Las protestas estudiantiles en Chile.

Student Protests Mark Low Point for Chile's Piñera

By Roque Planas | 09 Aug 2011

Last Thursday will likely be remembered as a low point for Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. Police clashed with students during an unauthorized protest, inviting unflattering, if exaggerated, comparisons to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The same day, the Center for Public Studies -- known by its Spanish acronym, CEP -- released a poll finding that Piñera's popularity had dropped to just 26 percent, the lowest level of any Chilean president since the return to democracy in 1990.

The two events were hardly coincidental. Like his predecessor, former President Michelle Bachelet, who faced student protests of similar magnitude in 2006, education reform is turning out to be one of Piñera's most intractable political problems.

While Piñera struggles with an image problem and rock-bottom approval ratings, the students have captured international attention for the creativity of their protests. Students have assembled in public to kiss for 1,800 seconds, a symbolic reference to the $1.8 billion in annual state investment they demand in order to guarantee access to quality, free education. They have similarly run 1,800 laps around La Moneda, Chile's equivalent of the White House, to drive the same point home. At another demonstration, a flash mob gathered to perform the choreography of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video in Santiago.

The theatrical protests that have ricocheted through social media and found their way onto international television broadcasts are the least of Piñera's worries, however. Since May, university and high school students have taken over hundreds of schools, shutting down classes in protest. A seemingly unending series of marches that sometimes attract tens of thousands of demonstrators act as a constant reminder of the federal government's inability to open a dialogue with student and teacher organizations.

If government officials and protesters have a hard time dialoguing, it is in part because they don't speak the same language. Students are demanding guaranteed access to an improved, free -- or subsidized -- public education system, from pre-school to university. They want the federal government to administer the school system, as opposed to the municipalities that currently do, to avoid the stark inequalities that municipal control has introduced into public school funding. Perhaps most of all, students oppose the application of the profit motive to education. Piñera, himself a billionaire businessman, speaks of opportunities, rather than guarantees, and is reluctant to take the profit motive off the table.

Piñera has twice tried to appease protesters, with little success. In July, he proposed the creation of a $4 billion fund to increase the availability of scholarships and provide relief for students paying college loans. Student organizations rejected it out of hand, however, for failing to address their demands for the primary and secondary school system, and for leaving the door open to normalization of for-profit universities. (For-profit universities are currently illegal, but many private universities use loopholes to skirt the prohibition.) At a July 6 press conference, the director of the Chilean Student Federation, Camila Vallejo, called the proposal "a step backward from what we've demanded."

Throughout the month of July, Piñera continued to watch his popularity plummet, from its peak of 63 percent following the rescue of 33 trapped miners in October down to the low 30-percent level (.pdf). Ideological conflict also popped up at the state-owned copper mining company, CODELCO, where the union went on strike for the first time in two decades over what they called plans to initiate the enterprise's privatization. Piñera shuffled his cabinet midway through the month, partly to jumpstart fresh talks with student groups by replacing Education Minister Ricardo Lavín.

On Aug. 1, Piñera's new education minister, Felipe Bulnes, followed up with a 21-point proposal addressing students' demands more clearly. The proposed reform would guarantee access to public education as a fundamental right, pave the way for a federal takeover of the public school system and reaffirm the current prohibition on for-profit universities. Again, student organizations rejected the proposal.

"Part of the student leadership doesn't want to start a dialogue with Piñera," said Chilean political scientist Patricio Navia. "They are increasing or changing their demands as the government is conceding to their previous demands." Navia added that he expects resolution of the crisis to come from political actors, rather than the student movement itself.

But after two months of protest and an estimated 60 million hours of lost class time, Piñera had enough. He refused to authorize a student protest march along Santiago's Alameda, a main thoroughfare, planned for Thursday, Aug. 4, arguing that a weekday protest would disrupt traffic and interfere with commerce. When the students showed up anyway, federal police dispersed the crowd with hoses and tear gas. Some of the protesters responded by throwing rocks and setting fires. The incident led to more than 800 detentions, 90 injured police and a rebuke from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Piñera kept quiet throughout the day, waiting until Aug. 5 to make a public statement, which he did via Twitter. "It's time to . . . search for agreements. I invite you to a dialogue and to contribute to quality education," he Tweeted from his Blackberry, making sure to include a link to his reform proposal. His government went on to authorize a student protest march for Sunday.

After the confrontation, however, an exit strategy from the conflict still seems elusive. "A great majority of citizens support the students' general demands of quality, free education without for-profit institutions," the editorial board of Chilean daily El Mercurio wrote Sunday, "but most people also want that discussion to move to an institutional channel and leave the streets and the barricades."

Navia thinks El Mercurio will get its wish. "They're kind of stuck," Navia said, referring to the impasse between Piñera and student protesters. "I think there will be dialogue not with the students, but with the opposition politicians. There will be some education reform -- not the reform the students want, but certainly a step in the right direction."

Piñera is not yet out of the woods, however. Today brings another strike by students, and this time they will be joined by the Federation of Copper Miners.
Roque Planas is a freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Americas Society and co-edits the Latin America News Dispatch.