I recently heard a young Chilean protester say this: “The poor people of Chile took to the streets because they can’t take it anymore. Because they want water. Because the government took away the rivers. Because they have us young people selling our lives on the streets to pay miserable fees. The people of Chile are finally awake, and they won’t fall asleep ever again.”

The president, Sebastián Piñera, has expressed his regrets. “I’m aware that we showed a complete lack of vision, and so I apologize to my fellow citizens,” he said in a nationally televised broadcast. But before he apologized he sent the military into the streets, resulting in several deaths, and established a curfew , the first declared in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

When someone apologizes after the tanks have been sent in and people have died, it doesn’t seem particularly sincere. “Sending the military to restore order is a high-risk and sensitive decision,” José Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch for the Americas, told me in an interview. Mr. Vivanco pointed to Argentina, Chile and other countries where the military class has been associated with brutal dictatorships.

Something similar happened recently in Ecuador, where protests against the economic policies that President Lenín Moreno had put in place — after he had agreed to a controversial loan from the International Monetary Fund — were violently repressed. The United Nations received allegations of human rights abuses by the government’s security forces, and Ecuador’s ombudsman’s office reported that as many as 10 people had been killed and over 1,000 injured.

“Bloody repression?” asked José Valencia, Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs, when I interviewed him. “No, because the police didn’t cause those deaths; those were accidents during the protests. The police, as far as we know, behaved appropriately and proportionally, given the situation.”