Gomez Aguilera, Clara (2020) The 2019 uprisings in Chile: A student led movement. Bachelor, Social Sciences.
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Abstract
The students have played a fundamental role in the social uprisings that started in October 2019 in Chile. The actions of evasion in the subway initiated by high school students, were the driving force behind the massive mobilizations that have been taking place throughout the country ever since. The unrest was triggered by a $0.04 increase in the subway fares in the city of Santiago. A few days later high school students began organizing and carrying out actions of evasion by jumping over the turnstiles without paying the ticket. “Evadir, no pagar, otra forma de luchar” (Evade, don’t pay, another way of fighting) was the slogan that the students chanted in chorus at the entrance of the subway. After a whole week of protests and evasion actions, the students called for a day of massive protests on October 18, and the population actively responded demonstrating in the main metro stations of the city. The Carabineros de Chile (the local police force) took action and confronted the protesters with brutal repression. The population, indignant at the police response and the government reaction, spilled out onto the streets (Ferretti, 2020). What started as a reaction to fare increases, transformed into a general challenge of the social and political system, which had prevailed in the country for the last 40 years. The structural inequality, the poor living conditions, the rate increases for public services, an authoritarian democratic system as well as the growing precariousness of social rights are among the main reasons behind the largest social outbreak since the recovery of democracy in Chile (Ferretti, 2020). The role of these high school students is especially noteworthy because of the broader impact that such mobilizations had and are still having in the whole structure of the country. For this reason, it might be important to get a better understanding of what motivated these Chilean students to stage such a startling movement especially when the event that triggered it (increase in subway fees), was not directly related to an educational matter; and to comprehend why it was initiated by high school students and not other sectors of society. The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative socio-psychological explanation of why the social movement that started in October 2019 in Chile was initiated by the students. There is an extensive body of research in regards to the student mobilizations and protest in Chile. The following research offers new contributions to the existing literature in terms of content, argument and methodology. It focuses on the subjective aspects of the Chilean student actions of 2019. It primarily looks at the experiences and perceptions of the students and pays less attention to the actual content of the “objective” characteristics behind their actions. Instead of analyzing the different reasons for collective behavior as unconnected elements, it provides a socio-psychological integrative model, the social identity model of collective action, that links and explains them together. Lastly, due to the recent character of the 2019 social uprisings, the existing literature on it is quite limited. This paper would be among some of the first research tackling the October 2019 events and the role of students in them. This article is organized as follows. I begin by discussing the Integrative social identity model of collective action (SIMCA), which I chose as a theoretical framework to analyze and explain the recent student actions in Chile. I expand its advantages over other models of collective action, and introduce its different components and the way they predict group behaviour. After this, I contextualize the events under consideration, by providing a brief review of the recent political and social history of Chile. I focus on the role and development of the Chilean student movement before, during and after the military dictatorship as well as in the new wave of student protests that emerged in the 2000s. Next, I present the socio-psychological reasons that drove the students to initiate the protests of 2019, which I classify in three groups based on the elements of the SIMCA model: perceived injustice, perceived efficacy and social identity. I explain each of them and support them with evidence collected from academic papers, journalistic articles, and other sources. I conclude with an explanation of how the aforementioned variables interacted with each other, emphasizing the importance of the development of a Chilean student identity, and how they led to the students actions of October 2019.
| Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Major: | Social Sciences |
| Supervisor: | Ioannou, M |
| Datum van aanlevering: | 29 Jun 2020 11:11 |
| Last modified: | 29 Jun 2020 11:11 |
| URI: | http://ucg.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/40 |
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