Activism in a time of pandemic: The impact of COVID-19 in Chilean citizen movement after the uprising of October 2019

Abstract

Chile, unlike other countries in the region, is facing two major crises: one of a large social nature and the other in public health, which is in its form of the pandemic that is currently affecting the entire world. In October 2019, secondary-school and university students organized a massive evasion of the Santiago metro fare. The reason was to protest the 30 pesos increase in the cost of the ticket. This apparently small issue detonated the greatest protest movement of the last 30 years. By January 2019, the uprising had left 31 dead and 5,558 people who reported human rights violations, including 331 with ocular trauma or injury to their eyes and 21 suffered damage or loss of the eyeball. In March 2019, protests were eradicated from the streets and the development of the movement was slowed down by the powerful action of the Coronavirus. This article explores the impact that the COVID-19 crisis had on citizen movement, and the functionality of the health crisis to establish the de facto authoritarian hyper-controlled state in order to freeze the social crisis. Also, this work identifies the strategy that the Chilean citizen movement developed to survive during 2020, applying Pleyers’s (2020) model of analysis of activism under pandemic as a starting point.