While watching the images of the student demonstrations currently taking place in Chile I felt a sense of déjà vu. Santiago, Chile’s capital, is encircled by the Andes mountains, and in winter, when the cold atmosphere causes pollutants to settle at ground level, it is one of the most polluted cities in the world. As a young student growing up in Chile I remember the asphyxiating atmosphere created by the pollution compounded by high levels of tear gas and the cold water cannons with which the police always responded to peaceful student demonstrations.

The same toxic atmosphere is now being inflicted on the current generation of students who are out in the streets demanding structural reforms to the country’s largely privatised education system. This time, however, it looks like police repression will not be enough to stem the discontent that has been simmering for several years and that is now exploding on the streets. The wide array of social movements that have become mobilised, coupled with the wide appeal of the movement’s leadership suggest that a real political transformation may be a serious possibility in Chile.

The immediate trigger for the current uprising has been the students’ demands for a free and state financed education with the movement comprising both school and university students. Since May, some 700 schools have been occupied by secondary school students and almost daily street protests have been taking place ever since. In mid-August around half a million students and their families took part in a demonstration in a park in central Santiago. The students have also managed to connect their struggles with other sectors of Chilean society. A week after the park demonstration, the students joined a national strike declared by Chile’s trade union confederation (CUT), mobilising again half a million people onto the streets of Santiago.

The educational system they are protesting against is one of the most unequal in the world. Less than 50 per cent of students attend state funded schools, which are of poor quality and are starved of funds. University education is the most expensive in Latin America and when family income is taken into consideration, one of the most expensive in the world. Around 84 per cent of expenditure on higher education is borne by students and their families while a meagre 16 per cent is funded by the state. For instance, the University of Chile, the country’s main university, only receives 14 per cent of its budget from the state.

In 2006 there were attempts at reforming the system, when thousands of secondary school students took to the streets in what became known as the ‘penguins’ revolution’ (in reference to the students’ school uniform). While they managed to obtain some minor reforms of the education law created under Pinochet’s dictatorship, their expectations of a more profound reform were betrayed by a government and parliament dominated by centre-right political elites who had a vested interest in maintaining a profit-driven privatised education.

Neoliberal origins

However, discontent in Chile extends beyond dissatisfaction with education and in order to understand this we need to look at the origin of the current economic model. On the 11 September 1973, the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a US sponsored military coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Under a regime characterised by state terrorism, Chile became the world’s first laboratory for testing radical ‘neoliberal’ economic policies devised by right wing economist Milton Friedman’s pupils in Chile, known as the ‘Chicago Boys’. These policies included the wholesale privatisation of state assets in areas such as health, education, public services and sectors of the copper mining industry (a mainstay of Chile’s economy). This resulted in the concentration of wealth in a few hands and the country was transformed from one of the least unequal countries in the continent to one of the most unequal.

It took 17 years before popular protests during the mid-1980s culminated in a plebiscite in 1988, which brought an end to the Pinochet’s dictatorship. But the Chilean elites that had imposed the neoliberal model at the cost of thousands of lives managed to legitimise and consolidate their unjust system, leaving in place an undemocratic constitution (approved in 1980), which ensured the perpetuation of the neoliberal model. The centre-left coalition, Concertacion para la Democracia (Coordination for Democracy) which ruled the country between 1990 and 2010 not only continued but in fact deepened the dictatorship’s free-market model. Although Chile now has the highest per capita income in Latin America (about US$ 15,000 per year), the country is also one of the most unequal. According to the Chilean economist Marcel Claude, at the end of the military dictatorship (1989), the richest 5 per cent of Chileans had an income 110 times higher than the poorest 5 per cent. This trend continued during the next 20 years of democracy and today this same differential is 220 times higher.

The widespread dissatisfaction with the Concertacion’s continuation of the neoliberal model inherited from the dictatorship and the slow pace of political reform of Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, especially among the young, resulted in a feeling that politicians of all shades had become the main obstacle to changing the political system. This disillusionment with politics was a primary factor that led to the erosion of the Concertacion’s electoral base and their ultimate defeat in the January 2010 presidential election, which was won by the rightwing billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera.

Government by billionaire

However, in just over a year and a half, Piñera’s government has been unable to revive the fortunes of the neoliberal camp. He initially used to his advantage, Chile’s highly concentrated private media (which is beholden to the country’s political and economic elites), to stage-manage and obtain political capital from major events which have occurred during his presidency. An example of this was the worldwide coverage of the rescue of the 33 trapped miners almost exactly one year ago. The predominant media narrative presented the government led-rescue operation as a personal triumph for President Piñera himself. Following this crisis his personal poll ratings climbed to 63 per cent. But a recent opinion poll in July, after the start of student protests, put Piñera’s popularity at 26 per cent while the opposition coalition, the Concertacion, had a dismal approval rating of just 16 per cent.

Contrast this with the support the students enjoy: an approval rating of 72 per cent. Students, in large part, do not vote in national elections, as a form of protest against the neoliberal consensus of the political elites that they feel do not represent them. But in organising the current protests, students have mobilised their circle of friends and family and used the internet as a means of broadening the base of the movement. Initially the mainstream media largely ignored the protests but as these have grown in numbers and have managed to incorporated wide sectors of the population during the months of July and August, the media has been forced to report on the students’ demands.

Global echoes

Chile’s protests are similar to those seen in Spain, Greece and the Middle East, in that they represent a wave of discontent with the social consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Unlike the riots we saw recently in the UK however, the demands of the Chilean students are of a highly political nature. In Britain the average citizen does not yet make out the deep causes which underlie the looting that took place during the riots, instead attributing it to ‘mindless criminality’. In Chile, the protests are legitimised by wide sectors of society. For example, one man who had his car destroyed during one of the student protests declared that he supported the protests because his daughter was a college student involved in a just cause.

The student movement has been diverse, creative and surprisingly ideological. This has been due in no small measure to the clarity and charisma of its leaders which belong to a generation free from both the fear instilled in their parents by the Pinochet regime and the sterility of the compromises they engaged in during the Concertacion government. Camilla Vallejos, the 23-year-old president of the Student Union at the University of Chile recently said: ‘We do not want to improve the present system. We want a profound change, to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee.’ Student leaders have also proved to be remarkably resilient and have remained defiant in the face of police repression and threats to their personal safety. In response to threats against Vallejo from a Piñera government supporter disseminated through Twitter, she was forced to seek police protection.

Radical and strategic

The student demands are highly strategic in nature, requiring a wholesale change in the economic and political model that goes well beyond simply reforming the education system. This is because they realise that unless the distribution of wealth in the country is tackled through tax reforms and the re-nationalisation of the mining industry, the state will not have the necessary resources to invest in education. In order to gather support the students have managed to coordinate their demands with a wide network of social movements ranging from environmental activists, workers of Chile’s strategic copper industry, and citizens organised in local assemblies (Asambleas Ciudadanas).

There is also a strong relationship between the environmental protests regarding the building of the HidroAysén hydroelectric project in Patagonia earlier this year and the student movement. And it is very likely that in the near future new relationships will be created between the demands of the Mapuche indigenous people, the public sector workers, the casualised workers in the mining industry (subcontratados), and those that owe money to banks and retail outlets (personal debt levels in Chile are amongst the highest in the world). In all these cases it is the oppressive power structures created by privatised conglomerates that are seen as the main cause of the problem.

So, as the Chilean winter comes to an end, the students’ struggles in the streets of Santiago are now giving way to a spring renewal in which a vast social movement representing the majority of Chilean society is expressing itself. Their aim is to build a truly participatory democracy. Whatever course current events take, Chile will no longer be the same. The students’ protests have managed to awaken the consciousness of vast sectors of the population about the need for a profound change in the country. What even a few months ago was considered impossible is now firmly on the agenda.

However, despite its strength, the success of this movement is far from assured. Today’s demands in education, health, social and political rights, have no solution under the current constitution so the path to success lies in moving towards a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution via a referendum, a route successfully followed by progressive governments backed by social movements in Latin America.

OS Also don’t forget about ‘Salvador’ in 1986. That was about El Salvador, in Central America, which was a tragedy. So I went back, I like Latin America; I view South America as the underdog in this situation. As a moviemaker I tend to make movies about people who don’t get a fair shake. I think it’s wrong what’s going on. I met Chavez for the first time in 2007, then I went back in 2008 and he said don’t take my word for it, go and talk to my neighbours. I did. We met seven Presidents in six countries. I said, what’s all the fuss about? Why are we making such a stink about Chavez? There is something going wrong. When the United States gets so self-interested in destroying somebody, which has happened repeatedly in South America and Central America, there is some motivation. We are looking for that motivation.

RN The mainstream US media has been rather critical about your film. Are you surprised about this?

OS No, I’m surprised we were able to take it as far as we have. People will see the movie. There will be an uphill battle, because when the New York Times says don’t see this movie they are lobbying against it.

TA That also has an opposite effect. A lot of people will say, the way these guys are writing about the movie means there is something fishy here. It encourages people to see it.

RN It’s more worrying when the Village Voice is so negative.

OS The Voice for years has been doing that. They are not a liberal organisation in my mind. I think that they are pseudo-liberals. You can get into a whole argument about what it is to be a liberal, or a progressive in America. It’s nitpicking. Nitpicking.

RN So it’s like The Guardian here in relation to Venezuela?

TA The Guardian correspondent in Venezuela lives in the leafy suburbs of eastern Caracas and his reporting from Venezuela is totally biased.

RN You seem to be fascinated by the charisma of the Latin American ‘caudillo’, leaders such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. But Latin America is also the birthplace of social movements that have for a long time been fighting for change. How do you see the dynamic relationship between the two, between the leaders on the one hand and the social movements on the other?

TA These leaders will not be in power were it not for the social movements. There is a link between the two. The social movements in Bolivia helped create the Movement for Socialism, the party of Evo Morales that propelled him into power. The big social movements against the IMF in Venezuela that led to the massacre, the ‘Caracazo’, in which three thousand people were killed produced Chavez. The same movements occurred in Ecuador, in Paraguay. So I don’t see a big divide. Each depends on the other. This divide largely exists in the West where the social movements have died out because they weren’t able to achieve anything. There is hardly a social movement left now in Western Europe. A country like Italy, which had huge social movements – now all gone. Whereas, in South America, one reason they have lasted is because they have managed to achieve something, not a huge amount, but structural reforms to the system.

OS I would add, not only do I like ‘caudillos’ or strong men, that’s not the same as a dictator, he [Chavez] has obviously been elected. I much admire Nestor Kirchner, an intellectual with volition to do something. Because intellectuals tend to get lost in their will power. Kirchner was strong enough to carry through a reform based on his thinking on economic reform. He is a shining example of a hero to me. He said, himself, in the documentary, my friend Hugo should consider a successor, because too much of one man will backfire and I think that is the problem that Hugo is going to face. He’s too much in the news. He is too controversial. They are making an argument about Hugo Chavez, instead of the argument about right versus left in Latin America.

RN In your film you also portray Lula, which doesn’t have the same left wing credentials as the others, but in terms of international politics, in terms of integration in Latin America is very important. It seems that some people on the left sometimes lose sight of the big picture, of where things are going in the continent.

OS Yes, that’s why I urge you, that’s why I keep saying to people: think of the big picture. You guys get lost in these details and you end up eating each other up.

RN Why do you think a person like Chavez projects such a bad image in the United States, while Presidents like Uribe, who are actually, allegedly, involved in drug-related paramilitarism in Colombia, with human rights violations on a scale unparalleled in Latin America, gets such a good press?

TA Because Colombia and Uribe are allies of the United States, work with them, have participated in US-initiated actions in the region and so that’s fine. It was always thus in the past. Why did they topple Allende? Why did they support Pinochet? That policy, in a different way, is still going on. Chavez they hate because not only does he attacks them frontally, but he is also the elected president of a country with the largest oil reserves in the continent, and that oil means a lot to them. As many of their journalists say, if Chavez was in Paraguay they wouldn’t hate him so much. But the reason they hate him is because he is using the oil, and he is using it against them, and he is helping to give oil to some of the other Bolivarian republics. The Cubans were kept going when they did a trade of oil for doctors, and that they hate because it’s broken the isolation of the Cubans, and they help each other, they want to speak with one voice. That’s what our film shows, that’s never happened before. For the first time, leaders who disagree with each other have united and have said to the United States enough- this far and no further, we are not going to back down.

Roberto Navarrete is an editor of www.alborada.net, a website covering politics, media and culture in Latin America.

South of the Border is released in UK cinemas on Friday 30 July
www.southoftheborder.dogwoof.com

The Tipping Point Film Fund will hold a screening of South of the Border (including a panel discussion entitled: Radical Latin American leadership – what’s to be afraid of?) on Friday 30 July at 6:30 PM (details here).

A large part of the Concertación vote went to Marco Enríquez-Ominami (MEO), who obtained 20.1 per cent. MEO, who resigned from the Concertación and stood as an independent candidate, is a former Socialist Party deputy whose father, Miguel Enríquez, was the leader of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Movement of the Revolutionary Left / MIR). Miguel Enríquez was killed in 1974 fighting against the Pinochet dictatorship and is seen as an iconic figure of the left. The candidate of the Communist-led coalition Juntos Podemos (‘Together We Can’), Jorge Arrate, is a former Socialist Party minister who had left the Concertación. He got 6.2 per cent, a slight increase over the coalition’s results in the previous presidential election.

Whose defeat, whose victory?

While the Concertación’s defeat has been interpreted by many as a defeat for the left and a victory for Chile’s right, a closer look at recent electoral results reveal that this is not necessarily the case. While the right in Chile has maintained a consistently high vote (close to 45 per cent) since the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1989, the 44.1 per cent obtained by Piñera in the December 2009 first round is below what was achieved by the right in the 1989, 1999 and 2005 presidential elections.

More significantly, the results reflect a strong protest vote within the left of the Concertación (represented by MEO) and the extra-parliamentary left (represented by Arrate), which together obtained around 26 per cent of the vote. This reveals a deep dissatisfaction, especially among the younger electorate, with the Concertación’s uncritical continuation of the neoliberal economic model inherited from the dictatorship, and the slow pace of political reform of Pinochet’s 1980 constitution, which ensured the perpetuation of the neoliberal model. There is also widespread disillusionment with the market dominating areas such as education, health, pensions and the utilities. The Concertación did not respond to the electorate’s desire for real change, and compounded this by nominating an uncharismatic former president widely viewed as responsible for deepening the neoliberal reforms inherited from the dictatorship.

During its 20 years in government, the Concertación, has attempted to moderate the harsh social impact of the Pinochet dictatorship, which had transformed Chile from one of the least unequal countries in the continent to one of the most unequal. But it has still continued the dictatorship’s free-market model, centred on exporting primary goods, with mineral (primarily copper) exports accounting for about 60 per cent of Chile’s foreign earnings.

Chile’s mineral wealth had been nationalised in 1972 during Salvador Allende’s government, but Pinochet opened the sector to foreign investment. Codelco, the state-controlled copper mining company, now controls only 30 per cent of copper production in Chile; foreign companies account for most of the rest. In 2006 alone, foreign mining companies earned around US$20 billion, which not only exceeds their gross investment in mining in Chile during the past 30 years but is equal to about 60 per cent of the government’s budget for that year.

During his previous presidential period, Frei and his successors, Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, signed free trade agreements with the US, the EU and China, which have set Chile’s foreign policy on a diametrically-opposed path to most of its neighbours. This has made it impossible for Chile to participate in the South American Common Market (Mercosur), and other initiatives such as the Bank of the South, which seek economic integration for Latin American countries.

The right’s Coalition for Change alliance represents a political pact between Renovación Nacional (RN), a party representing Chile’s big business interests and Unión Democrática Independiente (UDI), an ideologically conservative party with a significant popular following. The party was created by Pinochet’s main ideologue, Jaime Guzman, who is closely linked to Opus Dei and other ideologically conservative Catholic sects. UDI is the largest party in the country with a large representation in Parliament (40 members, nine senators).

The alliance’s candidate, Sebastian Piñera, formerly a RN senator and one of Chile’s richest people, is the closest the country has to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Piñera’s fortune, estimated by Forbes at more than US$1 billion, was amassed during the Pinochet dictatorship, when his brother and former business partner, Jose Piñera, a labour minister under Pinochet, was the one who reformed the mining law, opening the mineral sector to private investment. Jose Piñera was also responsible for implementing a privatised compulsory pension scheme and a comprehensive liberalisation of labour laws, which set back a long history of gains by the trade union movement in Chile.

Sebastian Piñera’s business group owns stakes in several major Chilean companies in the energy, mining and retail sectors; it has 100 per cent control of Chilevision, a terrestrial TV channel; owns the largest airline in South America, Lan Chile; and owns the country’s most popular football team, Colo-Colo.

Piñera is a declared admirer of Alvaro Uribe’s right-wing government in Colombia and, if elected president in the second round of the Presidential election (underway as Red Pepper went to press), he is likely to align Chile with Colombia and other US allies in the region. This would represent a dangerous trend for the Latin American integration process that is being promoted by the Mercosur countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) and the countries of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

Political responsibility of the left

In addition to the Concertación, the left bears political responsibility for the current situation. The dispersion, confusion and demoralisation of its traditional popular power base can be attributed to a large extent to its inability to generate a wide united front of all the progressive anti-capitalist forces. It has still not recovered from the fragmentation caused by the repressive measures of the dictatorship, which exiled and physically eliminated its best leaders, and the slow insidious action of an electoral system that rewards coalitions and makes it virtually impossible for small parties to obtain parliamentary representation.

In the absence of a popular and democratic alternative to transform Chilean society, a vote for the Concertación represents the ‘lesser evil’. It currently offers the only means to contain the ability of Chile’s oligarchy to administer the one remaining enclave of political power outside their dominion – the government itself. At the time of writing, before the second-leg election result is known, it seems that the only chance of preventing the right’s victory in this and future elections lies in adopting a broad platform of renewal in the Concertación programme. The electoral arithmetics indicate that if Frei were able to attract around 90 per cent of Arrate’s vote and 75 per cent of MEO’s he would stand a chance of winning.

The reform programmes of both MEO and Arrate, representing the left critique of the Concertación, are comprehensive. They includes tax reform; the creation of a state-controlled pension provider; the end of the ‘bi-nominal’ electoral system; the recovery of state control over basic mineral resources (copper, lithium and water); strengthening the public education and health systems; environmental policies focused on people rather than short term profit; and a call for a constituent assembly that will lead to a new constitution to finally put an end to the authoritarian enclaves left by the dictatorship.

However, in the few weeks that have elapsed since its dismal performance in the first ballot, the Concertación has shown little evidence of responding to the discontent among its supporters. It has failed to reform its political leadership, and its discredited undemocratic practices make it uncertain as to whether it will be able to enthuse the protest vote in order to win in the second round.

So as Chileans prepare to vote once again the stage is set. A Piñera victory would mark a new stage in a long process of ideological erosion in Chile – the one that began with the overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected government in 1973 by Pinochet’s brutal US-backed forces. Responsibility for this erosion also lies with the Concertación, who by unquestioningly siding with the neoliberal project has both contributed to making people believe that there are no alternatives to the capitalist system, and destroyed the foundations of humanism and solidarity in parties such as the Socialists – the party of Salvador Allende – that had a long anti-capitalist tradition in Chile.

Roberto Navarrete is an editor of www.alborada.net, a website covering politics, media and culture in Latin America