The Year Chile’s Students Refused to Disappear

Through most of 2011, Chilean students took to the streets in what became one of the largest sustained protest movements in the country’s post-dictatorship history. The demand was specific and structural: an end to a privatized education system designed under Pinochet and left more or less intact ever since, one that forced families into debt for degrees that were supposed to be the route out of debt. The contradiction was maddening enough that hundreds of thousands of people eventually stopped pretending it wasn’t.

President Sebastián Piñera—a billionaire businessman governing through a right-wing coalition—responded with the standard toolkit: police water cannons, tear gas, negotiations that went nowhere, and the occasional press conference suggesting the students were being manipulated by outside forces. The students, led by figures like Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, were not particularly impressed. They occupied schools, organized flash mobs, held mass kiss-ins in city plazas, and kept going regardless.

What struck me watching all this from a distance was how clearly it named something that was happening everywhere that year—in Spain with the Indignados, in New York with Occupy, across the Arab world. The students in Santiago weren’t just protesting tuition fees; they were contesting the premise that the market should be the thing deciding who gets to learn. That premise had been so thoroughly normalized that saying it out loud in a public square felt, briefly, like news.