How Former Protesters Are Leading the Next Generation of Chilean Politics
How Former Protesters Are Leading the Next Generation of Chilean Politics
BY Brendan O'Boyle | November 16, 2015
As the country’s youngest legislators navigate bureaucracy and party politics, reforms are slow to come by.
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Camila Vallejo chairs the House of Deputies' Education Commission.
(Photo: Camara de Diputadas de Chile/Johanna Zarate Perez)
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As student leaders in 2011, they mobilized some of the largest protests Chile had ever seen. They frustrated authorities, inspired millions of young people and earned a fair share of international attention. In 2013, before the age of 30, they were elected to Congress in a national election that many considered proof of the Chilean left’s resurgence.
Now, two years later, Camila Vallejo, Giorgio Jackson, Gabriel Boric and Karol Cariola are learning just how hard it is to change the system from within. The reforms they demanded in the streets and promised as candidates – above all to the country's education system – have been held up by disagreements over how they are to be achieved.
As the so-called bancada estudiantíl, or student caucus, they have found consensus hard to come by, a reminder of their time representing competing factions within university politics. While the Chilean and international media group the four deputies together, the reality of partisan politics has made such an association more or less irrelevant.
“Blaming a bancada estudiantíl for not being successful is a bit unfair since there isn’t a bancada estudiantíl,” Patricio Navia, an expert on Chilean politics who teaches at New York University, told AQ. “The four legislators got elected on three different coalitions – two of them in the New Majority, one as an independent, and the other on a different independent list.”
More:
http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/chiles-former-student-leaders-congress-lesson-compromise