois women (as was often the case in Chilean first-wave
feminismcf. Maza Valenzuela)29 despite working-class womens involve-
ment in feminist and womens organizations during the Popular Fronts.30
They chose to identify as women or as a specific brand of feminists: pobla-
doras feministas, for instance. Without a doubt, this issue is closely linked to
the intersection of social class and gender in Chilean history.
FEMINISM ANDGENDER POLICIES INPOST-DICTATORSHIP CHILE (19902010) 169
power, he had the Health Code amended and criminalized all attempts to
terminate a pregnancy or aiding or abetting a woman to do so, in all cir-
cumstances. These issues were alsoand more cruciallydivisive for the
coalition in power between 1990 and 2010, since the Christian Democrats
tended to side with the right rather than with their coalition allies when
pressed on this turf. For a long time, abortion was a political taboo, men-
tioned by no candidate for fear of losing the election over anti-family and
non-Christian positions. Of course, Chilean women have continued to have
abortions, in often life-threatening situations: rich women travel abroad or
have an abortion performed in expensive upper-class Santiago private clin-
ics whereas poor women use risky and unsafe methods without medical
care (parsley, knitting sticks, and clandestine abortion doctors). The use of
misoprostol as a means to self-administer a drug-based abortion has made
abortions somewhat safer if the women have access to adequate informa-
tion and purchase the genuine chemical compound, but has also led to a
new black market and to a decrease in abortion-related mortality, meaning
unsafe abortions are construed as less of a public health issue.70
At the turn of the millennium, the battleground therefore shifted
toward birth control and the morning after pill. Right-wing parties,
the major faith organizations and extremist Catholic sects (Opus Dei,
Schoenstatt, Legionarios de Cristo), also in control of major media out-
lets and Chilean big businesses, have waged a long legal battle against
this drug (for a full recount, cf. Casas Becerra71). They were able to
prevent its market availability for almost 20 years, arguing before courts
that it has an abortive effect. When they lost this battle and Bachelet
decided to make the morning after pill available in public health centers
because despite the fact that it was legal to carry the drug hardly any
pharmacies didthe right-wing took the issue before the Constitutional
Tribunal (2008). At a time when Chilean society was expressing a col-
lective refusal of social injustice and impunity vis--vis the dictatorships
unpunished human rights violations,72 the opinion bristled, stressing
that the Constitutional Tribunal was a dictatorship-era legacy with no
right to creep into peoples beds and do away with 60 years of fam-
ily planning policies (the request had to do with the hormone levo-
norgestrel, which is also found in regular hormonal birth control, i.e.
pills and hormonal intrauterine devices, IUDs). The Constitutional
Tribunal nonetheless ruled against the morning after pills distribution
in Minister-run health centers, once again jeopardizing womens access
to effective birth control. Nonetheless, the issue of abortion surfaced in
the political debate and through this last struggle came to be reframed
182 N. FORSTENZER
Conclusion
The feminist movement has undergone a radical transformation in post-
dictatorship Chile, going from the height of the second wave, hand in hand
with a powerful womens movement, to a fragmented and diminished land-
scape of activists and organizations lacking voice and presence in the public
space. The divisions brought about by double militancy and the transitions
political orientation, combined with the institutionalization of gender pub-
lic policies, deepened the fault line between institutional and autono-
mous feminists. The third category of social mobilization feminists, which
I have contributed to analyze and highlight, are key players in keeping femi-
nist politics alive. Beyond a merely strategic or tactical disagreement, the
autonomy versus institutionalization discussion shapes and frames feminist
philosophical and political approaches to fundamental issues such as the
gendered division of labor or sexual and reproductive rights.
However, this should not lead to overlooking the remaining femi-
nists and their intense and passionate efforts to change gender relations
in Chilean society, whether through public policy and a reform agenda,
theoretical productions or social awareness-raising and political activism.
FEMINISM ANDGENDER POLICIES INPOST-DICTATORSHIP CHILE (19902010) 183
Notes
1. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Pour une Cartographie de la Politique
Contestataire.
2. Women and Politics in Chile.
3. Pratiques et Stratgies Pour un Meilleur Accs des Femmes la Cit:
Considrations partir du Cas Chilien.
4. Un Nuevo Silencio Feminista? La Transformacin de un Movimiento Social
en el Chile Postdictadura.
5. Bisilliat, Le Genre: Une Ncessit Historique Face des Contextes
Aportiques.
6. Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society.
7. Mathieu, LAnatomie Politique, Catgorisations et Idologies du Sexe.
8. Guillaumin, Sexe, Race et Pratique du Pouvoir. Lide de Nature.
9. Kergoat, Division Sexuelle du Travail et Rapports Sociaux de Sexe, 3940.
10. Fougeyrollas-Schwebel, Mouvements Fministes.
11. Ibid., 139.
12. Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises.
13. Fougeyrollas-Schwebel, Mouvements Fministes, 143.
14. Joignant, La Politique des Transitologues: Luttes Politiques, Enjeux
Thoriques et Disputes Intellectuelles au cours de la Transition Chilienne
la Dmocratie.
15. Gl. Pinochet was Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean armed forces until
1998 and then was a lifelong Senator (Senador vitalicio, a position given to
all former Presidents).
184 N. FORSTENZER
37. Franceschet, Women and Politics in Chile; Kirkwood, Ser Poltica en Chile;
Las Feministas y los Partidos.
38. Caas, Le Mouvement Fministe et les Institutions Internationales.
39. Destremau, Les Droits Sociaux Lpreuve Des Droits Humains: Les
Limites de la Solidarit Internationale.
40. Marques-Pereira, Le Savoir du Genre au Chili: Une Connaissance
Vocation Politique et Pragmatique Dans un Contexte de Dmocratisation.
41. Marques-Pereira, Le Chili: Les Femmes et la Gauche. Une Relation
Amicale?
42. Ros Tobar, Godoy, and Guerrero Caviedes, Un Nuevo Silencio Feminista?
La Transformacin de un Movimiento Social en el Chile Postdictadura.
43. Woodward, Building Velvet Triangles: Gender and Informal Governance.
44. Pobladoras, Indgenas and the State. Conflicts over Womens Rights in Chile.
45. Gender and Social Movement Decline Shantytown Women and the
Prodemocracy Movement in Pinochets Chile.
46. Recasting Popular Movements; Market Citizenship and the New
Democracies.
47. Forstenzer, Reprsenter les Intrts des Femmes dans le Chili de la Post-
Dictature: Enjeux et Conflits.
48. Ibid.
49. Margarita Pisano (19322015) is a major Chilean feminist theoretician.
She is the author of Un Cierto Desparpajo, among many other books and
papers.
50. Pisano, Un Cierto Desparpajo; Gaviola, Bedregal, and Rojas, Feminismos
Cmplices, Ms Gestos Para Una Construccin Radicalmente
Antiamnsica.
51. Gaviola, Bedregal, and Rojas, Feminismos Cmplices, Ms Gestos Para
Una Construccin Radicalmente Antiamnsica.
52. Forstenzer, Reprsenter Les Intrts des Femmes dans le Chili de la Post-
Dictature: Enjeux et Conflits.
53. Le Mouvement Fministe et les Institutions Internationales.
54. El Estado del Movimiento y el Movimiento en el Estado.
55. Araujo, Transnationalisation et Politiques Publiques; Les Processus
Dinstitutionnalisation Des Agendas Fministes.
56. Marques-Pereira, Laccs Des Femmes Lespace Public: Du Local au
National, de Linternational au Transnational; Lexcercice de La
Responsabilit Publique et les Rapports de Genre En Amrique Latine;
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Baldez, Lisa. 2002. Why Women Protest: Womens Movements in Chile. NewYork:
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Bisilliat, Jeanne. 2003. Le Genre: Une Ncessit Historique Face des Contextes
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Blofield, Merike H., and Liesl Haas. 2005. Defining a Democracy: Reforming the
Laws on Womens Rights in Chile, 19902002. Latin American Politics and
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Borgeaud-Garcianda, Natacha, Bruno Lautier, Ricardo Peafiel, and Ania Tizziani
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Caas, Mercedes. 2003. Le Mouvement Fministe et les Institutions
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Casas Becerra, Lidia. 2008. La Saga de la Anticoncepcin de Emergencia en Chile:
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CHAPTER 7
FranciscaGutirrezCrocco
Introduction
There is a broad consensus among scholars that neoliberal policies have
weakened Chiles labor movement during the last three decades. Imposed
in the late 1970s by the military regime and deepened after the restoration
of democracy in 1990, the Chilean model of development has restrained
the scope of action of organized labor by limiting its rights, privatizing pub-
lic companies, and promoting flexibility in the labor market.1 Disoriented
by the scope of these changes, the labor movement has undergone a deep
fragmentation, and has lost support among workers. In fact, less than a
third of firm-level trade unions currently adhere to a peak union,2 which
makes the coordination of workers around common goals very difficult.
Likewise, the percentage of organized workers has visibly decreased since
the Labor Plan sought to broaden employer control over the produc-
tive process, reducing workers protection. In particular, trade unions
prerogatives were strongly limited.21 In fact, the Labor Plan reduced the
possibilities of collective bargaining, restricting it to the firm-level and lim-
iting the issues subject to negotiation to wage readjustment. At the same
time, workers were allowed to negotiate with the employer without the
intervention of a trade union, through the constitution of negotiation
groups. The LaborPlan also gave employers the right to replace striking
workers and to fire union members without a justified cause. In contrast to
the prior legal framework, in which all the workers of a firm automatically
became members of the union if 55 % of the workers approved its creation,
the new legislation established voluntary union membership. Finally, it
also facilitated the creation of parallel unions within the same firm, mak-
ing 25 workers sufficient to form a union. Through these measures, the
new labor legislation had the explicit aim of depoliticizing trade unions.22
the number of courts and judges, among other measures.37 In 2005, the
reform was finally approved and gradually began to be implemented.
Strengthening the power of the DL and the judges in labor disputes,
the governments of the center-left coalition sought to provide workers
with minimal state protection against the abuses of employers. However,
in a context of restricted collective rights, Chilean trade unions took
advantage of the opportunities that this policy offered. In short, devoid of
the necessary guarantees to directly and successfully confront employers,
trade unions have found in the DL and the courts a channel to fight for
workers rights.
Its a long process to file a lawsuit. You have to collect a lot of information,
and find the right people to represent you in court. Not all trade unions
have the resources to have such a good lawyer. [] Good lawyers are work-
ing for employers and if you want to have such a good a lawyer, you have
to pay a lot.
Similarly to the CUT, firm-level trade unions do not report the firm to
the DL and/or the courts only to restitute a right that has been abused
(Gutirrez Crocco 2014). For instance, interviews show that union lead-
ers use legal mobilization to create points of reference that can be used
to give arguments more weight.48 In other words, they use the DL and
court sanctions to give a legal form to their claims and to pressure authori-
ties to introduce a new law. As I show below, many of the modest legal
changes that trade unions have obtained from the government since 1990
have been made using previous DL legal statements and/or court-rulings
as proof of the inconsistency of the current legislation and the need for a
broader protection for workers.
202 F.G. CROCCO
Interviews also show that trade unions use legal mobilization for tacti-
cal purposes to increase the likelihood of success of other actions. In fact,
interviewed DL employers observe that union leaders control the timing
of the allegations, reserving some actions for moments such as collective
bargaining processes when they need to reinforce the pressure on employ-
ers. As one interviewed union leader stated, [its] a bit like saying: We
are going to face a collective bargaining process now, and were ready
to go on strike []49 By doing this, trade unions seek to make the
employer more responsive to the demands of the workers and show that
they are willing to take the process to its natural conclusion if necessary.
In this section, I have argued that legal mobilization has played a key
role in the repertoire of action of the Chilean union movement since the
restoration of democracy. Reporting the abuse of a labor law to the DL
and/or the courts has been a strategy to fight for an extension of workers
rights at the different levels. However, the fact that trade unions increas-
ingly resort to legal mobilization for these different purposes does not
necessarily imply that this strategy has been as effective as union leaders
expect. To what extent have the DL and the judicial power helped Chilean
trade unions to contest the inherited legal order? I develop this question
in the following section.
with the promulgation of the law in 2008 that modified the regulation of
the working time in this sector. As one of the union leaders stated: We
gained the law almost without protesting, simply by taking the employers
to the courts.51
Another recent example is the Supreme Court prohibition of the
replacement of workers during strikes and recognition of the right of
workers from the public sector to be treated as other workers in matters of
fundamental rights.52 By doing this, the upper representative of the judi-
cial power endorsed one of the most valued goals of the CUT since the
restoration of democracy and forced the government to incorporate some
of these aspects in the bill to reform the Labor Code.
These victories should not, however, detract from the fact that legal
mobilization has not always brought the results that trade unions expected.
Moreover, the orientation of the DL and the courts has undergone some
significant changes throughout the last two decades that are important to
underline.
The DL
As the DL directly depends on the Labor Minister, it has been vulnerable
to political cycles. Union leaders, lawyers, and DL employees have iden-
tified at least two main turning points in the history of the agency. The
first one took place at the end of the administration of Mara Ester Feres,
a Socialist lawyer who led the institution between 1994 and 2004. The
interviewees agree in that Mara Ester Feres was the National Director
most clearly committed to the workers cause, which reflected in the DLs
actions. In fact, Feres identification with workers brought her the antipa-
thy of employers, who accused her of being too ideological for the posi-
tion she kept for ten years. As one interviewed firm lawyer stated: []
[after] the cycle of the democratic governments began, after Aylwin, the
DL progressively leaned toward the left. A turning point in this process
was queen Mara Ester Feres [] She left horrible legal statements and
other things.53
In 2004, Mara Ester Feres publicly supported the strike of the DLs
employees, who were protesting for an improvement in their working
conditions. This put her in direct conflict with the Minister of Labor,
and she was forced to resign. Her departure helped mitigate the DLs
204 F.G. CROCCO
The successful actions of the inspected companies against the DLan appli-
cation for protection in the ordinary justice or a complaint in the special
labor justicehave forced the DL to be more prudent when it applies the
sanctions.
COPING WITHNEOLIBERALISM THROUGH LEGAL MOBILIZATION... 205
Graph 7.1 Evolution of the number of inspections and the percentage of inspec-
tions that result in a fine (There is no public data on fines for the period
20012003). Source: Gutirrez Crocco, Francisca, and Ignacio Gutirrez Crocco,
Chile: Judicializar para ganar derechos? 14
Before [the reform], we encouraged workers to sue the firm only when they
were not paid, when they got fired, when they were fired in a serious breach
of contract. But to the others we said: You know, its not convenient to sue
because youre going to be waiting three, four years and nobody assures you
anything. But when the law changed we began to tell all workers to sue.60
Conclusion
Chiles labor movement suffered from the policies introduced during the
military regime and continued during the democratic governments. Yet,
as I showed in this chapter, trade unions have not been passively facing the
barriers that neoliberal policies have put on their path. While traditional
repertoires of action such as the strike have declined, trade unions have
increasinglyresorted to the DL and the labor courts to contest the inher-
ited institutional order. They have appropriated these legal proceedings to
force employers to respect existing rights and, even more importantly, to
promote changes in labor relations.
Legal mobilization has helped trade unions obtain some advance-
ment during the last two decades that has been key to broadening the
scope of action of workers. The recent shift in the orientation of the
Supreme Court seems to mark the beginning of a new cycle, where we
can expect these advancements of union legal mobilization to be more
numerous. However, at present, the fact is that legal mobilization is
far from having brought about a rights revolution in favor of work-
ers. At the same time, this change in the repertoire of action of trade
unions has deepened the dependency of the Chilean labor movement
on the state, which has been pointed out as one of its historical limita-
tions.67,68 Trade unions have put their faith in the DL and the Judicial
Power, which could cause more serious problems in the future, when
the orientation of these institutions change as a result of a changing
political cycle. The labor policies of the Concertacin governments are
responsible for fostering this dependency. Incapable of abolishing the
limits to collective rights that the Labor Plan imposed in 1979, the
center-left coalition has compensated workers by increasing the pow-
ers of the DL and the Labor Justice System. Thus, it has created the
incentives for trade unions to make legal mobilization their primary
fighting tactic.
I want to conclude by pointing out the relevance of the findings pre-
sented in this chapter. Scholarship has mainly focused on the decline of the
Chilean labor movement, underestimating the capacity of organized labor
to adapt. Instead, in this chapter I proposed shifting the focus from the
COPING WITHNEOLIBERALISM THROUGH LEGAL MOBILIZATION... 209
Notes
1. See Sehnbruch, The Chilean Labor Market; Cook, The Politics of Labor
Reform; Moulian, Chile Actual: Anatoma de Un Mito; Winn, The
Pinochet Era; Frank, Politics without Policy.
2. Direccin del Trabajo, Encuesta Laboral (ENCLA) 2011.
3. See Garcs and Milos, FOCH CTCH CUT; Direccin del Trabajo,
Compendio Estadstico de 1990 a 2012.
4. See Radrign, Movimiento Sindical en Chile; Drake, El Movimiento
Obrero en Chile; Moulian, Chile Actual; Agacino, Notas: Acumulacin,
Distribucin y Consensos en Chile.
5. See Espinosa, Sindicalismo en la Empresa Moderna; Yanes and Espinosa,
Sindicalismo en Chile.
6. See Palacios-Valladares, From Militancy to Clientelism.
7. Chilean labor law forbids work stoppages outside of the collective bargain-
ing process. However, the conventions signed by the Chilean state with
the International Labor Organization and the current jurisprudence rec-
ognize striking as a fundamental right. This creates a contradiction with
the more restrictive national legislation. For this reason, I use the concept
of extra-legal mobilization to denote the tactics used by trade unions
that imply the deliberate interruption of work taking place outside of the
regulated procedures.
8. See Aravena Carrasco and Nez, El Renacer de la Huelga Obrera en
Chile; Baltera and Dussert, Liderazgos Sindicales Emergentes.
9. See McCann, Law and Social Movements.
210 F.G. CROCCO
10. See Burstein, Legal Mobilization as a Social Movement Tactic; Epp, The
Rights Revolution; McCann, Rights at Work; OBrien, Rightful Resistance.
11. McCann, Law and Social Movements.
12. Ibid.
13. The data presented in this article was collected in two phases; first, between
the years 2009 and 2012, during a study that sought to identify the general
trends of the contemporary Chilean labor movement, and again in 2014,
during research that deepened the understanding of the specific problem
of union legal mobilization.
To measure the extent of legal actions, I use official data from the DL.To
analyze the meanings that trade unions give to these actions, my argu-
ments are based on (1) 47 semi-structured interviews of union leaders of
different union structures and economic branches; (2) declarations of
union leaders in the press, published between 2003 and 2013in La Nacin
and El Mostrador. To identify the extent into which the DL and the Judicial
Power have favored unions, I employ actors perceptions. I augment the
information from the interviews union leaders had with other actors: one
judge, three union lawyers, two firm lawyers, and eight DL officials. In
addition, I contrast actors perceptions with official data from: (1) the
Compendium of the DL; (2) the Annual of the Labor Justice pub-
lished by the Ministerio de Justicia (Justice Minister); (3) the database of
the Supreme Courts rulings published by the Judicial Power.
14. See Roomkin, A Quantitative Study of Unfair Labor Practice Cases, 245;
McCammon, Labors Legal Mobilization; Chappe, Dnoncer en Justice
les Discriminations Syndicales; Plisse, Judiciarisation Ou Juridicisation?;
Conley, Trade Unions, Equal Pay and the Law in the UK.
15. See Chen, Legal Mobilization by Trade Unions; Fazio, Judicializacin
de la Protesta Sindical en Argentina; Anner, Meeting the Challenges of
Industrial Restructuring; Cardoso, Neoliberalism, Unions, and Socio-
Economic Insecurity in Brazil.
16. See McCammon and Kane, Shaping Judicial Law in the Post-World War
II Period.
17. See Frege and Kelly, Union Revitalization Strategies in Comparative
Perspective and Varieties of Unionism:Comparative Strategies for Union
Renewal; Heery, Kelly, and Waddington, Union Revitalization in Britain;
Hamann and Martinez Lucio, Strategies of Union Revitalization in Spain.
18. See Angell, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile; Rojas Flores, La
Dictadura de Ibez y los Sindicatos (19271931).
19. See Winn, The Pinochet Era, 21.
20. See Campero, Macroeconomic Reforms, Labour Markets and Labour
Policies.
21. See lvarez Vallejos, El Plan Laboral y la Negociacin Colectiva.
COPING WITHNEOLIBERALISM THROUGH LEGAL MOBILIZATION... 211
42. See La Nacin, CUT Anuncia Acciones Legales contra AFPs por
Publicidad Engaosa; Aranguiz, CUT Presenta Demanda Contra
AFPs.
43. See El Ciudadano, CUT Present Querella contra las AFPs, con Base a
Datos de CENDA.
44. See La Nacin, CUT Recurre a la Corte Interamericana para Acceder al
Congreso.
45. See Encuesta Laboral (ENCLA) 2011.
46. See Gutirrez Crocco, Contesting the Inherited Labor Order.
47. See Direccin del Trabajo, Anuario Estadstico de la Direccin del
Trabajo.
48. Interview with a union leader of an air company cinducted by author,
October 2014.
49. Interview with a DL employee by author, August 2014.
50. The RUT (Rol nico tributario in spanish) is a number that identifies a firm for
all legal purposes. The concept of multiRUT is used to refer to firms which
belong to the same owner or group but have different identification numbers.
51. Interview with a union leader of an inter-firm union in the transportation
sector by author, October 2014.
52. See Urza, Corte Suprema se Distancia de Fallos Pro Empresa en
Materia Laboral; El Mostrador, Suprema Favorece Trabajadores
Internos.
53. Interview with a firm lawyer by author, August 2014.
54. Interview with a firm lawyer by author, August 2014.
55. See Gutirrez Crocco and Gutirrez Crocco, Chile: Judicializar para
Ganar Derechos?
56. According to the last ENCLA, 51.5 % of the union leaders of Chilean firm-
level trade unions think that workers do not join the organization because
they fear negative consequences, and 14.3 % because they do not see the
utility. See Direccin del Trabajo, Encuesta Laboral (ENCLA) 2011.
57. The public organism that provides a lawyer to workers who do not have
the resources to hire a private one.
58. In the Chilean system, workers and employers can attain an agreement
during a conciliation process before the judge pronounces a verdict. The
agreement can be total or partial according to the number of items in
the original workers complaint that is satisfied in the negotiation. When
the conciliation does not work, the dispute is resolved by the judge. In that
case, the result can be totally or partially favorable to the workers
position, or completely unfavorable.
59. See Ministerio de Justicia, Anuario Estadstico Justicia Laboral.
60. Interview with a union leader of an inter-firm union of the transport sector
by author, October 2014.
COPING WITHNEOLIBERALISM THROUGH LEGAL MOBILIZATION... 213
61. Interview with a lawyer representing both firms and workers by author,
August 2014.
62. This was the interpretation of the three lawyers that I interviewed.
63. See Poder Judicial, Bases Jurisprudenciales.
64. Interview with a workers lawyer and member of the bureau of the Chilean
Association of Labor Lawyers by author, August 2014.
65. The cited list of significant sentences has been retrieved from the analysis
of experts in the press. See e.g. Urza, Corte Suprema se distancia de fal-
los pro empresa en materia laboral; El Mostrador, Suprema Favorece la
Huelga sin Derecho a Reemplazo, ni siquiera con Trabajadores Internos.
66. See Gutirrez Crocco and Gutirrez Crocco, Chile: Judicializar para
Ganar Derechos?
67. See Angell, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile.
68. See Epstein, Labor and Political Stability in the New Chilean Democracy.
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214 F.G. CROCCO
KennethM.Roberts
Introduction
The groundswell of social protests that swept across Chile in the early
2010s was in many respects a continuation of long-standing patterns
of periodic social upheaval against free market (or neoliberal) poli-
cies in contemporary Latin America. At the national level, however, the
Chilean protest cycle marked a sharp departure from a prolonged period
of relative societal quiescence that followed the countrys 1990 transi-
tion to democratic rule. Moreover, from a broader comparative perspec-
tive, Chiles wave of protests manifested a number of distinctive traits
that differentiated it from previous cycles of anti-neoliberal social protest
in Latin America. While belonging, broadly conceived, to the Polanyian
I thank Sofa Donoso and Marisa von Blow for their very helpful comments and
suggestions for this chapter. I also thank Eduardo Silva for a series of intellectual
exchanges that influenced my thinking on this topic.
central roles in many types of protest, and even where material grievances
are present, protest dynamics are heavily conditioned by organizational
resources and networks, political opportunities and constraints, and the
social construction of collective identities.6 A number of important recent
studies on social movements in Latin America, however, have sought to
refocus attention on material grievancesin particular those related to
market liberalization policiesand the role they play in the instigation of
mass social protest.7 Even where market reforms enhance economic effi-
ciency, they can create pockets of economic hardship or insecurity among
social groups who bear the brunt of specific adjustment policies, including
workers who face layoffs or wage cuts, low-income consumers threatened
by the privatization of public services and the elimination of price con-
trols or subsidies, and local communities whose control over land, water,
and natural resources is challenged by the extractive activities of multina-
tional firms. Not surprisingly, Polanyis metaphor of the double move-
ment is often invoked to describe the myriad forms of social protest that
contested market-based structural adjustment policies in the aftermath to
Latin Americas 1980s debt crisis.8
Ironically, Polanyi himself had little to say about social protest, and
it was not integral to his concept of the double movement. For Polanyi,
the double movement was a principle of social protection against the
pernicious effects of a market-controlled economy. This principle aimed
at the conservation of man and nature through powerful institutions
and protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments
of intervention.9 Polanyis conceptualization clearly reserved a central
role for state and political institutions as well as social organizations in the
construction of protections against commodification. The role of social
mobilization in shaping or inducing an institutional response was left
largely unexplored.
Nevertheless, the Latin American experience during the neoliberal era
suggests that there is a complex reciprocal relationship between social
mobilization or protest and institutional responsiveness to claims for social
protection from market insecurities. Although localized or sector-specific
protest activities can emerge around concrete economic grievances in vir-
tually any political context, widespread social protest that links together
diverse societal interests or claims is most likely to occur where formal
representative institutions are closed, failing, or ineffectual. Indeed,
Polanyis double movement is most likely to find expression in widespread
CHILEAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ANDPARTY POLITICS INCOMPARATIVE... 225
social protest not only where states are unresponsive to claims for social
protection, but where party systems fail to effectively articulate and chan-
nel such claims in the first place. In such contexts, cycles of social mobi-
lization and protest may well be required to elicit a meaningful response
from state or party institutions. Where party systems do articulate and
channel claims for social protection, however, the double movement may
well be contained within the formal partisan, regulatory, and state poli-
cymaking institutions envisioned by Polanyi, minimizing social mobiliza-
tion and protest. As I argue below, this was the case in Chile for the first
decade-and-a-half of democratic rule after 1990, until a variety of new
movement organizations emerged to articulate claims and contest social
policy spheres that mainstream parties had largely neglected.
Two important theoretical insights can be derived from this recipro-
cal interaction between political institutions and social protest. First, anti-
neoliberal social protest is likely to be far less common than market-based
hardships and insecurities, and also less common than the double move-
ment for societal protection that such insecurities foster. This insight fol-
lows logically from the understanding that widespread social protest is
but one of several different political manifestations of Polanyis double
movement, all of which are conditioned by representative institutions and
their responsiveness to claims for social protection. Second, widespread
social protest is rarely, if ever, a response to material grievances alone;
instead, it nests material grievances within an overarching critique of polit-
ical institutions and their lack of responsiveness or effective representation.
As stated by Silva in his seminal study of contemporary Latin American
social movements, political exclusion, understood at its most basic as the
capacity of pro-neoliberal reform forces to ignore popular sector demands,
was a powerful force behind the unification of streams of anti-neoliberal
mobilization.10
These theoretical insights are developed below through an analysis of
Latin Americas three generations of anti-neoliberal social protest. The
analysis highlights the reciprocal relationship between social protest and
political institutions, in particular the conditioning of protest by partisan
competitive alignments. It also suggests that Chiles recent cycles of social
mobilization are indicative of an unprecedented politicization of social
citizenship rights in the neoliberal era, a process that is intimately tied to
a deepening crisis of partisan and representative institutions in the post-
1990 democratic regime.
226 K.M. ROBERTS
adjustment measures in the late 1980s.14 Labor was hardly alone, how-
ever, in resisting the initial adoption of austerity and structural adjustment
policies. Price shocks associated with cuts in subsidies or the elimination
of price controls for food and gasoline, for example, triggered spontane-
ous protests and food riots among the urban poor in a number of coun-
tries. These riotsoften dubbed IMF riots because austerity measures
had been mandated as a condition for international debt reliefoccurred
in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico,
Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.15
These patterns of societal resistance sometimes succeeded in delaying
or watering down the market liberalization process, as in Uruguay, where
strikes and protests were buttressed by popular referenda that allowed
voters to veto specific privatization measures.16 In their most expansive
formssuch as the five-day, multicity uprising known as the Caracazo that
greeted the 1989 adoption of neoliberal shock treatment by Venezuelan
President Carlos Andrs Prez17protests played a central role in the
development of national crises that would eventually produce dramatic
political change. Nowhere, however, was the initial wave of strikes, riots,
and protests strong enough to prevent structural adjustment from mov-
ing forward; every country in Latin America had liberalized markets by
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the heyday of the so-called Washington
Consensus.18
In many respects, then, first-generation protests were the defensive
residuum of a social order in decay, and a prelude to the political defeat
of popular sectors in the decade that followed the onset of the debt crisis.
As hyperinflation pummeled governments that experimented with het-
erodox alternatives to market liberalism, deeper and more comprehensive
structural adjustment programs were imposed, organized labor entered
into a steep decline, and societal resistance withered and fragmented.
Technocrats converged on variants of neoliberal orthodoxy, while scholars
took note of the surprising weakness of popular resistance to the demo-
cratic implementation of structural adjustment policies that were once
presumed to require the iron fist of a Pinochet to impose.19
By the middle of the 1990s, hyperinflation had been vanquished in
Latin America, and every country in the region had gone through struc-
tural adjustment, even if they varied in the thoroughness and effectiveness
of their liberalization policies.20 In essence, the region had entered a post-
adjustment political era, one with a different set of economic and political
coordinates for social mobilization and protest. Whereas first-generation
228 K.M. ROBERTS
labor markets and the large-scale privatization of delivery systems for social
security, health care, and education. These social pillars were constructed
under the Pinochet regime starting in the late 1970s, and they remained
largely intact under the center-left governments of the Concertacin alli-
ance following Chiles transition to democracy in 1990. As the focal point of
most social mobilization in Chile, the advanced liberalization of these social
pillars helps to explain why the country is on the leading edge of the third
generation of anti-neoliberal protest in the region.
Although market reforms also began under the auspices of military dic-
tatorships in Argentina and Uruguay in the mid-1970s, neither country
consolidated the neoliberal model under military rule, leaving structural
adjustment on the agenda of new democratic regimes and their party sys-
tems as economic crises deepened in the 1980s. Alone in the region, then,
the Chilean party system was shielded from responsibility for managing the
politics of economic crisis and structural adjustment in the 1980s. Indeed,
the early timing and authoritarian imposition of structural adjustment
in Chile altered the dynamics of anti-neoliberal protest in the country.31
Fierce military repression in the aftermath of the 1973 coup largely fore-
closed any opportunity for organized resistance to the initial adoption of
structural adjustment policies, which took a sharp neoliberal turn in 1975.
Simply put, first-generation anti-neoliberal protests in Chile were heavily
suppressed by military rule; one must look elsewhere in Latin America to
identify the characteristics of this initial pattern of anti-neoliberal protest
in the region.
Paradoxically, having largely missed out on the first-generation anti-
neoliberal protests, Chile experienced second-generation protests far
before the rest of the region, as Chile alone had largely completed the
process of structural adjustment by the time of the 1980s debt crisis that
forced the rest of Latin America to liberalize. Second-generation protests
erupted when Chiles liberalized economy, following a spurt of rapid
growth in the late 1970s, was rocked by a financial crisis and severe reces-
sion during the early stages of the debt crisis.32 A call by the copper work-
ers federation for a day of protest triggered a massive three-year uprising
against the dictatorship from 1983 to 1986, reversing a decade of highly
coerced societal quiescence. Although labor unions, womens groups, and
human rights organizations played an active role in this protest cycle, the
uprising increasingly relied on shantytown youth as its principal protago-
nists as the level of political violence rose.33 This protest cycle combined
staunch criticism of the neoliberal model with opposition to the military
CHILEAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ANDPARTY POLITICS INCOMPARATIVE... 235
intact. In particular, the Socialists and their allied offshoot, the Party for
Democracy (PPD), began a tentative shift from neoliberalisms residual
welfare state, with its emphasis on highly targeted poverty relief programs,
toward more universal (or social democratic) forms of social citizenship
rights. Reforms adopted by the Socialist/PPD President Ricardo Lagos
moved Chile toward universal coverage of basic health-care needs, while
the first government of Michelle Bachelet established a public pension sys-
tem to provide social security for individuals who were not effectively cov-
ered by the employment-based private pension system.40 Although these
social policy reforms patched up some of the holes in Chiles porous social
safety net, they were very partial first steps in a social democratic direc-
tion, and they still left behind gaping inequalities and widespread reliance
on private market-based responses to basic social needs, especially in the
educational sphere. For many citizens in the working and middle classes,
this reliance created forms of insecurity and indebtedness that called into
question the social mobility promised by the neoliberal growth model.
Social policy reforms under the Concertacin were implemented in a
highly technocratic manner, and they were neither triggered nor accom-
panied by widespread social mobilization and pressure from below. As
Somma and Medel report in their chapter, protest activity began to pick
up during the second decade of Concertacin rule, but social mobilization
remained relatively modest in comparative terms. As late as 2010, only
4.7 percent of Chileans reported having participated in a protest event
in the previous year, the second lowest percentage in Latin America. The
social demobilization that began during the early stages of Chiles regime
transition thus became an enduring feature of the new democratic order.
Like other Latin American countries that experienced aligning critical
junctures, Chilean politics at the turn of the century was characterized by
relatively stable forms of partisan and electoral politics and modest levels
of social mobilization. The social explosions and party system turmoil
that rocked neighboring countries with de-aligning critical junctures like
Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela seemed far removed from the
Chilean experience.
Nevertheless, the relative stability of partisan and electoral politics at the
national level masked considerable evidence that parties roots in society
were withering.41 The detachment of citizens from parties and formal rep-
resentative institutions could be seen in declining levels of partisan identi-
fication and low levels of participation in election campaigns, both ranking
on the lowest rungs among Latin American countries. Paradoxically, in
238 K.M. ROBERTS
Notes
1. Polanyi, The Great Transformation; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in
Latin America.
2. UNDP, Desarrollo Humano en Chile: Los Tiempos de la Politizacin.
3. Silva, Technocrats and Politics in Chile: From the Chicago Boys to the
CIEPLAN Monks and Doing Politics in a Depoliticised Society: Social
Change and Political Deactivation in Chile; Roberts, Deepening
Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru.
4. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.
5. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
6. McAdam, McCarthy and Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social
Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural
Framings.
7. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America; Almeida, Mobilizing
Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest, 1316; Spalding, Contesting
Trade in Central America: Market Reform and Resistance; Simmons,
Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in
Latin America.
8. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, 1718; Roberts,
Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and
Peru, 5961; Spalding, Contesting Trade in Central America: Market
Reform and Resistance.
9. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 7980, 138139.
10. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, 29.
11. Walton and Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global
Adjustment; Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the
Struggle for Democracy in Chile; Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions
and Market Reforms in Latin America; Williams, Social Movements and
Economic Transition: Markets and Distributive Conflict in Mexico; Lpez
Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio.
12. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the
Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America.
13. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, 45.
14. Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions and Market Reforms in Latin
America, 2.
15. Walton and Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global
Adjustment.
16. Filgueira and Papadpulos, Putting Conservatism to Good Use? Long
Crisis and Vetoed Alternatives in Uruguay.
17. Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio.
18. Williamson, What Washington Means by Policy Reform.
CHILEAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ANDPARTY POLITICS INCOMPARATIVE... 243
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246 K.M. ROBERTS
EduardoSilva
Introduction
The protest movements that rocked Chile in 20112012 were unex-
pected and, thus, took the nation by surprise. They raised uncomfort-
able questions for Chiles political and socioeconomic elites who believed
in a national consensus on the bounties of the nations market democ-
racy. Given stable institutional channeling of social tension since the end
of military rule, were widespread protests indicators of a political crisis
that threatened the Chilean model? More alarmist versions of the ques-
tion read: Was Chile on a road to chaos like that which had engulfed the
Andean region and Argentina a decade earlier, a road that led to the estab-
lishment of irresponsible radical left populist governments?
E. Silva (*)
Department of Political Science, Tulane University,
New Orleans, LA 70118-5698, USA
autonomy. But these intertwined with demands driven by a desire for de-
commoditization. In both countries, highland indigenous confederations
like Ecuarunari (Ecuador) and CSUTCB (Bolivia) represented indigenous
peasants. Thus, they called for state-sponsored land reform, cheap credit,
infrastructure, and price protection for crops. They also shared many of the
socioeconomic grievances of nonindigenous popular sectors. Their list of
demands included subsidies for food, fuel, transportation, and housing as
well as price controls more generally. The basic territorial unit of organiza-
tion for the member organizations was the rural village or municipality in the
countryside or neighborhood and borough in lager urban areas, such as La
Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba, Oruro, and Potos. The roadblock, as with the
piqueteros, was a preferred tool of direct action. However, they also employed
the siege, most notably in the case of La Paz during the Gas War in 2003.
No social movement rose to lead anti-neoliberal contention in
Venezuela the way that the indigenous peoples movement did in Ecuador
and Bolivia and the piqueteros and unemployed workers in Argentina.
After the violent riot that was the Caracazo in early 1989, the main labor
union confederation initially organized mass demonstrations and a couple
of significant general strikes, but it pulled back after the two attempted
coup dtats in 1992. As we shall see below, from then to 1998 protests
roiled in near constant manner carried out by decentralized, heteroge-
neous, and uncoordinated groups.
Nevertheless, they exhibited similar characteristics. For example, many
were territorially organized, such as middle-class neighborhood associa-
tions and popular sector organizations from working-class neighborhoods,
such as the 23 de Enero, as well as self-help community associations in the
barrios, especially in Caracas that sprouted many self-help organizations
under the auspices of progressive mayors, such as Atristbulo Isturiz of the
Causa R party.22 Student organizations were also prominent alongside state
employees, public sector industrial unions, transportation workers, teachers,
professors, and doctors. They staged protests, strikes, marches, and demon-
strations almost daily, frequently employing road blockages and disrupting
government functioning. They varied in magnitude. Most were short-lived
sharp events, although some engulfed practically the whole country.
Despite the lack of an overarching organization as in the other three
emblematic cases of anti-neoliberal contention, near daily protests in
Venezuela, punctuated by general strikes, had powerful effects. They were
ever-present indicators of widespread dissatisfaction with public policy and
politicians. It emboldened military putschists and engendered new politi-
cal movements and parties, including Hugo Chavezs.23
256 E. SILVA
their campaigns have received ample treatment in this volume (with the
exception of the regional Aysn movement), I will only discuss them in
relation to the question posed above.
At their core, as Roberts chapter argued, these movements rose up
against accumulated injustices that were a legacy of signature free-market
policies imposed by the military dictatorship. Students and workers pro-
tested the persistence of that eras free-market restructuring of education
and labor relations. The environmental and regional equity movements
grievances were also rooted in the retreat of the state, deregulation, priva-
tization, and the uncontested rule of liberal private property rights and
the price system, especially where land and water were concerned. They
also protested the unrivaled economic power and political influence of
large-scale Chilean and transnational economic actors that accompanied
the process. The Mapuche may have demanded autonomyand therefore
less statebut they protested that democratic governments prioritized the
interests of the timber conglomerates over their land.
All demanded de-commodification. The evidence from this volume
shows that they clamored for greater-state involvement in the economy
and society to control markets, govern capital, and protect individuals and
groups from their rigors. The student and labor movements raised these
claims in the most directly apprehensible manner. Students demanded
state-guaranteed free, quality education. They framed the issue in terms
of the inequity of the market-driven system and insisted on greater-state
responsibility. Labor demanded substantial reforms to a labor code that,
with small modifications, was little changed from the one imposed by the
civilian neoliberal technocrats of the military dictatorship. They called for
state-backed strengthening unionization and collective bargaining rights,
state support for formal over precarious labor, among other issues.
Demands for de-commodification were also present in the environmental
and Mapuche movements. They rejected unfettered private property rights
and the seemingly boundless freedom of powerful of national and transna-
tional economic actors to do pretty much as they pleased. Environmentalists
argued that the protection of nature demanded curtailment of private prop-
erty rights, and that government had a strong role to play in creating envi-
ronmentally friendly industrial policy to correct the excesses of exclusively
for-profit-driven development. Many advocated alternative, smaller-scale,
and more people-oriented or grassroots environmentally sensitive develop-
ment, which at some level required government support.27
258 E. SILVA
decisive in the following sense. Over 1020 years from relatively powerless,
and therefore ineffective, resistance they built heterogeneous coalitions
sufficiently powerful to destabilize governments, force the resignation of
presidents, create post-neoliberal policy agendas, and generate new politi-
cal movements capable of winning political power. This understandably
sent shivers of fear and revulsion down the spine of political establishments
in the rest of the region.
Chilean democracy after the dictatorship was characterized by a high
degree of demobilization, defined as the absence of widespread protest.30
This was a legacy of the years of the Chilean Road to Socialism, the military
regimes brutal repression, and, as Robertseloquently argues, the character-
istics of Chiles transition to democracy.31 The result has been the political
establishments rejection of social movement protest as a form of demo-
cratic political participation. Only institutional forms such as voting and
parliamentary representation are deemed legitimate. In this imaginary, pro-
tests signal public disorder, the gateway to unleashing uncontrollable forces
that may overwhelm political institutions and destabilize the political system
sending Chile spiraling down another unpredictable national misadventure.
From this perspective, the escalation of anti-neoliberal protest in
20112012 first unsettled and later sent tremors of distress through the
Chilean political and socioeconomic elites, which the media amplified.
Was the political system unraveling? Was Chile in danger of following the
radical populist road of Argentina and its Andean neighbors?
I will argue that these concerns were unfounded for theoretical reasons
that have been borne out by events. First, I very briefly review the factors
that contributed to cycles of politically decisive anti-neoliberal mobiliza-
tion in the emblematic cases of the Andes and Argentina. I then compare
Chile on those dimensions.
be seen.38 The labor movement and its political allies, as has been the case
since 1991, have tried valiantly to make headway but has met with limited
results.39 This stands as a testament to the centrality of labor markets for
Chiles market economy and the power of the business lobby. Mapuche
movement organizations demanding more radical change in indigenous
policy have been met with regressive polices typical of the historic rela-
tionship between them and the Chilean state: criminalization and, more
recently, militarization.
Since 2013, Bachelets government has also moved on to the broader
political issues. In August 2014, the Congress approved with 8628
votes electoral reform toward a proportional, and more representative,
electoral system, significantly modifying the binominal system inherited
from Augusto Pinochets dictatorship.40 Tax reform to support increased
expenditures in education followed in September.41 Constitutional
change, as expected, is a contentious issue. It has become bogged down
in debates over whether it should be limited to legislative reform or
through the establishment of a constituent assembly, which would open
the process more to citizen participation.42 In December 2015, however,
President Bachelet announced that a constituent process would be
initiated in 2016.
Meanwhile, the Social Movement for Aysn also enjoyed concrete gains,
most of which were hammered out in a settlement in late March 2012.
Pieras government guaranteed the implementation of key demands: the
creation of an employment subsidy, and the establishment of a special
development zone (zona franca) in Aysn. A series of round tables were
also established to set plans for the implementation of additional issues.
Thus, many of demands of the Aysn movement were incorporated in
the Plan de Desarrollo de la Regin de Aysn (signed in April 11, 2011, by
President Pinera). Between 2012 and 2013, the government substantially
increased public goods provision in the region. Especially noteworthy
were the opening of a new hospital, university, and ships for the maritime
connection.43
In the final analysis, then, the Chilean political systems response to
the upsurge in anti-neoliberal protest stood in sharp contrast to that of
Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. In those cases, the unwavering
support of all major established political parties for market economic and
social reforms, together with growing economic hardship, pushed counter-
mobilization to greater heights. It also contributed to the formation of a
politically decisive counter-hegemonic post-neoliberal policy agenda.
268 E. SILVA
Conclusion
Polanyis great contribution to the push-pull between market rule and
the political control of markets lay in shifting the locus of tension from
the point of production to circuits of exchange.48 The principal clash was
no longer conceived to be between workers and owners of factories (or
capital in general). It lay in the insecurities and hardships created by shift-
ing prices that obeyed the logic of self-regulating market economies; the
economy had attained the status of natural law with potentially disastrous
effects for everyone in deep recessions or depressions. He pointed to a key
causal mechanism in the double movement of capitalist society in which
dominant factions of capital generally push for economic liberalization
and social groups adversely affected by the process seek to control capi-
tal (including uncompetitive factions of capital). Utopian market society
sought to commoditize land, labor, and capital. But these, he argued, are
fictitious commodities. They embody much more for people, they con-
tain social, cultural, and economic relationships on which stable reproduc-
tion of communities and life chances by which people attach security and
meaning to their lives depend. The self-regulating marketthe creative
destruction of capitalismthreatens community and personal stability.
Thus, people generally seek protection from them.
Polanyis work on the double movement of capitalist society leaves
open questions of the forms and intensity that it takes. Polanyi himself, in
his best-known publication, was concerned about great transformations,
and especially those that might explain the global catastrophic events of
fascism and World War II.He was interested in elucidating the underlying
logic not, as is repeatedly noted, putting flesh and bones so to speak on
the social actors involved in the drama.
POST-TRANSITION SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INCHILE INCOMPARATIVE... 271
Notes
1. ODonnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative
Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies.
2. Boeninger, Democracia en Chile: lecciones para la gobernabilidad; Silva,
The State and Capital in Chile: business elites, technocrats, and market eco-
nomics; Roberts, this volume.
3. Cook, The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility
and Rights; Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions and Market
Reforms in Latin America; Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular
274 E. SILVA
Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile; Kurtz, The Dilemmas of
Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons from Latin America.
4. Franceschet, Women and Politics in Chile; Rhodes, Social Movements and
Free-Market Capitalism in Latin America: Telecommunications,
Privatization, and the Rise of Consumer Protest; Silva, Democracy, Market
Economics, and Environmental Policy in Chile.
5. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time.
6. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America; Silva, Exchange
Rising? Karl Polanyi and Contentious Politics in Latin America.
7. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time; Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America; Silva,
Exchange Rising? Karl Polanyi and Contentious Politics in Latin
America.
8. Notable exceptions were the rise of the Workers Party in Brazil during the
1990s and the Party of the Democratic Revolution in Mexico that won
important state and municipal elections.
9. Levitsky and Roberts, eds. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left.
10. Roberts, Changing course in Latin America: party systems in the neoliberal
era; Flores-Maca, After Neoliberalism? The Left and Economic Reforms in
Latin America.
11. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
12. I also drew from Michael Manns (1986 and 1993) four sources of social
power and from social movement theory. Mann, The Sources of Social
Power, Vol. 1; Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2; Tarrow, Power in
Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics; McAdam, Tarrow
and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.
13. Burawoy, For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence
of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi; McMichael, Globalization; Silva,
Exchange Rising? Karl Polanyi and Contentious Politics in Latin
America; Garca-Guadilla, Civil Society: Institutionalization,
Fragmentation, Autonomy.
14. Burawoy, For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence
of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi.
15. Of course, labor unions and strikes remain part of the mix. Burawoy, For
a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio
Gramsci and Karl Polanyi; Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and
Globalization Since 1870.
16. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
17. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time.
POST-TRANSITION SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INCHILE INCOMPARATIVE... 275
33. Drake and Jaksic, eds. The Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 19821990;
Borzutzky and Oppenheim, eds. After Pinochet: The Chilean Road to
Democracy and the Market; Borzutzky and Weeks, eds. The Bachelet gov-
ernment: conflict and consensus in post-Pinochet Chile; Sehnbruch and
Siavellis, eds. Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of an Historic
Coalition, 1990-2010.
34. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
35. Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America.
36. Written communication, Ana Mara Silva, Mesa Social technical coordina-
tor, November 30, 2015.
37. See, for example, the chapters by Donoso and Somma and Medel, this volume.
38. A hopeful effect may be at project level. At least one hydroelectric project
that had been held up because of the Hidroaysn flap has been given the
green light. However, it involves a system of smaller, interconnected cen-
trals that have more benign environmental footprints. This is a model that
the Patagonia Defense Council supports. In other words, perhaps govern-
ment officials will look more closely at projects before permitting them.
This would be a policy implementation effect (Silva, Social Movements,
Protest, and Policy). The Defense Council is also part of a government
commission created to develop a renewable energy policy for Chile
(Personal communication with Patricio Rodrigo, former executive director
of the Patagonia Defense Council, November 15, 2015).
39. See Gutirrez Crocco, this volume.
40. Huge Step Says Chilean President on Electoral Reform. Telesur,
August 15, 2014.
41. Chile: Tax reform makes swift progress. Oxford Analytica Daily Brief
Service, April 24, 2014; Chile politics: Michelle Bachelet marks one year
in office. EIU Views Wire, March 13, 2015.
42. Abogado constitucionalista: Debe priorizarse la reforma total de la
Constitucin a travs del Congreso. La Tercera, February 13, 2015.
43. Gobierno de Chile. Informe del Ejecutivo sobre los cumplimientos de las
demandas en Aysn, 2013. The movement recognized these advances too.
See interview with top spokesperson Misael Ruiz in La Cooperativa,
February 4, 2013. http://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/site/artic/2013
0212/asocfile/20130212222804/informe_cumplimiento_un_a__o_
movimiento_ays__n_.pdf
44. von Blow, Building Transnational Networks: Civil Society and the Politics
of Trade in the Americas; von Blow, The Politics of Scale Shift and
Coalition Building: The Case of the Brazilian Network for the Integration
of the Peoples.
45. Concertacin pide agenda social sin letra chica, La Nacin, May 9, 2011.
POST-TRANSITION SOCIAL MOVEMENTS INCHILE INCOMPARATIVE... 277
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Index1
D F
democratization, 4, 6, 1315, 70, 71, FECh. See Federacin de Estudiantes
74, 103, 250, 268, 272 de la Universidad de Chile
dictatorship, 19731989, 14, 29, 131, (FECh)
162 Federacin de Estudiantes de la
demobilization, 30 Pontificia Universidad Catlica de
economic model, 108, 226, 233, Chile (FEUC), 71, 79
257, 259, 264 Federacin de Estudiantes de la
education model, 258 Universidad de Chile (FECh), 71,
institutional legacies, 167, 174, 240, 78, 79, 81, 90n25, 90n26,
266, 267 91n46, 91n72, 240
labor policies, 195 Federacin de Estudiantes Secundarios
opposition to the, 30, 75, 103, 149, de Santiago (FESES), 72, 75
165, 250 feminist movement
popular protests, 234 branches of, 162, 172
repression, 14, 168 Chilean 19902015 gender policies,
Direccin del Trabajo (DL), 193, 199, 179
208 demands, 180; legitimate and
DL. See Direccin del Trabajo (DL) radical, 173
differences with womens movement
in Chile, 165
E double militancy, 171
environmental movement, 42. evolution, 162
See also Patagonia Without feminist second wave in Chile, 167
Dams (PWD) fields of womens organization
Barrancones conflict, 139 during the dictatorship, 168
framing, 30 interactions with institutional actors,
interactions with institutional 162, 167, 169, 180
actors, 144; internal tensions, 182
political parties, 45 international waves of mobilization,
learning, 149 165
organizational evolution, 136 opposition to the dictatorship, 165,
organizational structure 169
arborescent and rhizomatic ways of political impact, 179, 180
organizing, 133, 135, 149 repertoires of action, 172
political impact, 139 FESES. See Federacin de Estudiantes
Ralco conflict, 43, 138 Secundarios de Santiago (FESES)
resources, 39, 145 FEUC. See Federacin de Estudiantes
strategies, 138 de la Pontificia Universidad
tactics, 138 Catlica de Chile (FEUC)
284 INDEX
S T
SERNAM. See Servicio Nacional de la Tilly, Charles
Mujer (SERNAM) polity members, definition, 32
Servicio Nacional de la Mujer polity model, 8
(SERNAM), 17, 162, 164, 170, repertoire of contention, definition,
1747, 179, 180 69
development of, 176 transformative event
social movements McAdam and Sewells definition,
definition of; as complex networks, 107
10
interactions with institutional actors;
political parties, 45, 72 U
resources, 40 UDI. See Unin Demcrata
stock of legacies Independiente (UDI)
Rossis definition, 69 Unidad Popular (UP), 13, 194
strategies of social movements, 9 Unin Demcrata Independiente
definition, 68 (UDI), 30, 38, 41, 46, 236, 269,
insider strategies, 67 272
institutional activism, 10 UP. See Unidad Popular (UP)
outsider strategies, 67
student movement
autonomism, 45 V
demands, 75, 81, 88, 238 Vallejo, Camila, 85, 86, 240