Hugo Morales
In the last two months, over a million Chileans have taken to the street in protest of the ravages of neoliberal economic policy in the country.
Protests are erupting across the Americas. In Colombia, which joined the growing sites of discontent across the region toward the end of November, protesters have mobilized against the administration of Iván Duque and its neoliberal economic policies.
“There is a total autonomy of the Colombian social movement that has awoken and begun to grow,” Edgar Mojica, the general secretary of the Central Union of Workers in Colombia (CUT), tells The Progressive. “A diverse social movement . . . is showing its nonconformity and indignation about parts of the Colombian society,” he says. “These groups have managed to maintain a permanent mobilization in nearly every city of Colombia.”
The protests began on November 21, after CUT and other groups called for a day of national protests against Duque’s austerity measures that would affect workers and pensioners. But the strike quickly grew into something much larger.
While Colombia is widely viewed as one of the more stable countries in the region, discontent is rising due to persistent economic inequalities. Among the other active groups are students, indigenous peoples, small rural farmers, and environmentalists.
A curfew was declared in Bogotá when looting and further unrest broke out after police responded to protesters with tear gas and water cannons.
The mobilizations were sparked after months of simmering discontent across Colombia. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out November 21 to protest a range of issues, including the failure of the far-right Duque administration to comply with and implement the 2016 peace accords. The protesters have begun to call for Duque’s resignation.
Laura Ramos Jaimes, an economist based in Bogotá, tells The Progressive, “The government of Duque does not have the capacity to hold a dialogue. There [is a] lack of consensus and . . . no diplomacy.”
A curfew was declared in Bogotá when looting and further unrest broke out after police responded to protesters with tear gas and water cannons on November 21. The curfew is the first to be implemented in more than forty years.
The government of Colombia has long attempted to tie movements for social change to guerrilla groups or drug traffickers, and uses these connections to justify its heavy-handed response. But police repression has done little to dissuade current protesters, hundreds of whom gathered outside the Duque’s home during the curfew.
Duque responded to the protests by declaring his desire for a “national dialogue.” But for those mobilized in protest against his administration, these efforts ring hollow.
“The government has not called for a negotiation, but rather a national conversation,” Mojica says. “This is nothing more than a means to listen to social movements, but he hasn’t said anything about negotiating.”
The protests in Colombia come after months of unrest in Chile, Haiti, and Ecuador, all of which are united by a common thread: the ravages of neoliberal austerity measures.
“In Colombia, it was a strike called for by the central unions, but because of this topic the youth became involved,” Raúl Zibechi, a Uruguayan social theorist and journalist, says in an interview. “In every place there is something distinct, but in every one there is something in common, and that is the rejection of the neoliberal and extractive [economic] models.”
Zibechi adds, “the new right is also being questioned by [these social] movements.”
In early October, intense protests erupted in Ecuador against the removal of fuel subsidies, which had been ordered by the International Monetary Fund. Between October 3 and 13, thousands of Ecuadorans protested the changes, which ended only after the rightwing administration of Lenín Moreno said it would not comply with the measures.
As the unrest in Ecuador was subsiding, Chile erupted in protest after the government announced plans to raise transportation costs. The protests quickly expanded to a nationwide mobilization against the high cost of living and the rightwing administration of Sebastián Piñera. Protesters have burned buildings, barricades, and occupied plazas during the weeks of popular uprising.
While Piñera has promised to reverse the fare increase and to hold a national referendum on a new constitution, the protests have continued each day across the country. The mobilizations have continued for nearly two months.
Chile has long suffered from the effects of the neoliberal reforms implemented following the 1973 U.S.-backed coup d’état against President Salvador Allende that began the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The coup allowed neoliberal architects such as Milton Friedman to implement a free market philosophy into Chile’s economy.
Thousands were killed or disappeared during the repression that lasted for more than a decade against popular movements following the coup.
Chile’s neoliberal model was further cemented following the return to democracy in 1988, which established a new constitution that privatized pensions, among other things. These privatization efforts were influenced by economist James Buchanan, whose model has also been embraced by the Koch Brothers.
In Haiti, the protests began in July 2018 after a similar structural adjustment called for the end of fuel subsidies. The discontent over the misuse of fuel donated by Venezuela and other examples of corruption boiled over into over a year of uprisings. Hundreds of thousands have continued to march through the streets demanding an end to corruption and the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse.
In 2004, the United States backed a coup d’état against democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic Priest and proponent of liberation theology who transitioned to politics following the fall of the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc. The coup further stunted democratic advances in Haiti, and led to the continuation of corruption. The country’s government revealed its fragility during the 2015 election fiasco that left the country without a president for nearly fourteen months.
Across the region, these protests are being sparked by structural changes that burden the most vulnerable communities as well as middle-class families, pushing them into precarious living situations. Even the International Monetary Fund was forced to admit the failure of neoliberal economic policies in 2016 after decades of destructive effects. But the policies have nonetheless continued.
These mobilizations—similar to the mobilizations of the Occupy movement in the United States in 2011—have continued to gain momentum. Chile’s protests have already lasted nearly two months with no signs of ending.
These protests have often turned deadly, as police have used force. In Columbia, the death of eighteen-year-old Dilan Cruz, who was struck in the head by a reportedly non-lethal object fired by the police, has further angered Colombians already frustrated with the current situation. Three police officers were killed and ten others injured by a bomb blast at a police station in Bogotá in late November.
In Chile, militarized police units known as the Carabineros have carried out a dirty war against protesters. At least twenty-three people have been killed, and another 2,300 injured, including more than 200 who were partially blinded by police projectiles. Human rights organizations have raised concerns over abuses including rape, sexual assault, and torture being committed at the hands of Chilean security forces.
Human rights organizations have raised concerns over abuses including rape, sexual assault, and torture being committed at the hands of Chilean security forces.
In Ecuador, nine people have been killed and another 1,500 injured by security forces since the protests began. In Haiti, at least forty-two people have been killed and another eighty-six injured, according to the United Nations. The injured include a photojournalist from the Associated Press who was shot in the face by a Haitian Senator who fired on protesters in September 2019.
The protests have the entire region on edge. The far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has referred to the mobilizations as “terrorist acts” and warned Brazilians not to try similar actions there.
But to others, the protests are a sign that the people of Latin America are willing to push back against attempts to shift the fiscal burden on poor and working class people.
“The popular activism is the most important part,” Zibechi says. “The people have said ‘enough.’ They do not want to continue to pay the high costs of this model. They have lost their fear."
In the past, he notes, “The characteristic of most of the countries [of Latin America] has been popular silence. But this has ended, and in one way or another they are moving from below to above. They are insisting that this model cannot continue.”