Learning From Defeat in Chile

We can speak of five contemporary factors. The first is economic stagnation and very low growth in the last decade compared to the previous one, which, of course, limits the options for working families to achieve good material conditions. The second was demographic change: the total fertility rate went from 1.92 children per woman to 1.16 children per woman. It’s a very rapid change that alters the population pyramid, to which we need to add migration: in 2002 Chile had 173,000 migrants, while by 2024 there were 1,600,000, a very rapid jump. The third point is the decrease in poverty, from 27 percent in 2006 to 6.5 percent in 2022 [beneath the poverty line of $260 per month income]. The political subject no longer identifies as poor, but increasingly as an aspirational middle class, if one very vulnerable to falling into poverty.

The fourth point is the technological revolution. In 2006, student mobilizations were done through Photolog. In 2011, it was Facebook and Twitter. In 2019, it was WhatsApp, TikTok, Signal, Telegram, Instagram. All this platformization gives a different perception of the political times, a change in how people conceive of political processes. And the fifth factor is the increasingly important role that organized crime and illegal trade networks have taken on in Chile in the last two decades. A certain type of more violent, more public crime may not have radically changed overall crime numbers, but it has had real media repercussions and impacted citizens’ perception of insecurity.