‘It Is Not 30 Pesos, It Is 30 Years’: Reflections on the Chilean Crisis: Introduction
| Author | Paz Irarrazabal,John Charney,Fernando Muñoz,Pablo Marshall,Daniela Accatino,Emilios Christodoulidis |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663920986432 |
| Subject Matter | Dialogue & Debate |
Dialogue & Debate
‘It Is Not 30 Pesos, It Is
30 Years’: Reflections
on the Chilean Crisis
Introduction
John Charney
Pontificia Universidad Cat´
olica de Valpara´
ıso, Chile
Pablo Marshall
Universidad Austral de Chile, Chile
Emilios Christodoulidis
University of Glasgow, Scotland
October 25th 2020 will come to pass as the day in which the Chilean people expressed
their will to put an end to Pinochet’s legacy. The referendum held that day (in which 78%
of voters approved the drafting of a new Constitution by a Constituent Assembly elected
by the people) marks the beginning of the end of a period of almost half a century which
began with the military coup against the democratic government of Salvador Allende on
September 11th 1973, continued with 17 years of despotic rule and another 30 years of
democratic government conducted under Pinochet’s Constitution. The ferocious riots
triggered by a subwayfare increase 1 year ago and theextraordinary protests thatfollowed
which brought millions onto the streets across the country and forced the government to
concede the referendum, can only be understood within this historical framework.
The papers in this section explore the causes of the constitutional crisis and the course
that the events took since. They confront the historical trajectory of neoliberal legality,
violently enacted during Pinochet’s dictatorship and institutionally consolidated during
democracy. The central thesis, lucidly exposed in Daniela Accatino’s paper, is that the
Chilean crisis is a transitional justice moment in which the past comes back to life in the
form of a violentpresent which can only be overcomeby reconstituting a hithertofractured
Corresponding author:
Emilios Christodoulidis, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Email: Emilios.Christodoulidis@glasgow.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(4) 627–668
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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political identity. Past becomes present and present becomes past in an intricate dialectic
between law and violence. For in fact, the repression and violence of the dictatorship
radically reconfigured the economic, social and institutional landscapeof the country. And
even if brutal physical violence receded after democracy returned, it shadowed a Consti-
tution that shielded the neoliberal project from democratic threats and prevented the
Chilean peoplefrom fully recovering its politicalliberty after almost two decadesof terror.
But as Fernando Mun
˜oz argues in his paper, the Constitution gave birth to its own
grave-diggers: a generation raised in democracy that did not share the traumas of its
predecessors and could fearlessly challenge injustice. As victims of the pitfalls of a
neoliberalized educational system, they organized themselves into a student movement
that led massive protests in 2006 and 2011 and was also responsible for precipitating the
crisis by resistingthe payment of the 30 pesos increase in the subwayfare (waves of pupils
and students jumped the subway turnstiles throughout Santiago in October 2019). Fero-
cious riots and extraordinary forms of protestfollowed those events, all of which were met
with state violence. Suddenly it was as if Chile was back again in the midst of the
dictatorship.A state of emergency and a curfewall over the national territorywere rapidly
decreed after thePresident claimed that Chile wasin war with a powerful enemy. Accord-
ing to a conservative report of the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH), up to
December 30th, 3,583 people were injured (out of which 359 were ocular injuries) with
2,059 of these injuries a consequence of shots fired by the police. At least 22 persons lost
their lives during the protests. International human rights organizations, including the
United Nations, identified numerous violations of human rights during this turbulence.
It is with reference to policebrutality that another side of Chile’s pastcomes to the fore at
the current moment, with the broad consensus that has emerged over the urgent need to
reform the Carabinerosde Chile. In her paper Paz Irarr´azabal tracksthe parallel trajectories
of the authority of Pinochet’s Constitution collapsing in tandem with the authority of the
police force that so vehemently repressed not only the political opposition to the dictator-
ship but also the social movement that forged the current constituent moment. For
Irarr´azabal, law and violence, inherently connected for nearly half a century of Chilean
political history, are now, slowly coming apart under the imperative of re-inforcing the
‘public’ aspect of the concept of public order, as she puts it, re-orienting policing away
from the protection of the interests of the powerful and towards ‘subaltern publics’.
So we find ourselves almost 50 years after Pinochet’s coup before a constitutional move-
ment that has erupted with a vehemence and a dynamism that took the world by surprise. The
market economy had been locked in place by a constitutional settlement that had subordi-
nated politics to capitalist structures. The ‘cheating constitution’ as Fernando Atria popular-
ized the description,
1
had made significant political reform practically impossible. If the
social movement swept away the constitutional settlement with its careful hierarchies, bal-
ances and articulations, it was because Chile’s constituent moment could not find expression
on the plane of the constituted.
2
The political found expression as contradictory and as
antisystemic: a moment of negativity on an emergent constitutional imaginary.
Violence receded during 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to neutralizing social
protests. But there could be no reversal; the popular upheaval was channelled into a popular
constitutional process. As John Charney and Pablo Marshall argue in their paper, this is a new
political and social pact. The capacity of the Chilean people to act in concert in order to decide
628 Social & Legal Studies 30(4)
for themselves the fundamental political arrangements for the future has been strengthened.
What we discern today in Chile are volatile revolutionary irruptions of norm-giving and
dramatically emancipatory social activity, moments of large-scale constitutional innovation.
The articlesin this Dialogue & Debate section are the workof an academic network that
began during 2018 in a series of workshops and meetings held in Chile (Valdivia and
Valparaiso)and in the UK (Warwickand Glasgow). In thecourse of these meetings,a group
of academics fromboth countries talked and exchangedimpressions about the relationship
between law andviolence in neoliberal Chile.The creation of this network, founded by the
Chilean Council of Science and Development, sought to give a group of Chilean legal
scholars who had been working together for several years, the possibility to extend their
network internationally. What has been pursued in this work is an alternative to the legal-
doctrinalapproach prevalentin Chilean academia,especially in two aspects.Firstly this is an
approach to law cognizant of the social reality in which law operates and conscious of the
need to incorporate interdisciplinary perspectivesand diverse legal methods;and secondly,
it adopts a critical attitude vis-a-vis current power structures in legal institutions, insisting
that such an attitude should have a place within legal debate and with the legal education.
Author’s note
The articles of this collection are part of the project REDI170323 funded by the Chilean Agency of
Research and Development (ANID).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The articles of this collection are part of the project REDI170323
funded by the Chilean Agency of Research and Development (ANID).
Notes
1. See Atria (2013).
2. For this argument see Christodoulidis and Goldoni (2020).
References
Atria F (2013) La Constitucio
´n Tramposa. Santiago: LOM Ediciones.
Christodoulidis E and Goldoni M (2020) Chile’s ‘Constituent Moment’ Law and Critique 31(1): 1.
The Chilean Crisis as a Transitional
Justice Moment
Daniela Accatino
Universidad Austral de Chile, Chile
Charney et al. 629
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