ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 49
Sometimes a single narrative takes over to such an extent that it becomes inescapable, day
after day, week on week.
In the fall and early winter of 2019, that story was Chile.
On the face of it the story focused on the nationwide protests which were rocking the country,
at one point with 5% of the entire population manifesting on the streets of the capital,
Santiago. 1 There were protests which began with a small group of students jumping
turnstiles in order to protest fare increases on the Santiago metro - really nothing new in an
international news cycle: students have always done disobedience; it’s basically expected.
That kind of thing barely merits any coverage at all. It doesn’t speak beyond the thing itself.
But, here, it was different.
Here there was an underlying touchpaper, and it was lit.
Here, an act that would usually have ordinary Chileans shaking their head at the actions of
recalcitrant youth instead had them furious and indignant with the state. It had them so
angry, in fact, that it drove them to the point of militancy.
As a result, on the night of October 18th and the days and weeks that followed, all hell broke
loose in Chile, unleashing a series of events that awoke the national character to the extent
that six short months later, 80% would come to vote in favor of drafting a new constitution.
2
Day after day in late 2019, the Chilean story and all the millions of stories that came from that
story were unignorable; everything else around it forcibly took a pause.
It was a narrative of overwhelming centrality not just because of events on the ground, the
magnitude and tenor of which were inescapable - especially in a country previously
perceived to be Latin America’s most stable - but because so much of what was being
protested tapped into big human/society/environment existential and global questions of
our times.
Of course the lines of engagement were fragmented, and revolved around open wounds
such as inequality, public/private ownership of national resources, access to public health,
education rights, the modern pensions paradox, and much more. But although these were
seemingly disparate narratives, really all these topics came together in what Santiago
48
