Introduction
Since the mid-2000s massive waves of student protest have succeeded in closing many Chilean schools and universities and drawing millions of students and sympathisers into the streets. Large student protests are not unprecedented in Chile. However, the most recent waves are unique in their massive proportions and in the fact that they have mobilised schools and universities with little or no tradition of activism.
As I explain in greater detail in the next section, existing studies suggest that the exceptional scope of recent student protests reflects the explosion of accumulated discontent with neoliberalism. Some works also emphasise temporally proximate political events and internal movement shifts that more directly triggered peak episodes of mobilisation. Focusing on the period from 1990 to 2011, this article complements these perspectives by highlighting how longer-term processes of intra-movement identity and organisational change contributed to the massification of the movement by facilitating its diffusion to schools and universities that had not previously been mobilised.
In particular, the article contends that student frustration with the unwillingness of authorities to substantially reform the military-era educational system created a growing cleavage between students and the political establishment, contributing to major innovations in movement identity and organisation. Students in traditionally militant universities and high schools increasingly adopted a generational identity opposed to traditional political parties and reformed their organisations to reflect the quest for substantive democratisation that they felt party elites had sacrificed in the name of stability and economic growth. Over time, these changes made the movement more appealing to students in institutions lacking a tradition of mobilisation, and were effectively deployed by activists during the major post-2004 protest waves. Protest thus diffused in tandem with a collective identity and an organisational approach that embodied that identity.
Beyond shedding additional light on the Chilean student movement, these arguments reinforce and further develop some key insights of the broader literature on social movement diffusion. First, they illustrate that cultural and organisational innovations in the way activists approach their struggle can at times help to accelerate and expand diffusion by making their movements more appealing to populations not previously mobilised. Second, they underscore that movement innovations are shaped through ongoing interactions with the state and political parties. Conflict and frustration, sometimes extending over several years, can be a seedbed for important internal changes. Finally, and perhaps more than other works, the article highlights the fact that the significance of particular innovations may not become manifest until years later, when other conditions also come to favour their diffusion.
The article draws on 22 interviews with student leaders representing different graduating classes and organisations at both the high school and university levels as well as newspaper coverage and secondary literature. It treats secondary and university protests as comprising one social movement, for a number of reasons. First, although direct collaboration has been limited, secondary and university students have influenced each other through mutual observation and some degree of emulation. Second, there is significant membership continuity in the sense that many high school activists subsequently become engaged in university activism. Finally, although their specific demands are different, secondary and university students have increasingly perceived themselves to be struggling towards common goals: the de-privatisation of education and the transformation of the post-Pinochet political system.
Explaining the Contemporary Chilean Student Movement
Existing analyses of the Chilean student movement suggest that the exceptional scope of recent student protests reflects underlying social grievances against neoliberalism.Footnote 1 They stress how discontent with the free market economic model generated a crisis of political legitimacy that the movement both tapped into and gave greater public expression to. Forged during the military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), this model was largely continued under the subsequent democratically-elected governments, even those of the centre-left Concertación coalition, which governed between 1990 and 2010.Footnote 2
While making important contributions, these analyses generally do not delve into the question of how discontent with neoliberalism developed into student mobilisation, or account for how seemingly constant grievances have fuelled mass protest some years and not others. The exceptions are the works of Lustig, Mizala and Silva; Donoso; Kubal; and Scherman, Arriagada and Valenzuela, which also emphasise the impact of temporally proximate external events and internal movement shifts.
Lustig et al.’s essay on the 2011 university protests points to activists’ adoption of inequality as a broad interpretative schema, or ‘master frame’, which helped legitimise student demands and put education at the centre of the national agenda.Footnote 3 Donoso's research on the 2006 secondary student protests also stresses the importance of framing and, furthermore, examines the impact of organisational mergers, mechanisms of internal direct democracy, and the political opportunities provided by President Michelle Bachelet's promise of a ‘government of citizens’.Footnote 4 Kubal, for her part, emphasises issue-specific opportunities, in particular, expert criticism of the secondary educational system, in promoting the 2006 protests.Footnote 5 Finally, Scherman et al. suggest that intensive use of social media in 2011 served to communicate grievances and coordinate movement activities, thus helping to expand protest.Footnote 6
These works usefully balance the predominantly structural orientation of the literature on the Chilean student movement, but their focus on explaining the 2006 or 2011 protest cycles leads them to downplay the longer-term processes that preceded these cycles and that provided crucial groundwork for the massification of protest.Footnote 7
Thus, the article seeks to complement the existing scholarship with an analysis of the movement's development between 1990 and 2011. This longer-term approach sheds light on how a pattern of recurring student frustration with official responses to demands for educational reform helped reshape the movement's identity and organisational structures toward greater autonomy from political parties, stronger embeddedness in youth culture, and more bottom-up forms of decision-making. These changes made the movement more attractive to students in schools and universities with little history of activism, facilitating its eventual diffusion to those sites. What diffused, therefore, was not just protest but a bundle of ideas and practices.
These arguments contribute to a broader scholarly discussion of the dynamics of social movement diffusion, understood as the spread of collective contention to institutions and social networks previously unengaged in the movement. This process entails the emergence of organisational, tactical and/or cultural innovations among some activists, their communication to other activists or potential activists, and finally their adoption by the latter.Footnote 8 Diffusion is not synonymous with growth because a movement can also expand through intensified participation at sites already engaged in it. As scholars have noted, however, diffusion can be a crucial catalyst for growth, helping to transform local protests into nationwide or even transnational cycles of contention.Footnote 9 This article reinforces, refines and extends some important themes put forward by the diffusion literature.
One of the key ideas confirmed here is that some innovations travel better than others. Distilling the insights of the literature, Soule identifies a series of characteristics of the innovation itself that affect how readily it will be adopted by other groups, including its strategic advantages in pressuring authorities, its cultural resonance with potential adopters and its ease of use.Footnote 10 The idea of resonance is particularly relevant here. While diffusion may involve adaptation and reinterpretation, and not simply emulation, it occurs more readily when the innovation is already ‘compatible with the experiences values, ideas and needs’ of potential participants at new sites.Footnote 11 The analysis of the Chilean student movement developed in this article underscores this point, demonstrating that the movement's diffusion was facilitated by the fact that innovations in identity and organisation appealed to students regardless of partisan affiliation and ideology. The movement diffused, in other words, because participation in protest was part of a broader socio-political and cultural experience with which students identified.Footnote 12
The present study also reinforces the notion that movement innovations are shaped, not in isolation, but through interaction with authorities, potentially extending over many years. Diffusion theorists argue that the state's responses to protest create strategic constraints and incentives that the movement must react to.Footnote 13 In addition, they contribute to shaping activists’ worldviews and normative notions of justice and politics. Thus, movement-state interactions generate processes of political learning that drive internal movement change, both with regard to short-term tactical shifts and longer-term identity transformations.Footnote 14 In the case of Chilean students, the repeated defeat of demands for structural change in education, even by governments dominated by centrist and leftist parties with an important presence in the movement, prompted activists to seek greater autonomy and to build an identity and modes of organisation that appealed to students as a new political generation.Footnote 15
Finally, the article highlights an aspect of diffusion that has received less scholarly attention: crucial internal innovations may not initially have a major impact in terms of expanding the scope of the movement. It may only be in subsequent years, when other conditions, such as external threats or opportunities, galvanise the movement's constituents into action, that the importance of an innovation becomes evident.Footnote 16 The identity and organisational shifts that occurred in the Chilean student movement during the late 1990s and early 2000s would encourage rapid diffusion only several years later, when combined with other, more proximate factors.
Student Protest and State Resistance to Change (1990–2004)
Student protest became a truly massive phenomenon starting in the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the democratic period, traditional bastions of student activism had been locked in an ongoing struggle with the state involving recurrent protests. Students found authorities relatively closed to their demands, offering short-term concessions, but failing to undertake the more structural reforms they wanted. In some cases, they even adopted reforms contradicting the spirit of student grievances. This led to a pattern of constant student contention and, at times, the massification of protest in schools and universities with a tradition of activism.
These conflicts had roots in the 1980s, when the military regime undertook dramatic changes to Chile's educational system. Until that point this system had been primarily public, centralised and free of charge. However, Pinochet sought to transform education in a way that paralleled the market-oriented changes implemented in other areas.
At the secondary level, the regime transferred state schools to local governments and created a new system through which private schools could receive public subsidies in accordance with their enrolment, as long as they did not charge for tuition. At the university level, public institutions started charging for tuition and public funding increasingly shifted from guaranteed allocations to competitive grants. Institutions belonging to the Consejo de Rectores (Council of University Presidents, CRUCH), a group of public and private research universities formed before the 1980s, had to compete for funding with newer private universities. Among the CRUCH universities there was additional competition for scholarships and student loans. Private post-secondary institutions were given autonomy to set admission standards and tuition, and accreditation was voluntary. The principle of state subsidiarity underpinning these reforms was enshrined in the constitution.
Student organisations, which had historically been strong and left-leaning in CRUCH institutions and public magnet high schools, were repressed. Many activists were tortured, killed or disappeared. Small groups of students continued to organise politically, however, by presenting themselves as cultural entities promoting artistic expression such as music and theatre. During the democratic transition these organisations gained visibility and succeeded in ‘recuperating’ centros de estudiantes (hereafter centros) and student federations from state sponsored student groups, and staging large protests.Footnote 17
The return to democracy in 1990 meant the rise to power of the Concertación. In its early years in government the coalition proactively reformed several aspects of the educational system. At all levels of education, it increased public spending. At the secondary level, it also required each school to have a centro to represent students vis-à-vis school authorities and, more controversially, allowed subsidised private schools to charge fees. At the university level, it eliminated restrictions on academic freedom and faculty governance. Subsequent reforms were in many cases influenced by growing student protest, although their design often conflicted with student demands, as discussed further below.
While these reforms increased enrolment (especially among the poor), they did little to attenuate educational inequalities. The continued decentralisation of secondary education contributed to persistent differences in educational quality and access to higher education based on family income.Footnote 18 Meanwhile, student fees grew in real terms.Footnote 19 At the university level, increases in funding lagged behind enrolment, impeding an effective response to serious deficits in faculty, infrastructure and student aid.Footnote 20 To confront these challenges, university authorities approved substantial hikes in tuition fees, which in turn fomented demand for student loans, generating a rising problem of student debt.
This situation helped fuel student protest. During the 1990s, most of this activity was at the university level, where federations within individual CRUCH universities led annual mobilisations. These campaigns usually involved only a few hundred students and little supra-institutional coordination, but in certain years, particularly 1992, 1996 and 1997, there were more coordinated efforts that brought together several universities, as discussed below.
In 1992 half of the public CRUCH universities mobilised for about a month, demanding a solution to the problem of high tuition. They proposed an arancel diferenciado, or variable tuition based on payment capacity. Despite its progressive orientation, the Concertación did not embrace this idea. Instead, in 1993 the government reformed the existing student loan system and renamed it Fondo Solidario de Crédito Universitario (Solidarity Fund for Student Loans, hereafter Fondo Solidario). The Fondo Solidario, still in existence, is a public system of favourable loans for CRUCH students. The reform expanded its resources but also allowed universities to sell loans to private banks, which would then have the right to collect payments. To lessen student discontent with the latter measure, the government increased scholarship funding for the following year and promised to work on a more comprehensive reform.
A larger wave of protests broke out in 1996, again driven by the high cost of university education. To a greater extent than in 1992, students attempted to coordinate collective action. To do so they revived the Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile (Confederation of Chilean Students, CONFECH), an informal mechanism of CRUCH inter-federation coordination that had been created during the anti-Pinochet protests of the 1980s but had remained inoperative since the early 1990s. The CONFECH succeeded in mobilising almost all the CRUCH universities for a little over a month. Eventually, the government granted increases in public funding and renewed its earlier promise to push for substantive university reform.
The following year the government proposed the Ley Marco de Universidades Estatales (Ley Marco), which was presented as the broad reform the government had promised. Nevertheless, the bill failed to substantially increase state funding for public universities or create an arancel diferenciado. To press for changes to the bill, the CONFECH coordinated national mobilisations, framed as part of a broader quest to make a cleaner break with Pinochet's privatising legacy.Footnote 21 Large protests, a few summoning tens of thousands of students, were part of a campaign that dragged on for almost two months and involved, to differing degrees, almost all the CRUCH universities.
Eventually, the movement lost steam. The government's decision to award larger budget increases to universities in Santiago, the capital city, contributed to this process by aggravating regional and ideological divisions within the CONFECH.Footnote 22 However, protests against the proposed Ley Marco continued, ultimately forcing the government in 2000 to withdraw the bill and invite students to collaborate in formulating a new proposal. CRUCH student activists’ hopes to advance their proposal for an arancel diferenciado were dashed the following year when the Concertación proposed a new system of private student loans.Footnote 23 Nationwide university protests erupted in response. Though they succeeded in stalling the bill, activists were not able to force authorities to offer a more favourable proposal.
Subsequent years brought additional protests, but they were isolated efforts limited to individual universities. Meanwhile, educational costs and student indebtedness continued to mount. Systematic, comparable tuition data are unavailable prior to 1997, but between that year and 2004, tuition at CRUCH universities grew by 50 per cent.Footnote 24 Between 1994 and 2004 the number of Fondo Solidario borrowers grew by roughly 40 per cent.Footnote 25 Payment delinquency averaged 43 per cent across the different CRUCH institutions. In a third of these universities it exceeded 50 per cent, in one case reaching 85 per cent.Footnote 26
During the 1990s, secondary students had been more politically quiescent than their university counterparts. Discontent in public high schools had been brewing over poor infrastructure, insufficient scholarships and the authoritarian practices of some administrators, but had not resulted in much collective action.Footnote 27 Even a controversial plan to lengthen the school day failed to elicit a massive response.
However, a major protest wave did emerge in 2001, triggered by delays in delivering the pase escolar, hereafter pase, a government subsidised school transport pass then administered by private companies, and more stringent rules for their use. Secondary students demanded that administration of the pase be returned to the state and that students be able to use public transport free of charge. Known as El Mochilazo, in reference to student backpacks, these protests originated in magnet public schools in Santiago but expanded rapidly to other public schools in the capital and other large metropolitan areas.Footnote 28 Tens of thousands of students stormed the streets for a month.Footnote 29 Leading them was the Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios (Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students, ACES), a new national coordinating body.
Students succeeded in forcing the government to reassume administration of the pase, but failed in their quest for free transportation. The government's response divided the movement between groups who wished to prolong the struggle and others who felt the partial victory made it politically unfeasible to continue. Protests continued in subsequent years, focused on the implementation of changes in the university admissions exam and the extension of the academic day, as well as the continuing demand for free transport, but on a smaller scale than in 2001.
The Shaping of Movement Innovations (1990–2004)
During this period, key innovations emerged in schools and universities locked in struggles with the state, including a distinct generational political identity independent of traditional partisan loyalties, and more bottom-up forms of organisation. These changes reflected normative meanings students derived from their interactions with the state and the need to sync movement practices with new youth cultural and political sensibilities. For analytical purposes the discussion below separates identity, which refers to ideas and culture, from organisation, which involves the character of decision-making processes. However, in practice the changes in these areas were interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
Identity
The return to democracy in 1990 strengthened the presence of the Centre and Left political parties that had led the student opposition to Pinochet in centros and federations, giving prominence to partisan political identities within the movement.Footnote 30
However, in the early years of the decade a number of phenomena converged to undermine the position of parties within secondary and university institutions where political activism had traditionally been strong. Party factionalism, and corruption scandals at the university level, fostered an image of parties as manipulative and self-serving.Footnote 31 More importantly, the Concertación failed to achieve (or even, for the most part, pursue) significant policy change. The persistence of student debt, as well as deficits in the quality and infrastructure of education at all levels, generated student discontent with the coalition, as illustrated by large secondary and university protests described in the previous section. For left-leaning students, who comprised the bulk of the activists, educational policy represented more of a continuation than a break with the system inherited from Pinochet. They felt that student demands for change were being subordinated to elite consensus, resulting in the acquiescence to the role of markets in education.Footnote 32
Student dissatisfaction with policy and politics came to be conjoined with cultural renewal. The activities organised by student governing bodies and party-based student groups tended to feature mostly 1960s–80s hippy cultural idioms, but newer forms of expression, such as Punk, Goth, Hip hop and Grunge, were coming to dominate youth culture.Footnote 33 Many student activists viewed traditional left culture as passé and embodying a Left that had failed. According to a student leader, secondary students generally viewed traditional parties as ‘alien, old, depressed, and unattractive’ and the adult Left as anchored in ‘a culture of defeat’.Footnote 34 At the university level, prominent student leaders viewed their own party's leaders as ‘ridiculous geezers’.Footnote 35 Even for radical groups, the idea of cultural rupture was important. As one interviewee put it, ‘we were not a replica of the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario, Revolutionary Left Movement, a Marxist insurrectional group formed in 1965] and other old “ultra” that had always existed…we had a different, new, outlook’.Footnote 36
These perceptions contributed by mid-decade to a crisis of representation within the movement.Footnote 37 Largely discredited, parties found support only among a small proportion of students. Concertación parties, in control of a majority of student government bodies during the early 1990s, were the first to be affected.Footnote 38
The resulting political space at both the secondary and university levels was filled by the Communist Party (PC), an opposition party, and rogue factions of the Socialist Party (PS), as well as myriad new small independent Marxist groups to the left of the Concertación and the PC. The latter included, among others, the Movimiento de Estudiantes por la Reforma (Movement of Students for Reform, MER) and the Asambleas de Estudiantes de Izquierda (Leftist Students’ Assemblies, EEII), both university-based, and the SurDA, which was mainly university-based but also had a secondary school presence. Even further to the left were small autonomist groups (colectivos) of anarchist inspiration, such as the Coordinación Revolucionaria de Estudiantes Autónomos (Revolutionary Coordination of Autonomous Students, CREA), a secondary student group, and semi-clandestine groups favouring a strategy of direct action. The latter included the Lautaro Youth Movement and the MIR, both of which organised secondary and university students. An exception was the Catholic University (PUC), a stronghold of the Right, where the Movimiento Gremialista (Guild Movement, MG), an organisation with ties to the right-wing Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union Party, UDI) gained traction.
Ideological and strategic differences prevailed among rising groups, generating considerable factionalism. However, at the same time, they shared a feeling of constituting a new political generation that would bring deeper democracy.Footnote 39 Student activists, according to one interviewee, felt they represented ‘a new wave of democratisation’.Footnote 40 This entailed more than just policy change; it involved the transformation of political practices. As another interviewee recalled, ‘parties always wanted to accumulate, instead we sought to socialise power’.Footnote 41
Given the waning prestige of traditional parties and the growth of autonomist identities in both the secondary and university contexts, activists with strong ties to such parties tended to publicly de-emphasise their partisan militancy.Footnote 42 The relationship between adult party leadership and student cadres became more tenuous and dependent on personal links, and overall movement strategies developed with less party interference.Footnote 43
In the early 2000s the trend away from parties deepened, affecting the entire political spectrum. In 2003, for example, conservative activists in the PUC began to stir against the MG, which they viewed as too beholden to the UDI, and several student PC cadres were expelled or left the party for defying party orders.Footnote 44 Although the specific causes behind these rifts were different, they all reflected a growing unwillingness of students to subordinate themselves to party structures.
Between 2003 and 2005, as traditional parties faded into the background, leftist autonomist organisations began to take centre stage in the movement.Footnote 45 Former members of the PC and autonomist and revolutionary groups joined forces with independent Left activists to form two new autonomous organisations, the Nueva Izquierda (New Left) and the Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left). Anarchists formed the Federación de Estudiantes Libertarios (Federation of Libertarian Students, FEL). These and other similar organisations established a presence at both the secondary and university levels. The process was not linear, nor did it preclude the presence of party militants in positions of leadership, but it meant that partisan identity became increasingly overshadowed by a generational identity built outside and in opposition to the traditional political system.
Organisation
The crisis of student representation had organisational reverberations starting in the mid-1990s. In a number of CRUCH universities, including the Universities of Chile, Santiago and Concepción, centros and federations, traditionally run by party organisations, could not muster electoral quorums and simply collapsed. Student government elicited little enthusiasm.Footnote 46
The ‘refounding’ of student government institutions was intensely debated within CRUCH institutions. Some factions argued that discussion of any organisation beyond the centros had to await the revitalisation of the movement at the grassroots, while others felt that university-wide federations needed to lead this process.Footnote 47
Eventually, a majority of activists agreed to rebuild the federations, but with a different structure, giving more power to student bases and creating spaces for greater representation of political minorities, independents and colectivos.Footnote 48 According to one activist, ‘the political structures of the movement were shadowy spaces characterised by party quotas and demands for government and party positions…to change that we needed political discussion to be out in the open for everyone to see’.Footnote 49 This led to the adoption of new organisational forms, such as open federation meetings, direct student elections, proportional representation elections and higher quorums for ratification of decisions. These changes became bylaws in university centros and federations and also influenced the CONFECH's informal rules.
Student leaders were aware that the universities where activism was high (i.e., CRUCH institutions) contained only a fraction of the total enrolment in higher education and tended to represent students from better-off backgrounds.Footnote 50 Consequently, they assisted efforts to organise students in some non-CRUCH universities.Footnote 51 The new centros and federations that arose in these universities adopted the new CRUCH institutional features.Footnote 52
At the secondary level, there were two coordinating bodies, the Asamblea de Centros de Alumnos de Santiago (Assembly of Centros de Estudiantes from Santiago, ACAS) and the Federación de Estudiantes Secundarios de Santiago (Federation of Secondary Students of Santiago, FESES). The ACAS was the official federation of centros, while the FESES had arisen during the 1980s to lead student opposition to Pinochet. Although the FESES had greater legitimacy in the eyes of most students, it collapsed during the 1990s, eventually giving rise to changes that were even more innovative than those occurring at the university level.
Toward the end of the decade, some activists sought to revive the FESES, but anarchist-inspired groups in public magnet schools urged more radical change. They argued that the organisation's federative structure needed to give way to a coordination of grassroots assemblies, which they viewed as a shift from representative to direct democracy.Footnote 53 This idea led in 2001 to the creation of the ACES, conceptualised as a series of regional and national meetings in which spokespersons representing different school-level student assemblies coordinated tactical decisions. Decisions taken at these meetings had to be ratified by each of the participating grassroots assemblies.Footnote 54 The massiveness of ACES-led demonstrations that year, after a decade of quiescence and organisational crisis, suggested that the new model had struck a chord among students.
The ACES was weakened by internal disputes after 2001, but persisted alongside the ACAS, at least in part because its highly participatory, bottom-up approach to decision-making was integrated into student political culture. During the period, several secondary centros and student political organisations adopted bottom-up structures for ratifying decisions.Footnote 55 Moreover, regional ACES coordination persisted, leading in 2003 to a handful of large protest events.
In sum, the new organisational forms at both the secondary and university levels reflected and embodied an emerging movement identity, in which students saw themselves as a political generation unburdened by the vices of the democratic transition generation and determined to deepen democracy.
Movement Expansion and the Deployment of Earlier Innovations (2005–11)
A new wave of student contention arose in the mid-2000s, with events that dwarfed even the largest protests of the past. Although it tailed off after 2007, an even more massive wave arose in 2011. Figure 1 depicts the year-by-year trajectory of student protest between 1990 and 2011, based on news reports.Footnote 56 The data represent the sum of the number of individuals participating in student-led protest events on each day of the year in question.Footnote 57 Although some of this growth reflected the intensification of protest in institutions where it was already occurring, it was also a product of diffusion to hundreds of other schools and universities with little or no tradition of political mobilisation.
Figure 1. Trajectory of Student Protest 1990–2011 (in thousands)
As other scholars argue, the movement's growth during this period reflects in part the impact of certain proximate factors, including political opportunities, organisational mergers, framing innovations and effective use of social media.Footnote 58 In addition, as emphasised below, the threat associated with the rise of a centre-right government in 2010, as well as the government's hard-line response to various protest events in 2011, were important factors in movement expansion.
Nevertheless, these explanations fail to recognise how prior movement innovations laid essential groundwork for the student movement's expansion by providing an identity and organisational approach that facilitated its diffusion to new sites. Activists were able to deploy the innovations of the prior decade effectively in part because they continued to resonate, given the failure of the state to respond to student demands with structural reform. Furthermore, by democratising the movement, the earlier innovations contributed to an ongoing process of bottom-up tactical innovation that made the movement exciting and appealing to broad swaths of the student population.
The eruption of student protest
Chile experienced large waves of student protest in 2005, 2006 and 2011. The first involved mainly university students, the second secondary students and the third, once again, university students. Each was larger than the previous one and each was prompted by a somewhat different combination of factors.
The 2005 protests were set off by the threats and opportunities generated by a proposed reform of student loans.Footnote 59 The so-called Créditos con Aval del Estado (State Guaranteed Student Loans, CAE) would parallel the Fondo Solidario by offering state-guaranteed private loans to students with accredited need and merit attending any higher education institution, including institutos profesionales.Footnote 60 Although it would make credit more widely available, the CAE's interest rate was higher than that of the Fondo Solidario (7 per cent versus 2 per cent). The bill, rooted in a proposal that had provoked protests in CRUCH universities in 2001, elicited different reactions from students. CRUCH students viewed it as a stealth effort to introduce private student loans into public universities and strengthen private universities.Footnote 61 In non-CRUCH institutions, it was better received, but activists sought to lower the interest rate and increase regulation of private lenders.Footnote 62
While engaged in negotiations with the state, activists called for national protests to increase their leverage. The CONFECH and the Confederación de Estudiantes de Universidades Privadas (Confederation of Students of Private Universities, CONFESUP) led them. The latter, which had debuted during the Ley Marco protests, represented the oldest and most politically organised non-CRUCH universities. The involvement of the CONFESUP meant that for the first time substantial numbers of students from non-CRUCH universities joined CRUCH students in nationwide protests, the largest involving hundreds of thousands of students.
Nevertheless, the CAE became law by mid-2005. Non-CRUCH students were not altogether displeased. Although the interest rate was still higher than that of the Fondo Solidario, they had achieved an increase in the number of loans available and the promise of vigorous regulation.Footnote 63 For CRUCH activists, the CAE was a defeat.Footnote 64 New CRUCH protests ensued and the state conceded a 40 per cent budget increase for Fondo Solidario and scholarships, which limited demand for CAE loans. Student leaders thought this was a ‘band-aid’ solution:Footnote 65 the subsequent trajectory of CAE loans showed that these measures were in fact not a permanent solution to the problem of student financing. Between 2006 and 2010, CAE borrowers increased ten-fold to 213,350.Footnote 66 By 2010 the delinquency rate of early cohorts of borrowers was over 30 per cent.Footnote 67 For recent graduates, payments were an average of 174 per cent of income, a figure vastly exceeding that of student loan programmes in other countries.Footnote 68
The following year even larger protests occurred, this time led mainly by secondary students. The Concertación's apparent openness to deeper educational reform was one of the triggers for the so-called Revolución de los Pingüinos (Penguin Revolution).Footnote 69 In fact, ironically, the frame of ‘educational inequality’ that activists used to mobilise students came from discussions sponsored by the state.Footnote 70
During 2005 the Santiago office of the Ministry of Education (SEREMI de Educación – Región Metropolitana) held several meetings with ACAS and ACES representatives from around the country to discuss potential reforms. Drawing on the work of Concertación experts, the meetings generated a diagnosis of secondary education that identified the decentralisation of public schools in the 1980s and the decision in the early 1990s to allow subsidised private schools to charge fees as key problems.Footnote 71 Decentralisation had reinforced sharp differences in school quality based on the socio-economic level of the neighbourhood, while the fee system had fostered the explosion of private schools offering subpar education while profiting from government subsidies.
Secondary activists saw the 2006 election of Michelle Bachelet, a politician perceived to represent the Concertación's more progressive wing and who had campaigned on promises of broader social participation, as an opportunity for reform. In their view, the election created a more favourable context to overhaul the national constitution in the direction of de-municipalisation: eliminate profit seeking in private schools subsidised by the state and enhance student input in education policy.Footnote 72 To their dismay, once in office Bachelet did not pursue such reforms.Footnote 73
The first 2006 secondary protests were triggered by local problems (bus fares and school infrastructural deficits), but activists seized the moment and called assemblies across the country to discuss broader issues.Footnote 74 The result was a list of demands that not only addressed relatively narrow problems, such as the extension of academic hours and university entry exams, but also called for the re-nationalisation of public schools, the elimination of profit from subsidised private schools and, eventually, the elimination of such subsidies altogether. As the movement grew into a national phenomenon, the ACAS and ACES merged into the Asambleas de Estudiantes Secundarios (Secondary Student Assemblies, AES), which replicated the structure of the 2001 ACES.Footnote 75
A major protest campaign ensued. Hundreds of thousands of students across the country mobilised for months. Information travelled widely and rapidly through online photologs and blogs, prompting students to visit occupations, participate in virtual discussions and emulate the most attractive collective action repertoires.Footnote 76 In less than a month, protest had spread to hundreds of public, publicly-subsidised, and entirely private schools, both in major cities and more rural areas, such as Buin, San Fernando and the remote Pozo Almonte.Footnote 77 Thus, contention expanded well beyond the metropolitan public schools that had protested during El Mochilazo. Although relations between secondary and university students were uneasy, the latter staged solidarity protests and, together with teachers, joined some demonstrations.Footnote 78
The compelling slogan ‘no al lucro’ (roughly, no to profiteering), which would become the student movement's best-known rallying cry, was added to the broad frame of inequality. The new slogan reflected moral outrage about a system that allowed private businesses to profit from public funds supposedly dedicated to education.
Expressions of support from some Concertación politicians and the inclusion of student representatives in the Presidential Educational Advisory Commission, a body mandated to amend the constitutional provisions on education, augured success. While some groups rejected participation in the Advisory Commission, viewing it as co-optation, others accepted. Their hopes gave way to bitter disappointment when the final report of the commission excluded two key student demands: de-municipalisation and the effective elimination of profits in state-subsidised schools. Despite activists’ disavowal of the proposal, it was pushed through Congress in 2007, becoming the Ley General de Educación (General Education Law, LGE). Even for activists close to the Concertación, the LGE was a betrayal. As one commented, ‘the photo of Bachelet holding hands with the Right after signing the LGE was emblematic…We were devastated’.Footnote 79
Protests against the LGE and CAE continued between 2007 and 2009, but their size dwindled. During this time there were efforts at expanding supra-institutional coordination, leading, for example, to the short-lived Asociación de Estudiantes Universitarios y Secundarios (Association of University and Secondary Students, ACEUS). In addition, new relationships emerged between students at different institutions. An example was the collaboration between the Nueva Acción Universitaria (New University Action, NAU, a social democratic autonomist group at the PUC) and the aforementioned Izquierda Autónoma.Footnote 80
Although not always successful, these initiatives advanced activists’ efforts to define and frame movement demands. They led to the 2009 National Congress on Education, a meeting of students, administrators, parents, and experts, which produced a document that would become a blueprint for subsequent demands.Footnote 81 Among the document's most innovative aspects were a call for free public education at both the secondary and university levels and demands for broader political reform.Footnote 82 Activists also devised a new variant of the slogan ‘no al lucro’. Leaders of NAU felt that, when combined with the new demand for free public education, the ‘no al lucro’ frame had a leftist undertone that could put off less politicised and more conservative students.Footnote 83 Inspired by a series of scandals involving major businesses, politicians and the Catholic Church, they proposed to conceptualise ‘lucro’ not simply as profit, but as ‘fraud’.Footnote 84
In 2010, the Concertación lost its first presidential election since 1990. It was replaced by a coalition with ties to the Pinochet regime. Sebastián Piñera, the new president, announced measures that seemed to further erase the distinction between public and private universities in terms of organisation and funding, which sent ripples of alarm through the student movement.Footnote 85 Perceived threats related to the rise of the new government triggered the re-emergence of massive protests in 2011.
It was clear to activists that there was going to be protest, but in 2010 a major earthquake directed massive numbers of students into voluntary emergency relief activities instead.Footnote 86 Although this situation precluded protest initially, it ultimately helped strengthen student networks, including online communities. During that year the CONFECH established a strong Internet presence. The goal was to diffuse content that would prepare the ‘mood’ for eventual protest, as well as strengthen online networks for future coordination.Footnote 87
Protests finally broke out in 2011. They started in CRUCH institutions in Santiago, triggered by problems with student aid. Shortly thereafter, protests arose in the Universidad Central, a non-CRUCH institution, over the university's possible transformation into a for-profit corporation. Conflicts with university administrators led to protests in other non-CRUCH institutions. Secondary students led their own protests against the public subsidisation of private schools and the municipalisation of education, and joined some university mobilisations.Footnote 88 Building on these conflicts, activists called for national protests demanding free public education, the elimination of profit from private institutions, and increased regulation of private educational providers.Footnote 89
Student activism soon erupted in non-CRUCH universities, institutos profesionales and high schools nationwide. National protest events swelled, with some reaching millions of participants, including students and sympathisers. Online networks took off.Footnote 90 Activism was coordinated by the CONFECH, ACES and new organisations such as the Asamblea de Estudiantes de Educación Superior Privada (Assembly of Students of Private Higher Education, ADESUP) and the Coordinadora Nacional de Estudiantes Secundarios (National Coordination of Secondary Students, CONES). ADESUP was a new version of CONFESUP that included institutos profesionales as well as private non-CRUCH universities, while the CONES represented a new incarnation of the ACAS.
The movement grew rapidly during 2011 partly in response to the government's political character and its expressed intentions of furthering the privatisation of education. For many activists, as one interviewee put it, ‘Piñera represented Pinochet.’Footnote 91 Piñera's use of strong repression also served to inflame protest, further recalling the military era.Footnote 92 Although past governments had repressed student protests as well, Concertación presidents had been careful to disavow the most violent incidents. To mark their distance from the government, Concertación and PC leaders publicly sided with students. Ultimately, however, many of these political leaders did not support student demands for free public education and the elimination of profit from education.Footnote 93
Student protests interacted with other events to embolden activists to demand not only educational reform but broader political change as well. High-profile financial scandals in the private sector (including a university) gave additional credence to the new ‘no al lucro’ framing, contextualising educational shortcomings as symptoms of an underlying problem of elite corruption. Outrage at a system that permitted these abuses incensed students. It inspired activists to put greater emphasis on institutional reforms, including eliminating the binomial electoral system, which artificially boosted the legislative representation of the Right, and holding a constitutional convention.Footnote 94
In the end, Piñera offered some substantial concessions, including equalisation of CAE interest rates to those of the Fondo Solidario and increased regulation of private higher education. However, demands for structural change were once again ignored.
The deployment of existing movement innovations
While the waves of student protest between 2005 and 2011 responded to certain proximate factors, as discussed above, the massive scope of mobilisation compared to the past was made possible by the diffusion of the innovations outlined previously. This section discusses how and why the pre-2005 innovations in identity and organisation continued to orient activists in later years, facilitating the diffusion of student contention to new sites and providing fertile ground for the rise of new innovations at the grassroots.
The Chilean student movement became a truly massive phenomenon because it drew participants from institutions and backgrounds of all types. It appealed to moderates as well as radicals, the less politicised and the more politicised, students in large cities and small towns, and those attending prestigious universities as well as those pursuing technical education.
For the movement to achieve such wide diffusion it had to cut across traditional divides and appeal to students as a generation. Such an identity was already available. As explained previously, by the mid-2000s in CRUCH universities and magnet high schools, partisan political identities had ceded space to a new identity marked by a rejection of the political establishment and aesthetics more representative of contemporary Chilean youth. At a strategic level, this identity proved useful for bridging deep regional, institutional and ideological cleavages within the movement. Divisions did not disappear, but they were at least temporarily submerged beneath a feeling of belonging to a generation with a common political purpose.
The massive protests that began in 2005 strategically deployed this identity to diffuse mobilisation to other groups. Interviewees emphasised that the movement's non-partisan identity helped them reach out to non-politicised peers. An activist at a private university commented that the movement allowed students at his institution to make common cause with more politicised and well-off students at more prestigious universities, finding ‘mutual recognition underneath the differences’.Footnote 95 Similarly, a leader at another private institution argued that the movement's autonomy from parties facilitated the participation of relatively conservative students. She noted that ‘the type of movement we have become allows us to appeal to students’ common sense’ rather than their ideology.Footnote 96
The student movement's embrace of newer forms of cultural expression also contributed to its rapid diffusion, both by underscoring its separation from the adult political establishment and by making participation in it entertaining and a source of social prestige. The movement appeared, as one of my interviewees recalled about the 2006 Pingüino protests, ‘so cool that no one wanted to be left out’.Footnote 97
The new generational political identity was manifest in the composition of student leadership. For instance, the 2005 and 2011 CONFECH, as well as the 2006 AES, included parties and colectivos ranging from far Left to Right.Footnote 98 The majority of representatives to those instances were not members of traditional parties, and the ones that had a party affiliation were vocally critical of parties.Footnote 99 Student activists did not always give up their partisan identities, but they came to see themselves as part of a larger enterprise that required the subordination of partisan preferences to student unity.Footnote 100 Students were aware that, according to one former activist, ‘disunity would mean game over’.Footnote 101
The unsatisfactory official responses to movement demands in 2005 and 2006 only reinforced long-standing student perceptions that the political establishment could not be trusted and change would come only through protest. Students saw themselves as a generation that was breaking with the fear and complacency of the older generation.Footnote 102 This vision was clearly stated in the movement's 2006 slogan, ‘Estamos dando clases’ or ‘We are teaching classes’. On one level, the slogan simply described a particular tactic: students and sympathetic instructors would relocate classes to the street, turning them into protests. However, ‘dar clase’ is also a Chilean idiomatic expression meaning to set an example. As one interviewee remarked ‘[the 2006 protests] ended the myth that we were stupid, apathetic kids and legitimised us as a new relevant political actor’.Footnote 103 The idea of a new, proud generation would reappear in 2011 in slogans like ‘Somos la generación que perdió el miedo’, or ‘We are the generation that lost its fear’.
The post-2004 movement also built on the distinctive organisational style formulated during the previous decade. As explained earlier, this style, characterised by horizontalism, was most clearly expressed in the ACES, but also was present in centros and student federations.
The diffusion of this approach beyond traditional sites of activism began to accelerate in 2005 and took off in 2006. In searching for an organisational model that would best mobilise students to pressure the Bachelet government, activists decided to base the new AES on the ACES model. While slowing deliberation, this model also limited the role of parties and gave the movement more grassroots legitimacy.Footnote 104 According to a protagonist, ‘we thought of different alternatives but settled on the ACES, because, although it gave minorities significant veto power and was messy, it had been until then the only organisation able to mobilise lots of secondary students’.Footnote 105 The success of the AES even influenced higher education organisations. For instance, the 2006 ADESUP was conceived as an ACES-like open forum.Footnote 106
Even after the Pingüino protests had died down, this approach remained alive, informing the creation of many new organisations. Despite the abeyance of the movement between 2006 and 2011, a growing movement infrastructure emerged nationwide. It was characterised by a strong ethic of grassroots participation, which helps explain the extraordinary expansion of protest in 2011.Footnote 107
Supra-institutional bodies adopted the same organisational practices during the 2011 protest cycle. The CONES, which followed the federative model in most respects, nevertheless used bottom-up ratification mechanisms.Footnote 108 Likewise, the CONFECH required the ratification of decisions by assemblies at each participating university.Footnote 109 Other student organisations created that year, such as the Coordinadora Metropolitana de Educación Superior (Metropolitan Coordination of Higher Education, COMESUP), the Asociación de Estudiantes de Instituciones Privadas (Association of Students of Private Institutions, AIEP), and the Federación de Estudiantes Mapuches (Federation of Mapuche Students, FEMAE), did the same.
In essence, the principles embodied in the 2001 ACES came to represent the standard approach for organising students thereafter. While activists did not necessarily seek to reproduce the overall ACES model, they routinely adopted some of its key features. As one interviewee explained, ‘The logic of student organisation has changed since 2001. No one can mobilise students without being legitimated by the base.’Footnote 110
The appeal of bottom-up organising was not accidental: it represented the embodiment of a student identity focused on deepening democracy and replacing hollow forms of representation with ‘real’ direct democracy. Despite its cumbersomeness, which sometimes gave vocal minorities inordinate influence, the approach became popular because it signified the putting into practice of the same values students sought to promote in national politics.
Moreover, by empowering students at the grassroots, this organisational strategy encouraged a steady stream of bottom-up tactical innovation, particularly during the 2006 and 2011 protest cycles. These included art installations, school beautification, runs around the presidential palace, kiss-ins, flashmobs, marches in costumes, and online protests.Footnote 111 The flowering of student creativity made the movement appealing to the general public, further encouraging participation by non-politicised and more conservative students.Footnote 112 At the same time it generated a unique cohort experience, one characterised by strong friendships, free self-expression, and self-government, or as one interviewee put it, ‘an autonomous space, outside the sovereignty of parents and authorities’.Footnote 113
Conclusion
Chile has a long history of student protests, but recent waves have been exceptionally large. While temporally proximate phenomena, such as threats, opportunities and strategic shifts, help us understand the explosion of mobilisation, this article argues that the massive scope of the contemporary movement was made possible by earlier identity and organisational innovations. These emerged in traditionally more militant institutions in the latter half of the 1990s and early 2000s, disseminating widely to new sites after 2004.
Innovations were driven by frustration with authorities’ unwillingness to substantially alter the military-era neoliberal educational model, which imposed a heavy economic burden on students and their families and reinforced inequality. In the face of what they perceived as repeated defeats, activists began to think of themselves as being outside and in opposition to the political establishment and to craft new forms of organisation independent from parties. These organisations sought to embody the democratic, participative ethos activists felt political elites had forsaken. Their bottom-up character allowed the new student entities to better express contemporary youth culture, and their autonomy and generational identity helped to bridge political divisions. These prior innovations interacted with other, more proximate influences beginning in the mid-2000s to bring about the diffusion of contention from traditional centres of militancy to institutions with little tradition of activism, helping the movement to become as large as it did.
These arguments contribute to a growing body of scholarly literature on social movement diffusion, or the process by which contentious ideas and practices spread from one social context to another. Studying this process can help us understand why some movements become massive phenomena spanning entire nations, or even extending beyond national borders, while others (probably the vast majority) remain local affairs. It can also shed light on the complex array of social ties and learning dynamics that underpin major movements.
In particular, my study reaffirms and enriches three important insights of the literature on protest diffusion. First, it underscores that the character of the innovations crafted by activists matters: some ways of approaching the struggle are more effective than others. This points to the importance of the fit between the organisational and cultural forms of the movement and the population to which it attempts to appeal. The Chilean student movement was able to blossom into a massive phenomenon because it created a set of anti-establishment idioms and practices that were compelling to a generation of young people who perceived the political system as impervious to calls for change. At the same time, its emphasis on bottom-up decision-making made the movement permeable to trends in contemporary youth culture, and thus appealing to students of different political backgrounds.
In addition, this study further develops the idea that conflict with authorities is a crucible in which innovations are forged. The large-scale movement that emerged in Chile during the mid-2000s was the product of a longer process of learning that involved not only observation and analysis, but recurrent, often intense, confrontation with the state. As a result of growing frustration with unfulfilled promises, students reached conclusions about the political system that led them to seek autonomy from parties and to view themselves as a generation embodying a broader renewal of politics. This transformation was facilitated by the fact that many secondary student activists subsequently become university activists, bringing with them the collective memory of earlier episodes of protest.
Finally, the article underscores the idea that the diffusion of certain innovations may have a strong effect on movement growth only when combined with other factors that impact the receptivity of potential activists to the movement's message. In other words, the most important internal movement changes may only become apparent later, when other conditions make the mobilisation of large numbers of people viable. The process of internal movement change stressed in this article was largely invisible during the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It would only gain widespread attention in later years, when opportunities, threats and other factors helped to set off major cycles of protest.
A broader implication of these observations is that the rapid, massive diffusion of protest witnessed during protest cycles may be fully understood only by carefully examining the slow-moving, long-term, trial-and-error learning processes through which activists construct meanings and formulate organisational practices. Although they do not always have this effect, these processes of internal change often prepare movements to respond effectively to situations in which contextual conditions are conducive to the diffusion of their struggle. In-depth historical analysis of social movement development, with its attention to how activists understand their world and how those understandings shape the decisions they make, is the method best suited to unearthing such dynamics.
Let me conclude by highlighting how the movement has affected the broader Chilean political landscape. Scholars have argued that student protests have illuminated previously hidden or suppressed discontents with the ‘Chilean model’, becoming a catalyst for a new political project that could potentially break with the limitations of the 1990 transition and fulfil democracy's progressive promises.Footnote 114 In this view, the movement has been a ‘laboratory’ of emancipation, prefiguring the broader transformational project, or ‘historicity’, of its time: the struggle to move beyond Pinochet's legacy.Footnote 115
This impact is reflected in the Concertación leadership's decision to seek a more left-leaning coalition, called Nueva Mayoría, which includes the PC, and to run on a platform in the 2013 elections emphasising the need for many of the reforms demanded by the student movement. The elections handed a decisive victory to Michelle Bachelet, Nueva Mayoría's presidential candidate, and gave the coalition majorities in both legislative chambers. A number of student activists, including Camila Vallejo, the most prominent face of the 2011 movement, were elected to Congress as members or allies of the coalition.
Although the Nueva Mayoría has had its share of problems, and has by no means fully satisfied student demands for change, it has delivered on important aspects of its platform. The Bachelet government has approved a reform forbidding subsidised primary and secondary schools from profiting from public resources, charging tuition or exercising selectivity in admissions, as well as measures making college education free of charge to students from lower-income families.Footnote 116 In addition, the Nueva Mayoría has passed broader measures demanded by the student movement, most notably a tax reform that provides additional revenues for education and other purposes, and the elimination of the Pinochet-era binomial electoral system. The Nueva Mayoría has also introduced a bill that would de-municipalise primary and secondary education and it has initiated a national discussion regarding a new constitution that could perhaps mark a definitive break with the institutional framework inherited from the military regime.
