Four years ago in Chile…

As civic resistance to the implied procedural threat to democracy here reaches a new and disturbing phase — the airport has run out of fuel, I have run out of red wine — I’d like to share a few observations on how this so far compares to my experience of the #EstallidoSocial in Chile back in 2019. 

By the time I arrived in Santiago a fair number of demonstrators had died. What had started as a protest against a hike of public transport fares in the capital had turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis and the government had deployed the carabineros — a paramilitary police force with an essentially fascist ethos and a plethora of heavily armoured vehicles. 

Any businesses not openly supporting the revolt were being ransacked as enraged crowds periodically flowed through the downtown areas. 

These were not peaceful demonstrations. An Uber I was travelling in was hit by a brick. Aside from the people killed by real bullets, the rubber projectiles were causing horrific ocular injuries.

And yet there was a fairly well-demarcated war zone centred on Baquedano metro station, which along with its immediate neighbours was shut. One could pass beneath the mayhem, almost as if a small area of central London had been designated as a permanent yet limited theatre of riot and repression, beyond which life was carrying on broadly as usual.

Valparaiso, on the other hand, had turned almost wholly post-apocalyptic. Aside from all the visible damage to property, the streets were sticky with the residue from gas canisters and I was genuinely shocked to observe how elderly residents just trying to stock up with basic provisions were coughing and spluttering. 

The popular movement appeared to stand its ground and achieve its immediate goal, a constituent assembly tasked with devising a new constitution, but then the cracks appeared. 

Narrow objectives had mutated into an unfocused and ultimately incompatible multitude, and after a left-wing drafted constitution was rejected in a referendum, a similar fate now seems to await a right-wing devised alternative.

Meanwhile, here in Guatemala 2023, after just six days of Paro Nacional Indefinido the country is already on the brink of an economic crisis and the Constitutional Court has greenlighted a more aggressive response to the blockades — but so far only an Opus Dei priest with a crib in Cayalá has taken up the invitation. 

Consuelo Porras seemingly lacks the resources and budget to suppress more than 80 choke points nationally (or overcome a case of 70% paralysis, as someone put it today), but some sort of incremental use of violence is surely to be expected. 

How will chapines respond to this?
 

So far the protests have keep up their narrow focus on Porras and her FECI clique. I would suggest that this is important, as wider support for the blockades, both domestically and abroad, depends on this remaining a preemptive counter-strike against a technical coup and not an umbrella movement attracting all sorts of radical nutjobs, which is essentially what happened in Chile. 

Yet it has its inherent limitations too, because Porras could go and the fundamental problem would remain. Indeed right now the ‘Pacto’ may be considering throwing grandma under a bus, as this might temporarily take the sting out of the situation, but would not necessarily clear the path for an uninterrupted transition.