Revolts Against Neoliberalism in the Southern Cone: The Argentine Crisis of 2001 and the 2019 Chilean Social Explosion in Comparison

The argentine “throw THEM all out!”

At the end of 2001, Argentina was experiencing the agony of the accumulation model structured around the 1990s neoliberal reforms. The adjustment policies carried out by Fernando de la Rúa (Radical Civic Union, 1999-2001), far from achieving their intended effects, caused economic stagnation, social distortion and citizen opposition and protest. ¹

The general crisis was unleashed in December, when the disturbance of the social order in its different spheres led to the collapse of the neoliberal hegemony achieved in previous years (Piva, 2015; Pucciarelli and Castellani, 2014). Social discontent with the economic and political model fueled an intense and growing protest from multiple positions in the social structure. The establishment of the “corralito,” which limited the free management of bank deposits, triggered an increase of social protest against government policies and promoted a general strike on December 13. Unionized workers participated widely, and there was support from other sectors of the population such as merchants and the unemployed (Lobato and Suriano, 2003). In the days that followed, social rebellion and the breakdown of the order expressed themselves in various forms. In this context, looting of supermarkets and retail stores in different areas of the country broke out and spread (Auyero, 2007).

The generalization of protest and looting led the president to declare a state of siege on December 19, and generalized civil disobedience quickly emerged. Focusing on the middle classes, the original social base of the government, the president’s speech announcing the state of siege met with cacerolazos and spontaneous mass demonstrations in various neighborhoods of the city and soon the mobilizations spread to various cities in the country. Citizen protest focused on making noise and using the Argentine flag as primary symbols of this unprecedented irruption of the masses. The challenge to the presidential order clearly entailed a destituent claim toward the central figures of institutional politics: “Throw them all out, let not a single one remain,” quickly became the slogan of the mobilizations of the period. At dawn, the peaceful mobilization turned into actions against police repression. On October 20, despite the resignation of the minister of the economy, the mobilizations, this time called by social and political organizations, continued. In the face of repression, these turned into clashes with the security forces and other forms of collective violence.

In this context, the opposition rejected the government’s call for a “united government,” forcing the president to resign for lack of support and legitimacy. This political force imposed the terms for succession (Malamud, 2015). Following a brief and chaotic succession of presidents, Eduardo Duhalde, Justicialista Party senator and former presidential candidate (defeated by de la Rúa in 1999), was designated interim president by the Congress.

The public attitude of contention continued in the following months. Rage and mobilization were expressed in the streets. Neighborhood assemblies were formed that, particularly in the city of Buenos Aires, employed different strategies seeking to prolong the citizen outrage to achieve social and political change (Svampa, 2017; Mauro and Rossi, 2015). The movement of unemployed workers known as piqueteros, which emerged at the end of the 1990s, became consolidated and increased its ability to mobilize (Maneiro, 2012), even surpassing union actors in the intensity of conflict. In a context marked by politicization and the structuring of solidarities among the mobilized, the piquetero organizations found more positive public reception for their plebeian protest, especially among the organized middle sectors. The period was marked by autonomy– the crisis of preexisting heteronomies and disobedience to authority by different social groups. It was a time of assemblies and democracy in the streets, direct action, picketing on public roads, takeovers of buildings and factories, and attacks on banks. It was also a time for social experimentation, the dissemination of alternative forms of production such as companies recovered by their workers, community gardens, barter clubs, and other type of activity fueled by political discontent and the model of accumulation. Collective action was characterized by diverse demands—from food and work to justice and an end to corruption with different strategies and levels of systematization of the criticism of neoliberalism– but showed little capacity to articulate an alternative project for the country (Rebón, 2018).

The protests presented a severe challenge for the provisional government, which focused its action on an agenda of restoring order, employing heterodox methods and selective recognition of actors. The sectors that continued mobilizing received an increasingly confrontational response. The murder of two piquetero activists and dozens of injuries of protesters during the repression of a group attempting to block the Pueyrredón bridge on June 26, 2002 was a brutal example. The wave of indignation and mobilization unleashed by this event led the government to call elections as a way out of its crisis of legitimacy. The withdrawal from the race of Carlos Menem—the candidate with the most votes in the first round and a former promoter of the 1990s reforms—in the face of probable defeat assured the election of Néstor Kirchner (Justicialista Party, 2003-2007) as president and initiating a new political cycle in the country (Pozzi and Nigra, 2015).

The Chilean Social Explosion

In contrast to Argentina’s, the Chilean revolt was not preceded by economic crisis. Even in the first days of October, President Sebastian Piñera (Chile Vamos, 2010-2014 and 2018-2022) boasted about the country’s situation, pointing out that it represented an “oasis” in the middle of a region convulsed by protest. Unexpectedly for the authorities, an increase in public transport fares in the capital’s districts precipitated the most significant cycle of collective action in twenty-first century Chile.

On October 14, 2019, high school students initiated a protest calling for fare evasion on the Santiago Metro. Massive evasions coordinated across social media followed that week and on October 18 they multiplied. In the face of this situation, the government closed Metro stations as protesters and repressive forces faced off. At night, the entire city banged on pots and pans in protest, while violence escalated after attacks on several metro stations, many of which were damaged and some of which were even burned. President Piñera declared a state of emergency in the region, ordering the deployment of the military in the streets to establish order. The following day, he decreed a curfew. Similar to the declaration of the state of siege in Argentina, the protest intensified in the streets and in homes, with cacerolazos and slogans against the military and government. Clashes between the demonstrators and the militarized police forces began in the central Plaza Baquedano and spread to the rest of the country.

It soon became clear that that the discontent went beyond the precipitant—the rise in the metro fare—to encompass the political and social regime of the posttransition to democracy as a whole. The slogan “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years” summarizes the cause of the dispute. The confrontation with the government gave rise to a set of heterogeneous demands that ranged from the cost of living and daily precariousness to challenging the entire political system. The demand for a new order, expressed as a call for a constituent assembly, took shape, thus renewing an old citizen demand for change in the constitution inherited from the dictatorship. ² Amid attacks on buildings and strong repression, Santiago came to a standstill. Stores were closed and flights were canceled. On October 20, Congress approved suspending the metro fare hike, but the discontent had already spread nationwide. Piñera declared: “We are at war against a powerful enemy who is willing to use violence without any limits (. . .) They have a degree of organization and logistics that is typical of a criminal organization.” These statements deepened the social unrest. The government announced and promoted palliative social measures, but the protest continued, and truckers and motorists against toll collection set up roadblocks, cutting routes in several areas of the country.

On Thursday, October 24, the “largest march in Chile,” organized through and followed on social media, broke out. In Santiago alone the march totaled more than 1,200,000 people. With a plural composition and without political party flags, it headed toward the Plaza Baquedano, now renamed the “Plaza de la Dignidad” (Dignity Plaza) (Ruiz, 2020). The slogans mostly referred to socioeconomic demands (Somma et al., 2020). The wenufoye, the flag that various Mapuche organizations had adopted in 1992, could be seen among the Chilean flags.

At the end of October, amid an abrupt decline in government approval, the president made a change in his cabinet and lifted the curfew and the state of emergency. On Tuesday, November 12, protests broke out that virtually paralyzed the capital. With almost no police on the streets, there was extreme violence. Destruction and looting shook downtown Santiago. In other areas of the country there were attacks on military barracks. That night Piñera announced an agreement for peace and against violence, for justice and for a new Constitution” (Ruiz, 2020). On October 15, a transversal agreement between the government and Congress, signed by the majority of political parties with congressional representation, agreed to call a national plebiscite to determine whether a new constitution would be drafted and what mechanism would be used. This agreement tended to reduce the massiveness of peaceful mobilization but not the collective violence (Somma et al., 2020). The cycle of mobilization remained active for some time afterwards.

As in Argentina, the protest tended to assume an inorganic form. Previous mobilization structures remained but were not dominant. A strong individual and/or family character stands out; unlike the bases of traditional organizations—whose social and historical formation preceded the neoliberal cycle—the large contingents that joined the protests did so in small groups or individually, each with its own slogans and banners.

The cycle promoted new processes of autonomous organization in and beyond the protest that in general had no continuity with the old popular organizational expressions. Faced with the state’s repression, self-defense groups were organized. The First Line, made up mainly of young people from low-income families who confronted the repression by using their bodies was notable. Barricades, Molotov cocktails, stones, homemade shields, and sticks were used as a defensive weapon aimed at resisting police attacks and, above all, making popular protest possible (Ruiz, 2020).

At the same time, politicization and citizen deliberation were expressed in public spaces with assemblies and open councils that sought to collect self-organized proposals for social change (Garretón, 2020) and in the alternative media (Valenzuela and Toro, 2020). The revolt also inspired artistic manifestations of various genres. The participatory performance of the feminist group Lastesis, with its chant, “A rapist in your path,” stands out. In a context marked by security forces’ repression against protesters, the performance soon went viral on social media and was replicated internationally (Ruiz, 2020).

The Revolts In Comparative Perspective

What did the revolts share and how did they differ? Mobilizations, shut-downs, strikes, cacerolazos, confrontations, looting, escraches or funas, ³ and other forms of struggle were repertoires of action that are repeated on both sides of the Andes. The revolts included actions that could clearly be defined as protests—collective actions making public demands of authorities—among others in which demands were not formulated, as occurred with some attacks and lootings. In a context marked by the weakness of institutional politics, the principle of direct action was prioritized as an expression of discontent. ⁴ In many cases, there was a direct appeal to proscribed or extrainstitutional actions such as attacks or roadblocks. In others, the use of formats institutionally prescribed or tolerated under normal conditions such as strikes or mobilizations was common even when disavowed by the conditions of a state of siege or emergency. The series of events could be characterized as cycles of revolt; in terms of generalized collective action, its form transcendsthe channels for processing the conflict and even the organizations of preexisting civil society. They represented massive inorganic forms of expressing discontent and indignation with a social regime. In the revolts’ peak moments, they were true explosions of indignation that become chaotic in cities and other areas of the country, on December 19 and 20, 2001 in Buenos Aires and October 18, 2019, in Santiago. The term “explosion” allows us to capture their sudden, volatile, fluid character, full of autonomous actions that momentarily disrupted the social order. This connotation is precisely relevant to the popular denomination of the episodes in Chile.

Another of their attributes was the relatively spontaneous character, or low organizational coordination of the majority of the actions, in which organizations participated, but did not lead, and the population mobilized itself without leadership. In the Chilean case, since it occurred more recently, social media were more important in the convocation and coordination of protest and in the self-defense measures employed, for example, in denouncing cases of police abuse against protesters because of their delegitimization by the traditional media (Ruiz, 2020). In the moments of greater massiveness, such as the night of December 19 in Buenos Aires or the “largest march in Chile,” they did not assume a mass organization. Rather, they represented a multitude of individuals and diverse groups linked by their opposition to the protest’s target. The organizational processes that they generated were marked by an autonomous impression that tended to resist representation. In tune with other resistances to neoliberalism, they were marked by horizontality, self-organization, and direct democracy (Burawoy, 2015), and they tended to take on the form of multitude more than union (García Linera, 2008).

They represented processes of politicization of universalization of the particular that brought together groups that felt aggrieved and mistreated. In this framework, two processes overlapped criticism of institutional politics, represented as autonomous from citizenship and corrupt, and rejection of the social dislocations configured by the growing commodification of life. The preexisting corporate demands made up a chain of negative equivalence that articulated them, blurring their particular differences in confronting the state and institutional politics, which were the perceived sources of malaise. The precipitants of each case served as grievances that condensed and generalized the accumulated social unrest. The state’s initial repressive response, far from putting an end to the collective action, strengthened the indignation and rebellion.

Despite the noted continuities, which allow a common conceptualization, the revolts presented a series of divergences. First, the temporal contexts and, linked to these, the magnitudes differed. The revolt of 2001 in Argentina unfolded more rapidly, beginning with the resignation of the president of a weak government and a failed model of accumulation. The party in government had already been defeated electorally in the preceding months, but mobilization and direct action had continued without reaching the same level of social chaos and crisis of state sovereignty. The revolt did not become a social movement (Tilly, 2008), although new movements emerged (citizen assemblies) and others, such as the piqueteros, were strengthened. Each group configured its own agenda of demands and experimentation. In contrast, in the Chilean case, a weak government and model of accumulation did not play a role in the rebellion’s eruption. The fact that the government did not resign and that it employed different strategies erratically prolonged and strengthened the revolt. In this context, it partially assumed the form of a social movement sustaining a campaign of public action over timemaking demands onthe authorities, and finding an axis of positive politics—the call for a constituent assembly—that articulated a set of political and social demands (Garretón, 2020). The congressional agreement for the new constitution seems to have started a slow process of political decompression, although without bringing about closure of the cycle.

A comparison of the repertoires shows greater influence of collective violence in the Chilean case and greater importance of classic actors in the Argentine case. This is particularly true in the conditions leading up to the days in 2001 when a labor strike had paralyzed the country. Nevertheless, on December 19 and 20 the unions were bypassed and lacked a viable policy, calling a strike only after the government’s luck had run out. In Chile, for its part, even though there were calls for a general strike, unions did not have the organizing capacity to paralyze the country. The weight of collective violence clearly differed between the two processes. In Argentina the looting preceded the event and played a very minor role, becoming insignificant afterward. The looting occurred prior to the peak of the protest and was partially separate from it. Confrontation with security forces in the demonstrations occurred in specific cases of repression, the main one taking place on December 20, and in some cases of looting. The attacks represented a minor component of the cycle and were clearly focused on symbols of what was being targeted, such as banks or government buildings. In contrast, in Chile the attacks and looting and confrontations with security forces were more generalized in time and space. There were even attacks and sieges on police and military facilities.

Chile’s more violent dynamic was linked to its previous history and the government’s repressive strategy. As we have pointed out, its transition to democracy was more gradual and presented a rather minor break with the repressive forces, preserving greater levels of repression against the protest. As collective action studies show, more repressive conditions tend to promote violence among dissenters (Tilly, 2008). In Chile, in contrast to Argentina, active armed groups existed well into the “transition to democracy.” At the same time, confrontations with security forces as a result of mobilizations have been part of the culture of collective action of various sectors. Repression of rebellion differs in magnitude and methodology between the two countries. The numbers of fatalities reached relatively similar levels, 33 in Chile according to the Public Ministry (Gómez, 2020) and 38 in Argentina (La Vaca, 2011), but we must bear in mind that Argentina’s population is more than double that of Chile. In both revolts, all the victims were civilians, mostly victims of the security forces in the repression of demonstrations and looting. In some cases, the perpetrators were looted merchants, and in other cases there is a lack of data to establish who was responsible. The absence of proven fatalities among the security forces is a clear indicator of the asymmetry of violence between the forces in confrontation.

Another distinguishing factor is that in Chile the forces of repression were militarized. The police forces carabineros are a fourth wing of the armed forces and as such have a military character and were at times directly charged with carrying out repression. The systematic mutilation and physical harming of protesters has a history in Chile’s repertoire of repression. According to the Human Rights Institute, as of March 19, 2019, 3,838 people had been injured by state agents, mostly by firearm projectiles. Likewise, 460 cases of eye injuries were recorded (INDH, 2020). There are also numerous reports of torture and rape. With respect to civil collective violence, we identified different components. The first is derived from the repressive dynamic of the mobilizations and is led by groups of protesters who resist; the First Line is the paradigmatic example. The second is the participation of criminal organizations (as in Argentina) in various instances of looting by residents of low-income neighborhoods who took advantage of opportunities to reduce their hardships. Finally, some events, such as the fires in Santiago’s Metro stations, seem to account for a third component linked to unknown groups that were more organized (Ruiz, 2020; Somma et al., 2020).

The revolts represented the accumulation of acts of resistance that had been brewing over the previous years and a meeting point for the new sectors that had become activated, joining the protest from multiple positions in the social structure. Their multiclass character is in line with Polanyi’s theories, but it falls short of explaining the subjects of the protest, which demands a broader analytical perspective to account for the processes in terms of class formation and other cleavages that organize inequality, recognition, and conflict.

The protest’s components indirectly express new configurations of the social structure. These involve greater heterogeneity and individuation and also, in line with global trends (Piketty, 2019), greater social inequality in an ideological framework marked by meritocracy and the sacralization of private property. Neoliberal modernization in Chile radically transformed the class structure, dismantling the old middle classes, especially the public-sector professional middle class, and reducing the industrial working class to its minimum expression, weakening the old union actor. New middle-class ranges characterized by labor instability, fragmentation, and an individualization marked by social representations of economic success and managerial lifestyles emerged in private services. Job rotation and subcontracting were generalized among workers after the reabsorption into the private sphere of the bulk of the workforce expelled from the state sector by deindustrialization and privatization. The services sector was one of the main pillars of economic growth, although with more flexible jobs and without the rewards or social prestige once associated with nonmanual work (Ruiz and Boccardo, 2014). This change in the social structure, originating under a model of accumulation marked by renewed reliance on the primary sector and financialization of the economy, simultaneously produced a reduction in poverty and an increase in inequality in wealth and opportunities (Ruiz and Caviedes, 2020). The highly individualized social fringes—because of the degree to which their living conditions had been commodified—transferred this character to the protest.

In Argentina, the accumulation model consolidated in the 1990s also produced structural changes. A polarization developed between sectors of the middle classes, at the same time that there was a reduction of the stable working class, particularly in industry and an increase in the growth of the marginal-precarious stratum. As in Chile, flexibility, outsourcing and atomization of the labor market increased, but in contrast to the situation in Chile there was a significant expansion of poverty, unemployment and social exclusion (Dalle, 2016). Argentine neoliberalism was also less stable and vigorous in terms of economic growth, particularly in the period prior to the revolt. Between 1990 and 2001, according to data from the World Bank, Argentina recorded an average annual GDP growth of 2.9 percent, presenting negative rates for the last three years of that period. Chile, in contrast, registered a yearly average growth of 4.3 percent between 1975 and 2018, with positive rates for the last nine years of that period. ⁵ Associated with economic and social gains, citizen consensus on the economic models reached different depths and stability in the two countries. Chile experienced the construction and consolidation of neoliberal hegemony over several decades, nurtured by new horizons of consumption and lifestyles despite the persistence of the constitution inherited from the dictatorship (Garretón, 2020). In Argentina, a weak and short-lived hegemony that was linked more to the threat of hyperinflation than to increased consumption ensued (Piva, 2015).

These transformations of the social structure generally imply a weakening of the working class in the field of economic struggle. This took on a radical character in Chile, where structural adjustment carried out under the dictatorship, lasting into the postdictatorship period, gravely altered the structural, associative, and institutional power of workers and unions (Ruiz and Boccardo, 2014; Bensusán, 2016). In Argentina, in contrast, while there was a significant decrease of workers’ and unions’ structural power, with losses of their social bases and resources, they maintained key aspects of labor networks such as in labor legislation and the management of social projects (Etchemendy and Collier, 2008).

Finally, two class cleavages of social inequality stand out. On the one hand, the ethnic cleavage of Native peoples’ inequality acquired a differential character. In Chile, their population was proportionately much larger than in Argentina: 11 percent versus 2.4 percent according to census data (Del Popolo, 2015). Second, the different historical timing of events meant different levels of crisis in gender relations. In the case of Chile, the wave of renewed feminist mobilization that has spread over the past decade in the Southern Cone and Latin America is clearly evident (Svampa, 2017).

In this general framework of transformations and continuities in the configuration of social structures, the revolt in Argentina was preceded by the heterogenization of protest in previous years – the emergence of new actors and repertoires of protest, among them the piqueteros and the appeal to more disruptive repertoires such as escraches and roadblocks. However, labor continued to be the main actor (Pereyra, Pérez and Schuster, 2017). In Chile, the rupture was greater. The actors involved student movements, regional rebellions, protests against the administrators of privatized pension funds, feminist movements, socio-environmental struggles, and Mapuche resistance, among others. New conflicts emerged that demanded recognition (Fraser, 2006), presented as dilemmas between private parties and therefore requiring political and institutional channels for processing them legitimately (Habermas, 1999). The resulting social action went beyond existing areas of expression, constructing new repertoires of action that corresponded with the uncertainty and privations of the commodification of daily life and nature, repression of indigenous peoples, inequality, and gender violence (Ruiz, 2020). Both revolts fed on the process of accumulation’s social dislocation and the weakness of institutional politics for processing demands, but each one reflected its own context. For example, unions played an important role in the previous phase in Argentina, piqueteros were prominent throughout the period and the outraged residents of Buenos Aires (expressing the “anger vote” of the previous election) held their cacerolazos. In Chile, in contrast, there was a strong youth and student presence, a powerful feminism, the Mapuche flag alongside the Chilean, and the demand for a constituent assembly in opposition to the dictatorship’s institutional legacy.

These episodes configured a crisis of political hegemony. The governments were questioned due to the state bureaucracy’s monopolistic dimension, and were confronted in the streets by sectors of civil society that claimed the community for themselves (García Linera, 2020). In contrast to other waves of mobilization in the region, such as the various conflicts developed during the so-called progressive governments (Argentina 2008 or Bolivia 2019, for example) these produced no polarization in the streets. Citizen disobedience in the public sphere was wholly articulated in opposition to the governments, which lacked the capacity to convene the masses. However, the types of crises differed on the two sides of the Andes. In Argentina the revolt had as an opportunity structure: the inability of a weak government to deal with an acute economic and social crisis that was a result of the model’s exhaustion of financial valorization. It emerged from growing discontent and the increasing relative and absolute privation of a civil society with rich experience of and capacity for mobilization. Each measure to confront the crisis, far from calming the mobilizations, strengthened them. The protest ended up becoming a general crisis, with all areas of social life disturbed and altered. The preceding economic debacle was deepened. The protest was not only the expression of this crisis but also a mechanism of its structuration. By challenging the political and economic order, it limited the viability of possible policies and constructed a scenario that precipitated the fall of governments.

In contrast, in Chile the crisis of domination shaped by the protest and the government’s inability to respond to it were neither preceded nor succeeded by an economic crisis, although economic growth had slowed. One unpopular action unleashed a dynamic of protest that was bolstered by the government’s repressive response, in a country in which various actors had been sowing a critique of the accumulation model. These different contexts of the emergence of the revolts should warn against any determinism between commodification and the outbreak of resistance. It was precisely in the Chilean case that higher levels of commodification were reached, but it was there that the revolt took longer to emerge—several decades longer than in the Argentine case.

The strengths or weaknesses of the accumulation model, of the government and political regime, and of the levels of rupture in the modification of the social structure and the actors in protests of the previous stage are elements that must be considered to understand this temporal contrast. Resistance is a social relationship and as such is conditioned by the strength of those who confront it and the conditions under which they do so.

Final Reflections

The revolts represented major political events that marked a turning point. What was on the margins of public discussion came forcefully into focus, giving birth to a new political time. The isolation of institutional politics was shaken by dissatisfied societies that were no longer those of the past. They had been brutally marked by neoliberal restructuring, with transformations of their social structures and the development of new processes of individuation. Their revolts were from and against neoliberalism. Various precipitants initiated them. Particular social forms made up their singularity. However, as we have described, there were broad swaths that crossed the mountain ranges and temporalities. To what extent did these revolts manage to produce regime change?

The Argentine case provides a preliminary answer to this question. The 2001 revolt limited and blocked government action to the point of instigating the resignation of presidents. Its content at the macro level was more destituent than instituting: it expressed veto power rather than the construction of a political direction for the country. The rich social experimentation in public spaces of those moments of diverse autonomies failed to find an organic form. However, they had a significant impact in the later stage. The definitive end of the 2001 crisis in Argentina occurred with the new political cycle represented by the presidential mandates of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015). Kirchnerism emerged as an institutional response to the crisis. The cycle was marked by a critical imprint of the neoliberal heritage, such as like other Latin American progressive governments experienced. Its origin was a response to the generalized demand for reconstruction of a postcrisis order with multiple components. In response to this demand, the Kirchner governments selectively addressed the claims of the previous period’s social struggles, proposing a reformist agenda with different intensities and temporalities (Piva, 2015). It proposed a reformist reconstitution of the order, more pragmatic than ideological, in which politics gained a degree of autonomy from economic power and partially reversed the social trends of the previous decade. In other words, the challenging at the time of the revolt only indirectly and partially managed to materialize on the public agenda, and it did so through a social force that originated from the state, not from those mobilized during the crisis (Rebón, 2018).

In the Chilean case, the response is still in progress. The destituent and confrontational character of the protest succeeded in establishing the need for discussion of a new constitution and opening up a new political period. However, the conditions for change face obstacles and setbacks that are far from resolved. After postponements, the people voted in favor of changing the constitution through a constituent assembly. This assembly was elected with a significant representation of nontraditional actors and the left, but the resulting constitutional draft was overwhelmingly rejected in a plebiscite. At the same time, in the December 2020 presidential election Gabriel Boric, a former student movement leader from the nontraditional left (Ruiz and Caviedes, 2020), was elected President of the Republic. Rather than a protagonist of the rebellion, Boric was a protagonist of an institutional solution, being one of the leftist deputies who had signed the agreement for a new constitution proposed by President Piñera. The Boric government faces the difficulty of meeting multiple citizen demands for political renewal and social change but also for reimposing order, while lacking a congressional majority and with the consolidation of a growing far-right sector of the opposition. The nonlinearity of change and the sinuous nature of the process are exemplified by the paradox that, after the rejection of the reforms proposed by the first constituent assembly, when delegates were elected to a new assembly, the far-right that defended the dictatorship’s constitution formed the largest bloc. But the resulting new constitutional project was also rejected in a plebiscite. To summarize, during the period of revolt in the streets, the Chilean citizenry checkmated the political economic hegemony of the “transition.” The construction of a new hegemony and its class character are questions that are still open to the scrutiny of history.