In contrast with the Pinochet years, Chile is now governed by a reformist government under President Michelle Bachelet, whose father served as a cabinet minister in the Salvador Allende government. In the most recent elections, Bachelet was able to claim victory by appealing to Chilean workers, while the oligarchy and rich solidly sided with the right-wing candidate, Sebastián Piñera. At the start of the protests, students asked the Bachelet government to consider the class question—working class families find it difficult to afford decent education, university entrance examination fees, and the cost of public transportation. Moreover, students asked the Bachelet government to consider putting some of the profits from the booming copper industry into the education system. And, for a short period of time, it looked as though Bachelet was going to relent. Despite police brutality, high school students organized another nation-wide strike on 5 June, occupied their high schools, linked their movement with 300 colleges, and essentially put enough pressure on Bachelet that she started to give in to the students’ demands. If the students had linked their movement with the working class and the trade unions, and called for a general strike, their demands would have been hard to ignore.

However, the student movement suffered a crisis of leadership that eventually brought an end to the protests. Twelve student leaders, out of millions of student protestors, sat down with Bachelet on 6 June to discuss the student demands. In the end, instead of pushing the movement forward to victory, the student leaders agreed to Bachelet’s inadequate offers that will barely help the situation of class inequality in Chile. The next day, students returned to their high schools and received merely subsidized bus fares, some free lunches, some relief from university entrance examination fees, and some renovation of run-down facilities – a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed for the average, working class high school student.

The eruption of protest is not over in Chile, though; it has merely quieted down for the moment. Due to the decay of capitalism and the dismal situation of the working class, we can expect to see more eruptions of protest in the future. The student protest in Chile, like the student protests in France, Greece, and even Québec, was merely a glimmer of what is to come. The future holds endless possibilities for change, and we can expect to see more and more people, more and more students, coming into the scene of protest to demand change from their governments, and from their capitalist societies.

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