UNEMPLOYMENT MAY be low, prices stable, and Chile’s economy predicted to expand by 6.6 per cent this year, not least because of the copper price boom in the world’s top producer of the metal. Yet Chile’s record of two decades of steady growth, of prudent fiscal policies, and its reputation as the region’s most socially and politically stable has not inoculated it from the sort of protests seen in countries like Greece and Spain where living standards are plummeting.
On the contrary, growth has been the spur. Students and workers have created a remarkable coalition to demand a fairer share of this deeply unequal society’s new wealth, their confidence, undoubtedly buoyed by that economic success. For three months, schools and universities have been convulsed by occupations in support of more state funding for education, better teacher training and an end to the two-tier voucher system for university that has created an apartheid system heavily privileging the rich.
The protests culminated in a two-day nationwide strike last week involving hundreds of thousands of transport and other public sector employees called out by the country’s largest union to back the students and a wider agenda that has given the movement a quasi-revolutionary dimension – calls for reform of the dictatorship-era constitution, popular referendums to give Chileans a direct voice, major changes to pensions, health care and labour legislation, and corporate tax increases to pay for education and health. The unrest has also been a lightning rod for wider protests from environmentalists to copper miners. Workers at some of the world’s biggest copper mines have staged strikes of their own to demand a bigger share of windfall profits.Widespread clashes with the police last week saw some 200 injured, with one student shot dead.
On Friday, Chile’s president Sebastian Pinera, head of a centre-right coalition, offered to negotiate. A year and a half into his term, the millionaire Pinera, who has reshuffled his cabinet twice and announced a package of educational reforms deemed grossly inadequate by the students, now has the worst poll ratings of any president since the days of dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet.
Expectations for the talks, if they happen, will be huge, the gulf almost unbridgeable. “It’s time to change the political system, the economic system, so there is a fairer redistribution of power and of wealth,” insists the students’ charismatic leader Camila Vallejo (23). That, however, is not a language Pinera understands.