Vol. 75/No. 32      September 12, 2011

The strike boosted a student protest movement, which has held nearly weekly protests over the last two months.

Strike demonstrations took place in 51 cities, Undersecretary of the Interior Rodrigo Ubilla told the Miami Herald. Differing government and union estimates of the turnout range from 175,000 to 600,000.

“It’s terrible that the CUT [United Federation of Workers] has called this strike, I think the damage they are doing to our country is immeasurable,” complained Chilean Labor Minister Evelyn Matthei in an August 26 radio interview posted on the government’s website.

That’s not how striker Miguel Escudero, a letter carrier for 29 years in Concepción, Chile, and member of the postal workers union, sees it. “The cost of transport, education, housing, and food have gone up too much,” he said in a phone interview, “but wages are static. The minimum wage is just 175,000 pesos a month [$375]. The only solution is to raise wages.”

For Escudero one of the most important demands of the strike is for free education. “My daughter’s tuition is more than I make in a month,” he said.

The cost of public education has jumped 26 percent since 2005, while the number of college students has risen to about 1 million from 200,000 some 20 years ago. The average student graduates with $45,000 in debts.

The government of Sebastián Piñera, elected president in 2010, claims that the students’ demands are “more than utopian.”

Education was free in Chile until 1973, Escudero noted, when the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup.

The protests are another nail in the coffin of the myth of the Chilean economic “miracle.”

After Allende’s overthrow, the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet privatized pensions, cut import tariffs, sold off state-owned industries, and fired thousands of government workers.

“In 30 years, Chile has gone from being a Third World country to a developed one,” proclaimed Investor’s Business Daily in a March 21 editorial, because Pinochet “turned the job of cleaning up a ravaged economy” over to economists who supported “free market reforms.”

After Pinochet stepped down and elections were held in 1990, subsequent governments continued his economic measures. Supporters of Chile’s capitalist course point to the country’s 6 percent yearly growth in gross domestic product and $24 billion in foreign currency reserves as proof of its success.

“The Chilean experience,” said President Barack Obama during a visit in March, is a model “for the region and the world.”

“It’s not a model, it’s a failed experiment,” Sebastián Vielmas, secretary general of the University Student Federation at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, told the Militant. “The economic growth has benefited a minority, the richest 20 percent, but it has not resulted in social development.”

Hoping to quell the protests, Piñera proposed $4 billion more in education funds and a reduction from 5.6 percent to 2 percent in student loan interest rates.

“That changes nothing,” said Guillermo Salinas, a leader of the CUT. What students and the union movement want, he added, “is an end to an education system for profit.”

“The school system is discriminatory,” Vielmas explained. Students from wealthy families go to expensive private schools, while working people go to public schools that have inferior facilities and inadequate funding.  
 
 
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