By Benjamin Welton

Chile, which many in the Dissident Right uphold as one of the world's few conservative and libertarian success stories, has descended once again into social and political chaos because of Latin America's ancient bête noire: left-wing populism.

Beginning in October 2019, hundreds of thousands of Chilean protesters took to the streets and engaged in battles with the Chilean Army and police services. Some of these scenes are reminiscent of the bad old days under the Marxist Salvador Allende just before the September 1973 coup. For readers in North America and Europe, the current chaos in Chile should remind them of Antifa and their many violent protests since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Indeed, since the protests began, black-masked thugs, most of whom are supporters either the Communist Party of Chile (PCC) or one of the other far-left parties currently organizing the protests, have taken to destroying Chile's churches and cathedrals. As part of their protests over income inequality, rioters have decapitated statues of Jesus, smashed statues of the Virgin Mary, and have looted and burned some of Chile's most beautiful houses of worship, including in Santiago's Plaza Italia.[1]

While the severity of the protests has weakened since November, this is in part because the center-right government of President Sebastián Piñera agreed to write a new constitution for the country this year.[2] Because of this decision, 2020 looks to be a conflict-heavy year for the South American nation, as all of its left-wing parties are likely to agitate for sweeping reforms and more “rights” enshrined in the new constitution.

The Riots: A Tale of Overreaction

How did it come to this? How did Chile, the most stable and prosperous nation in Latin America, suddenly erupt in massive protests? The immediate answer is a minor increase in public transportation fares. The more comprehensive answer is that despite the success of Augusto Pinochet's regime, Chile, like its mother nation Spain during the reign of General Francisco Franco, failed to eradicate Marxism and left-wing dogma from its national conscience. Thanks to the continued employment of left-wing high school and college teachers, and to liberal scribes in the Hispanophone and Anglophone worlds, who for so long have focused on the repressions of the Pinochet era without mentioning the horrors of Allende's government, socialist pipe dreams continue to live on and breathe new life into failed social engineering experiments.

Along with the underreported demographic changes in Chile (more on this later), Chile's current predicament can be blamed on complacency and the poison that exists at the center of all successful societies. Namely, during prolonged periods of peace and prosperity, soft-handed malcontents will always rise and demand more for their ilk out of a combination of anger, class resentment, and religious fervor (i.e. the false religion of historical materialism).

According to Isidora Cepeda Beccar, one of the leaders of the protests (although she likes to claim that the protests are leaderless), the Chilean government's price increase on public transportation was “not a large amount.” In fact, the price increase was 30 Chilean pesos, or about 4 US cents.[3] Beccar also admitted to a interview for Jacobin that the high school students who began protesting the increases were not effected by the new price because they have their own, separate fees:

“It started, in the first instance, because the government increased public transport fares. In Chile, there is a Panel of Public Transport Experts in charge of defining these readjustments. They argued that this particular rise was due to the rise in the price of oil, the variation in the consumer price index, and other factors, such as the price of the dollar. So they increased prices thirty pesos, which is not a large amount and the government didn't expect protests. But students organized and started to encourage people not to pay. It was high school students, actually, who have their own fares, so the increase didn't impact them at all.”[4]

Despite being untouched by the price hikes, high school students in Santiago began jumping turnstiles and encouraging others to do so too. (Such a phenomenon recently made news in the US, with cities like New York promising to cut down on fare evaders, who cost the city $215 million in 2018.[5]) Santiago's wild youth gave a patina of “social justice” to their delinquency by claiming that they were doing it for their parents and working class Chileans who spend hours on buses and trains in order to go back and forth from work.[6] From this minor headache, most of Santiago descended into chaos as protesters managed to shut down the public transportation system and occupy major thoroughfares in the city.

Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com

References

1. Saunt, Raven (2019, Nov. 8). “Demonstrators loot churches in Chile and burn statues Jesus in the streets as month-long protests over inequality turns violent”. Daily Mail.
2. Miranda, Natalia A. Ramos (2019, Nov. 11). “Chile to re-write Pinochet-era constitution in win for protesters”. Reuters.
3. Gomez, Christian (2019, Nov. 2). “Socialist Protests Paralyze Chile”. The New American.
4. Burtenshaw, Ronan (2019, Oct. 28). “We Will Make a New Chile”. Jacobin.
5. Goldman, Henry (2018, Dec. 3). “NYC Turnstile Jumpers, Bus-Fare Cheats Cost MTA $215 Million”. Bloomberg.
6. Merelli, Annalisa (2019, Nov. 27). “Chile is a rich country and that is why its people are so angry”. Quartz.
7. Vergara, Camila (2019, Nov. 23). “Chile Can Be a Laboratory of Popular Democracy”. Jacobin.
8. “Unidad para el Cambio propuso 4 puntos centrales para dar pronta respuesta a demandas sociales”. Chilean Communist Party, 21 Oct. 2019.
9. Welton, Benjamin (2018, Jul. 21). “Don't Touch the Valley”. Taki's Magazine.
10. Maximus, Nullus (2017, Jul. 20). “A Consideration of Helicopter Rides”. Zeroth Position.
11. Maximus, Nullus (2018, Jan. 25). “Book Review: Reactionary Liberty”. Zeroth Position.
12. Jasper, William F. (1999, Sept. 13). “Pinochet: Patriot Enchained”. The New American.
13. Rail, Richard Jack (2019, May 9). “A Pinochet Could Help Venezuela”. American Thinker.
14. Dwyer, Colin (2019, Nov. 13). “Evo Morales Condemns 'Coup' After Lawmaker Assumes Bolivia's Interim Presidency”. NPR.
15. Charles, Jacqueline (2018, Mar. 1). “Haitians gamble on a better life in Chile. But the odds aren't always in their favor”. Miami Herald.
16. “Censos digitalizados”. Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (Chile).
17. Vásquez, Felipe; Blanco, Benjamín (2018, Apr. 9). “Extranjeros en Chile superan el millón 110 mil y el 72% se concentra en dos regiones: Antofagasta y Metropolitana”. Emol.
18. Legutko, Ryszard (2018). The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. Encounter Books. p. 1–9.