CHILE: Massive student protests have exposed discontent about Chile's rapid modernisation, amid calls for the government to redistribute wealth and fulfill a campaign promise for open democracy.
Some 800,000 teenage students marched through Chile this week, handing the almost three-month-old government of President Michelle Bachelet its first domestic crisis as police and protesters met in sometimes violent clashes. The protests won sympathy across party lines and Dr Bachelet announced new education benefits late on Thursday, partially conceding to demands.
Chile has modernised quickly since the end of the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, cutting its poverty in half in the past 15 years. "The protests unveil disquiet or discontent with the form of the modernisation," said Pablo Salvat, professor at the Padre Hurtado University in Santiago. "Not because we don't want to modernise but because we are not consulted on how we want modernity to be."
Measures announced by Dr Bachelet were seen as a bold statement to students about how far she will go to avoid disturbances, and what she was not willing to do. Students were considering the merits of Dr Bachelet's plan yesterday before deciding whether to go ahead with another national strike early next week.
Most of the students protesting are too young to remember Chile's military regime and political strife of the 1970s and 1980s.
They are also too young to feel loyalty to the socialist coalition of which Dr Bachelet is a part and which has governed Chile since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. "These students were born when the dictatorship was coming to an end, so they are not marked by the fear that most Chileans have of protesting," said Patricio Navia, a political scientist at New York University.
Pointing at billions of dollars in budget surpluses from copper export revenues, students are demanding free bus fares, free college entrance exams, more teachers and improved secondary school buildings. Dr Bachelet said she could not give students everything they were asking for, such as free bus fares, but she was willing to seek education reforms.
Protests began two weeks ago when students took over a few schools in the capital, but the movement spread quickly to become Chile's largest student demonstration in decades.