That afternoon’s session was packed with Trotskos — Trotskyites. They listened raptly to a speaker who recently led the occupation of a factory in Argentina, breaking, now and then, into tongue-twister-like chants. It was hard not to recall their 1973 counterparts, the ones the narrator of Roberto Bolaño’s novel “Distant Star” describes as speaking in a “slang or jargon derived in equal parts from Marx and Mandrake the Magician,” whose dreams of revolution would end in torture dungeons and prisons or in long years of enervated exile and bitter reckoning — the story of a generation.

The parallel is not lost on the student movement’s critics. “The University of Chile as revolutionary vanguard,” Patricio Meller, a University of Chile industrial engineering professor, wrote in El Mercurio. “We’ve seen that movie, and we know how it ended.” But Meller’s pessimism may well miss what is really happening in Chile. This is the first generation to come of age without personal memories of the dictatorship. In a profile of Giorgio Jackson, published in the Mexican magazine Gatopardo, Rafael Gumucio asked the student leader, “What does the dictatorship mean to you?” and Jackson responded: “Nothing. I was born in 1987.” What has struck Gumucio, and many others, about this movement is that for all its revolutionary rhetoric, it has remained pragmatically focused on educational reform. “The student protests that have mobilized Chile are perhaps the result of a radical change in the roles of fathers and sons,” Gumucio wrote. “Because in Chile it’s the fathers who are the nihilists, the suicides, the silent ones, the frustrated, and their children the reformers, the realists, the strategists.”

One Monday evening in late November, I attended a FECH candidates’ debate at the school of public administration. Vallejo waited her turn, standing within a small coterie of supporters. I noticed how the others doted on her, that she did most of the talking and that she made everyone laugh. Her eyes shone, and her smile was sometimes wry, even rakish. Later Giorgio Jackson told me that Vallejo’s jokes are exceptionally “salty.” Salty how? I asked; but he wouldn’t say. Vallejo guards her private life with iron discipline, and those who spend a lot of time with her, including some of her rivals, are equally guarded. So little is known about Vallejo that what does leak out creates a tabloid excitement. When someone posted a photograph of her in a bikini at the beach, it went viral. The false belief that a fairy-tale romance had blossomed between her and the handsome Jackson was so widespread that even his longtime girlfriend was jealous. In fact, Vallejo did have a steady boyfriend — a pololo, in Chilean parlance — a Cuban who moved to Chile as a teenager. He was the tall, bearded, soulful-eyed fellow who I’d first guessed was her bodyguard.

Vallejo’s reluctance to put herself forward was partly strategic — she was determined to give the impression that she might be the movement’s spokeswoman but that she was merely one among many. She had other reasons as well. In August, a minor government functionary, Tatiana Acuña, tweeted, “Se mata a la perra y se acaba la leva” — meaning, more or less, “Kill the bitch, problem solved.” It echoed a phrase infamously spoken by Pinochet on the day of the ’73 coup, when Allende committed suicide as troops stormed La Moneda. Everyone understood the tweet to refer to Vallejo, and Acuña was fired. That same month, Vallejo received death threats, and the Supreme Court ordered police protection for her. Then someone posted her address on Twitter, and Vallejo’s parents insisted that, for her own safety, she move from home.

That week, because of the demands of the election, Vallejo was even more difficult to speak to one on one than usual. But I caught up with her father, Reinaldo, on a street lined with auto-mechanic shops and hardware stores — he owns a small air-conditioning and heating business with his wife — and we stopped in a cafe to talk. Reinaldo, a lumbering man with fair hair and melancholy blue eyes, once starred, around 1982, in a popular Chilean soap opera. He is also a veteran Communist Party member and belonged to a political theater group that traveled the country, putting on shows for copper-mine workers. Camila, as a little girl, accompanied him. For most of Camila’s childhood, the family lived in La Florida, a working- and middle-class neighborhood, where she attended an alternative school called Colegio Raimapu, which educated the children of anti-Pinochet parents (neither Reinaldo nor his wife was ever imprisoned). He told me that she liked art and drawing and was originally going to apply to the University of Chile to study theater design. As a teenager, she joined the Communist Youth. He said he missed having her at home. Then the conversation turned to the elections, and he said: “We Communists are used to losing. I tell Camila that she won’t really become a leader until she learns what it is to lose.”

In the FECH elections, Vallejo’s rivals were making her association with Chile’s Communist Party an issue. She was blamed — though it was hardly her decision alone — for the movement’s agreeing to negotiate with the traditional politicians of the Concertación, the coalition of center-left opposition parties (with which the Communist Party was then allied). All of Chile’s leaders since Pinochet had come, with the exception of Piñera, from the Concertación, and what had changed? In November, student leaders, including Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, traveled to the Parliament in the coastal city Valparaíso to hold dialogues with some Concertación politicians on the educational budget, but in the end, only a modest increase was passed. Chile’s peculiar “binomial” electoral system ensures a virtual tie in both houses of Parliament between the Concertación and the right-wing Alianza and, many believe, makes true structural reform in Chile almost impossible.

Vallejo’s leadership was being portrayed by her critics, most of whom were running to her left, as too institutionalist, too trusting. Her main rival, Gabriel Boric, spoke of working outside the system toward a complete change of the country’s political structure. “It’s principally the 1 percent who control this country, the economic elites, those who refuse to consider tax reform,” Boric’s associate, Francisco Figueroa, told me one evening. “We have to create a great social block for change, because it’s not enough to convene marches and news conferences.”