12/3/19, 1(56 PM The Meaning of Chileʼs Explosion Page 1 of 7 https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/chile-protests-sebastian-pinera-constitution-neoliberalism The Meaning of Chile’s Explosion BY CAMILA VERGARA The ongoing popular upheaval in Chile is the product of thirty years of neoliberal oligarchy and half-hearted democratization. To uproot the existing power structure, the country needs a new constitution. Chile, Latin America’s “oasis” of stability, has been in flames for a week, fueled by an underlying current of socioeconomic oppression. The rapacity of the “Latin American tiger” that accomplished the neoliberal “miracle” of high economic growth from the ashes of socialism, has been revealed in street clashes in which protestors threatening the neoliberal order have become enemies of the state — stripped of their rights in a de facto, and therefore illegal, state of siege. The aggressive, zero-tolerance response of the police to peaceful civil disobedience, and the government’s resort to the use of the military to quell political dissent, is partly the result of three decades of denial vis-à-vis Chile’s growing oligarchization of power. The oppressive conditions facing the working class and the precarious position of an indebted middle class in a system in which all basic necessities have been privatized to make a profit, have been ignored, justified, and normalized during the last three decades of democratic governance in which left- and right-wing governments have alternated power. Chile is neoliberalism’s ground zero, a testing ground for neoliberal economic policies as well as neoliberal forms of legality. The Constitution of 1980, which has been amended almost forty times and is still in place, was mostly designed by Jaime Guzmán, an ultraconservative jurist and member of the fundamentalist Catholic Opus Dei, with the intention of stabilizing and protecting the newly implemented neoliberal economic model — together with a patriarchal social framework — against popular pushback. Article 8 —repealed in 1989 just few months before the