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Six weeks ago, the president of the Colegio de Profesores de Chile (CPC) announced an indefinite strike after the government “shut the door” on negotiations over demands to end the precarious working and learning conditions in the country’s public schools. The union, which represents all of Chile’s public school educators, estimates that more than eighty thousand teachers have adhered to the strike. Since then, the CPC has called for a series of mass demonstrations that have mobilized hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and workers to Chile’s streets. As protests escalate, and 1 million students continue to be outside of class, history appears to be repeating itself for conservative president Sebastián Piñera’s administration, which entered a crisis of legitimacy during his first government in 2010, also as a result of student and teacher unrest.

Open Wounds As with most political movements in Chile today, this situation has its roots in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. And while Pinochet’s military junta overturned the democratic gains made under Allende, the center-left alliance called the Concertación negotiated with Pinochet to ensure that the regime’s neoliberal pillars remained intact during the “transition to democracy.” For this reason, Chile retains the military regime’s constitution, which to this day does not guarantee education as a right. Rather, the document calls on the state to assume a subsidiary role by establishing a voucher system, creating a market for education — along with all the inequalities the market creates. The dictatorship also fragmented the education system by transferring the administration of public schools into the hands of municipalities, corporations, and private operators of charter schools. This meant that teachers’ working conditions were no longer a public matter under the law, but rather were subject to the weak labor laws that govern the private sector. As such, teachers — the vast majority women now heading into old age — did not benefit from the 1981 decree that readjusted public wages by upward of 90 percent. More than four decades later, fifty-eight thousand teachers are still waiting for the payment of this readjustment, which would amount to 30 percent of their wages and total almost $14 billion USD. The payment of this historic debt ranks first among the CPC’s list of demands and is also at the center of the national political conversation. This movement, which emerged almost entirely out of a grassroots struggle, now wields enough power to set the tone of the debate.

Political Context The assassination, abduction, and exile of Chile’s working-class fighters at the hands of Pinochet’s dictatorship after the overthrow of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende severely crippled traditional leftist parties, namely the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. Since then, these parties have tried to preempt popular mobilizations through tightly controlled reform agendas that seek to alleviate, as opposed to end, the clientelism and gaping inequalities that dominate Chile. And although the rising tide of new working-class parties is pushing the Socialists and Communists back to the left, their role in cementing the neoliberal consensus has lost them the support of millions of working-class Chileans. Accordingly, when Socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet won the presidency in 2006, she did little more than to invite young people to participate in government “working groups” to temper the militant energy of hundreds of thousands of middle and high school students who took to the streets and occupied their schools to protest the gross inadequacy of the public education system. Anticipating that Bachelet’s reforms would not hold off another insurgency for long, economic elites turned to center-right, law-and-order candidate Sebastián Piñera in 2010. As René Rojas notes, Piñera “failed miserably” in his attempt to demobilize the middle and high school students who had, by that point, gone onto college and reignited the student movement alongside militant teachers, port workers, and miners around broader anti-neoliberal demands for pension and labor reforms. Finding no solution for the endless waves of marches and campus occupations “now inculcated with a dose of class distrust,” Piñera unleashed a scale of repression “not seen since the dictatorship,” employing water cannons and attack dogs, and making hundreds of nightly arrests. The government crackdown of 2011 helped earn Piñera a 26 percent approval rating, making him the most poorly evaluated president since the return to democracy in 1990. With growing popular support for mobilizations and sharply declining government approval, the country’s elite had no alternative but to open itself to a coalition with the Communist Party in the 2014 elections. The support of the Communists, and the begrudging endorsement of the leaders of the movement, secured Bachelet a second term. But Bachelet’s piecemeal reforms to desegregate (rather than integrate) schools and to regulate (rather than end) profiteering in education were unable to mitigate the government’s crisis of legitimacy. They also led to a series of important ruptures within the labor movement and the broader political order.

In With the New The rebellion of the rank and file, or “rebelión de las bases , ” was a spontaneous movement of educators that mobilized more than sixty thousand teachers against then–CPC president Jaime Gajardo, also a Communist Party leader, for striking a key deal with Bachelet’s administration behind the backs of teachers. Gajardo, having betrayed the confidence of his base, lost the seat he had occupied for well over a decade to Mario Aguilar in 2014. Under Aguilar, the newly reinvigorated CPC distanced itself from the establishment, choosing instead to draw its strength from a younger, more militant generation of educators who had experienced the 2006 and 2011 mobilizations and were unafraid to fight tooth and nail to save public education. By all accounts, the double cross of the traditional leftist parties had a profound impression on the generation that led the student mobilizations in 2006 and 2011. Some of the movement’s key figures, who at the time presided over their campus’s student federations and were then propelled into the national spotlight, seized the momentum to form new political parties and contest key elections. The political forces that took shape after the rebellion of the rank and file coalesced around a mass political organization to form the Broad Front (Frente Amplio) coalition in time for the 2017 presidential elections. Although the center-left coalition lost to Piñera’s center-right pact in the general elections, the Broad Front was a mere 3 percent short of burying the center-left establishment in the primaries. The mass support garnered in a short period of time by the Broad Front is a testament to the vulnerability of Chile’s once-hegemonic neoliberal regime. And in this regard, the emergence of a national teachers’ strike today, two years after the formation of the Broad Front, shows just how much ground the working class has gained through organization.