The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America's Neoliberal Era

CHAPTER SEVEN. Chile: Repression and Restructuring

The Chilean political panorama, at least until quite recently, has been devoid of major popular protests. This scenario is all the more puzzling when one considers the high degree of ideological polarization, the powerful labor movements, and the militant Marxist parties that are the traditional hallmarks of Chilean politics. Today Chile stands out in the region for its relative political and economic stability (Rindefjäll 2009; Siavelis 2008). A general consensus has been built around the neoliberal model. Unlike in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, where governments have generally sought improvements to political representation in an attempt to diffuse opposition to neoliberalism, posttransition governments in Chile have instead extended socioeconomic rights. Nevertheless, the level of inequality in the country continues to deepen. After Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia, Chile is Latin America’s most unequal society. Yet latent social discontent has not been met with more protest but less, as citizens gradually disengage from politics (Kurtz 2004a, 2004b; Posner 2008). Why has Chile not experienced the same intensity of antineoliberal sentiment and popular mobilization as Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia? Scholars have generally attributed Chile’s current dearth of popular protest to its macroeconomic success. More precisely, the government’s commitment to poverty alleviation is argued to have limited the extent of antineoliberal resistance in the country (Silva 2009). A second line of analysis suggests that the social and economic dislocations associated with neoliberal reforms have undermined the basis of collective action in the country (Kurtz 2004a; Posner 2008; Taylor 2006). An alternative argument is that Chile’s lingering authoritarianism translates into governmental intolerance of dissent (Agüero 1998). Certainly all three factors are crucial in explaining CHAPTER SEVEN Chile Repression and Restructuring 102 the general pattern of demobilization in Chilean society. However, such explanations fail to account for the diversity of experiences with and reactions to economic restructuring across social sectors. In particular, neoliberal reforms have provoked indigenous opposition, especially among Mapuche groups located in the south (Haughney 2006). Mapuche grievances center around the construction of hydroelectric dams and private logging on contested indigenous lands. In a dynamic broadly similar to that in Peru, indigenous activism in Chile is geographically segmented, fragmented in structure, and confrontational in nature. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that Chile’s distinctive pattern of indigenous and popular protest is the product of its strong political institutions , which contain and control conflict, in conjunction with its historic mode of popular political incorporation. Indigenous groups, which lack institutionalized channels of representation, tend to be far more given to mobilization in response to neoliberalism than other popular-sector actors that have been able to establish or maintain institutional channels to express their grievances. At the same time, Chile’s strong legacy of classbased integration has impeded the construction of a potent new master frame of protest based on appeals to ethnicity. This has limited the capacity of the indigenous movement to build a broad-based antineoliberal coalition. The chapter also argues that government policies that have attempted to address indigenous peoples’ socioeconomic demands while flatly denying their broader political claims have exacerbated indigenous– state tensions in the country. The chapter begins with an examination of Chile’s neoliberal experiment and the impact on patterns of collective behavior. The massive crisisinduced protest cycle of 1983–1986 is explored in detail as well as the conspicuous absence of major popular protests in the posttransition period. The largely unexpected wave of protests from secondary students, contract workers, and indigenous groups under the administration of President Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010) is also explored. The second section of the chapter examines the country’s historic pattern of popular political incorporation and the way in which it has framed and constrained collective identities and protest repertoires. The final section of the chapter provides an in-depth look at the emergence of the Mapuche movement, arguably the country’s leading force for change, in response to the promises and failures of market democracy. Authoritarianism, Market Reform, and Protest Activity The brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989) firmly entrenched Chile’s neoliberal model and the domestic institutions Chile 103 underpinning it. Organized workers and peasants were among the primary victims of Chile’s aggressive program of privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization. The process of deindustrialization that resulted from the steady removal of protectionist barriers to foreign competition saw close to a third of public-sector employees lose their jobs and a collapse in...