Organizing against despair in Chile
Digital art by @Pazconadie for Ojalá.
Opinion • Alondra Carrillo Vidal • November 20, 2025 • Leer en castellano
Chilean social movements have been clear about the need to fight the rise of the far right long before the emergence of the current electoral panorama.
I write on the evening of November 16, the day the first round of presidential elections saw more than half of votes go to right-wing parties. We now know the second round of elections in December will pit ruling party candidate Jeannette Jara against far-right candidate José Antonio Kast.
Our priority now is to ensure that despair over this result does not lead to demobilization. Our most immediate task is to launch an independent campaign for Jara, against the threat that Kast represents. Doing so will help us organize for what is to come.
To understand these efforts and Chile’s current electoral situation, it's essential to consider recent years of mass protest that brought the crisis in the country to light.
I'm writing in response to those on the left who are calling for us to abandon and bury our recent experiences of struggle, who’ve given up on them as a necessary part of fighting the fascist offensive. The political task before us today is to dissent.
While I alone am responsible for the ideas I'm sharing here, they've been developed in part with my compañeras from the 8M Feminist Coordination. We’ve gone through an intense and unstable cycle as part of this organization, which came together to build a feminism that can fight against the precarization of life.
The Coordinadora was born in the wake of the feminist general strike, which we promoted as part of the emerging global feminist wave that centered mass political strikes in its organizing.
Without letting go of each other, we navigated a social uprising, pandemics, lockdowns, extraordinary institutional struggles, defeats, and authoritarian regression. Today, we aim to face the challenges ahead by continuing to organize together.
The spark that lit up Chile
The 2019 social uprising in Chile was the most significant collective struggle we have experienced in decades. The social conflicts that preceded it had been growing and building in struggles for education, pensions, housing, and against socio-environmental devastation. They also included massive mobilizations against patriarchal violence, which fed a growing cycle of protest.
Meanwhile, the constant, everyday violence in poor and working-class neighborhoods, the horrors of the National System for Minor Care, the ongoing healthcare crisis, the precarious working conditions, and low wages were part of an unbearable normalcy, but had yet to trigger large-scale mass protests.
Sebastián Piñera's government decided to tackle this conflict by shutting down any discussion of reforms and opting for repressive measures to manage the impacts generated by the state’s failures. More protests meant more repression. The uprising that broke out in October 2019 began as an unpredictable outcome of his repressive approach.
Only the pandemic lockdown—which began 10 days after the largest march in Chilean history, which took place on International Women’s Day in 2020—was able to interrupt the movement, which was pushing the government and the political system into unprecedented crisis. The dream of every authoritarian ruler who feels threatened was realized: from one day to the next, the streets and squares were emptied.
The Constitutional Convention that took place between 2021 and 2022 was a continuation of the struggle sparked by the popular uprising. It incorporated issues raised by social movements over previous decades into politics. Despite that, it was rejected in a popular vote, which returned momentum to the social sectors that the uprising had challenged and destabilized.
Tactics versus strategies
Progressives and leftists were quick to point to the supposed “identitarianism” of the draft of the new constitution in order to explain its defeat at the ballot box. By identitarianism, they were referring to the strong presence of feminist, Indigenous, and environmental concerns in the proposal.
These explanations, rather than reflecting a genuine attempt to understand what was at stake in the defeat, too often felt like a settling of scores among popular and progressive sectors.
The electoral result had more to do with the ongoing crisis and the contradictions in how it was resolved than it did with evaluating the proposed constitution itself. Leaving context out meant that the costs of the electoral defeat of the constitutional process were borne entirely by social movements, whose power was already weakened.
The main problem with the explanation of the electoral result based on identitarianism is that it disregards the need to understand the rejection of the new constitution as an expression of the uprising that gave rise to the constitutional process in the first place.
To understand this, we need to examine how the economic and social crisis that gave rise to and accompanied the constitutional process unfolded, and how that related to the Convention and its proposals.
Let's recap. The 2019 uprising was a mass political strike in a context of crisis in which the working class challenged the government, which in turn sought to end the crisis through repression. In doing so, it pitted popular sectors against the political establishment as a whole.
The Constitutional Convention became the new stage for the issues raised during the uprising. It took place during the pandemic, in a context that prevented mass protests while accelerating the impoverishment of the population. Material needs became more pressing than ever.
Faced with the Piñera government's refusal to make direct transfers of resources to the population, the left and social movements promoted a law that was a double-edged sword.
It allowed workers to make withdrawals from their mandatory provisional savings accounts, which are held by Pension Fund Administrators (AFP), which is to say by vertically integrated business elites (the same capital that owns the AFPs also owns everything from water and healthcare to education, the press, urban land, and more).
The 10 percent withdrawal law, as it was known, meant that we, the workers, would pay for the crisis with our future wages, but it was presented as a victory for progressive sectors.
It is this same contradictory victory that would be key to the defeat of the constitutional process. As a congressman and during his presidential campaign, Gabriel Boric and his party pushed for the 10 percent withdrawal law to mitigate the crisis. But once he came to power, he refused to authorize new withdrawals from pension funds.
The debate on the pension system and, more generally, around social rights and the nature of the state was replaced by a debate over the immediate ownership of workers' pension funds. That took place thanks to a communications campaign orchestrated by the de facto power behind the AFPs.
This shift in the debate was based on a contradiction that was obvious to workers: while the Convention proposed a horizon of universal social rights, Congress limited immediate access to the resources that made it possible to sustain life in the midst of the crisis, and that gave many access to liquidity and rare purchasing power.
By the time of the vote on the new constitution, the crisis that had dragged on throughout the process had reached a critical point. Data from Chile’s Bureau of Statistics shows wage growth began to decline in 2010, with the sharpest drop occurring around September 2022. More than five million new voters, particularly those hardest hit by the crisis, turned out for the plebiscite held that same month.
The policy of withdrawals was definitively rejected, and Yes lost to No at the ballot box. From that, it never recovered.
Against neoliberal violence
When the proposed constitution was rejected, social movements were further disorganized and in retreat. The Boric government deepened a trajectory that increasingly embraced the material and symbolic policies imposed by reactionary sectors.
It desperately tried to stay afloat by managing what it had available, safeguarding the continuity of what it had claimed to oppose only a short time before.
The policies deployed by the Boric administration allowed the far right to govern the country without being in office.
There’s the trigger-happy Naín-Retamal law, which guarantees police impunity for crimes committed during the uprising; the militarization of Araucanía/Wallmapu via a state of emergency that was in force during the entire government term; the Usurpations Law, which has made it possible to evict dozens of housing encampments; the law on sectoral permits, which reduces environmental protections; and the xenophobic and discriminatory immigration law reform, which, among other things, prevents migrant workers in an irregular situation from entering into employment contracts.
As part of the feminist movement that focuses on the lives of women, children, and working-class dissidents, we are compelled to confront this neoliberal consensus, which is the context that has allowed fascism to gain ground.
Challenging the far-right advance is part of the much larger task of reinforcing grassroots initiatives and social movements in a context of fascist attacks and organizational weakness. We must also address the urgent need for in-depth policy debates.
In order to defend our own agenda, one that reflects and articulates decades of struggle and mobilization, it is essential to return to the uprising: to what it revealed, including the limitations of our own politics, and to what the constitutional process left behind as a testament to the possible.
The devastation of the current moment is summed up globally by the genocide in Palestine and the image of its regional echoes in the recent massacre in Rio de Janeiro.
This moment requires us to learn all the lessons we can, without burying the uprising or assuming that the struggles that brought us to this place are worn out or useless. We have much to learn from them.
Part of the left that has abandoned some of the only tools it has to confront authoritarian restoration and the advance of the far right. We stand against that position.
In the mass strike and popular struggles, we see the beginnings of working class renewal, capable of forging, through its efforts—as well as through its defeats—the contours of a project firmly rooted in the future.
