Week of furious protests leaves Chilean leaders stunned
SANTIAGO: After a week of huge and sometimes violent protests, Chileans are showing no sign of easing the pressure on a government that seems stunned and paralyzed by a popular explosion fueled by years of socio-economic frustration. Seeking to negotiate an end to the crisis, President Sebastian Pinera on Saturday announced a sweeping reshuffling of his cabinet and said a highly controversial state of emergency could end as early as Sunday “if circumstances permit.”
Whether such moves will help take the air out of the protests that have brought much of the country to a standstill remains to be seen. The public fury in Chile, one of South America’s richest and most stable countries, was touched off by
a four-cent rise in ticket prices on the state-owned Metro system. That seemingly innocuous change sparked angry clashes with security forces, widespread looting, and demonstrations that culminated Friday in Santiago with the historic mobilization of nearly a million people.
The protesters, if anything, appear to be gaining energy, and their list of demands has continued to grow, reaching far beyond the price of public transportation. The demands now include decent retirement benefits, affordable health care and education, lower prescription drug prices... but also Pinera’s resignation and even the scrapping and replacing of the nation’s Constitution, which dates from the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).
Between the calls for greater social justice and the demands for political transformation, “It’s hard to know which of these two dimensions will be the key to managing an exit from the crisis,” said Marcelo Mella, a political scientist at the University of Santiago. But with more than a million Chileans taking to the streets nationwide - in a country of just 18 million - the protests are no longer limited to the demands of the country’s poorest. “This social explosion includes some people who are very angry, but also — and this is unprecedented - there are demonstrators from more affluent neighborhoods,” said Genaro Cuadros, a professor of urban studies at Diego Portales University. —AFP