Teachers, student movement shake things up in Chile

Limited changes to the education system, which prime minister Michelle Bachelet has tried to package and market as great reforms, have not eased the political crisis the Chilean government is facing.

On the contrary, protests by students and teachers threaten to accelerate and deepen the crisis. Recent student marches, including those responding to increased police and right wing violence, have mobilised numbers as large as those at the peak of the movement in 2011.

Some 95 percent of national teachers’ union members have rejected the government’s plan for the teaching profession, which not only failed to address concerns about working conditions and educational quality but also established a performance pay framework that will open the road for a further erosion of teachers’ rights and wages.

On 1 June an indefinite national strike began. According to the union, on the third day of the strike, more than 150,000 teachers mobilised in marches across the country. University and secondary students joined the demonstrations, which now look like developing into a new wave of protest.

Since the 2013 election, Bachelet has tried to use the participation of the Communist Party in her coalition government to muffle and coopt opposition to an agenda that by and large aims to persist with and in some areas extend the neoliberal attacks of previous governments. In the context of a looming decline in the minerals-dependent economy, the hard right has been increasing its public agitation, putting pressure on the government and shifting the balance of forces in the coalition further to the right.

Bachelet’s Socialist Party is struggling to keep the initiative. The Christian Democrats are in the wings waiting for a chance to take a more central role.

Despite the Communist Party giving Bachelet some initial breathing room, the momentum of the long-running education movement in Chile appears to be breaking through that party’s bureaucratic grip on the trade union movement. The Communist Party won the presidency of the teachers union in 2013. But it has been under growing rank and file pressure to hold firm against the government’s plans.

Such pressure appears to be forcing the party to tack left. Its president of the national trade union confederation recently announced a national mobilisation for 11 June to push for progressive labour and constitutional reforms, which Bachelet promised to enact. But while the Communist Party is agitating for changes to the government’s plan, other sections of the teachers’ union leadership are campaigning for a complete rejection.

As soon as the teachers went on strike, secondary students joined the protests, organising numerous school occupations in Santiago, including at a number of the most emblematic schools – Liceo 7 in Providencia, Liceo 4 in Santiago, Darío Salas and the Instituto Nacional. According to Tomás Vergara, a spokesperson for CONES, one of the two secondary student organisations, students are in solidarity with the teachers and also are protesting the government’s refusal to follow through on education reforms it had promised.

An additional component of this new wave of protest is the increasing mobilisation of students from the private universities.

Nicolás Fernández, president of the student federation of the private University Diego Portales and spokesperson of the CONFECH (national confederation of student organisations), made the point: “Students at private universities understand that they need this social right [free public education] and you can now notice their enthusiasm to go conquer it”.

Fernández also pointed out that in the private universities, the most prominent demand is for democratisation; students increasingly are conscious of the rorts and mismanagement of funds by administrations.

University students are becoming more aware of the government’s strategy of packaging small changes in grand rhetoric about public education, while refusing to make the big changes being demanded.

At its 30 May meeting, the CONFECH decided to organise another major mobilisation for 10 June, at which students will put their demands on the table again.