In May, Chilean activists Exequiel Borbarán and Diego Guzmán were murdered in Valparaíso at a large student demonstration. Another college radical, Rodrigo Avilés, was sent into a life-threatening coma after police attacked him and his comrades with a motorized water cannon or guanaco, slamming him to the ground, resulting in severe head trauma.

The Chilean government’s recourse to routine repression during recent protests, despite promises to address popular grievances, reveals an increasingly exhausted ability to absorb demands from below.

After a twenty-year absence of popular mobilization, since 2006 a growing student movement calling for an end to the commodification, fragmentation, and inequality in the educational system has transformed Chilean politics. The movement has been punctuated by moments of quantitative and qualitative growth. In 2011, it reignited with unprecedented force and began attracting support from new generations of worker activists. More recently, it remobilized alongside new working-class insurgencies and expanded its anti-neoliberal demands.