Chile's New President Already Facing Student Protests.

AutorWitte-Lebhar, Benjamin

A month-and-a-half into his return as president, Sebastian Pinera--a billionaire businessman and political conservative who first led Chile from 2010-2014--is already on a collision course, it appears, with a familiar adversary: fired up student protestors.

Under the banner "Chile ya decidio" (Chile already decided), the influential Confederacion de Estudiantes de Chile (Confederation of Chilean Students, CONFECH) and its partner organizations held a major demonstration on April 19 in downtown Santiago. Student groups said that approximately 120,000 people turned out for the event. The office of the intendente (appointed regional governor) for the greater Santiago area estimated the crowd size at just 30,000. It also reported that police made 180 arrests and that one student suffered serious injury after being hit by a police vehicle.

The march drew inevitable--albeit premature--comparisons to the wave of student protests that washed over the country starting in 2011, during Pinera's previous presidency. The "Chilean Winter" movement, as some in the international press dubbed it, torpedoed the conservative leader's approval numbers and eventually helped propel his predecessor, Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010; 2014-2018) of the Partido Socialista (Socialist Party, PS), back into power.

Under the leadership of people such as Camila Vallejo, Giorgio Jackson, and Gabriel Boric--all of them now members of the Camara de Diputados, the lower house of Chile's Congress--the education reform movement of 2011-2102 called for deep structural changes to the country's education system. Among other things, they demanded that higher education be available, cost-free, for anyone who qualifies, and that for-profit schools be barred from operating.

Seven years later, as their "Chile ya decidio" slogan suggests, CONFECH and its partners have a different agenda: to protect the partial gains they secured during Bachelet's recently concluded second term. Of those, the for-profit issue is the most pressing due to a controversial ruling issued March 27--just two weeks after Pinera replaced Bachelet as president--by the country's Tribunal Constitucional (Constitutional Court, TC).

Cost-free education

Bachelet didn't go as far in reforming the education system as some student organizations and left-wing lawmakers would have liked. But she did pass legislation guaranteeing cost-free university or vocational school education for students in the bottom 60% of the...

Para continuar leyendo

Solicita tu prueba

VLEX utiliza cookies de inicio de sesión para aportarte una mejor experiencia de navegación. Si haces click en 'Aceptar' o continúas navegando por esta web consideramos que aceptas nuestra política de cookies. ACEPTAR