Protest and the persistence of the past

Abstract

Protest has long been a motor of change in Chile. In October to December 2019 protesters in Santiago harnessed protest methods and memories of hope and change related to Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–3), resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90) and discontent with the subsequent decades of neoliberal democracy (1990–2019). The 2019 protests evoked this past in the struggle against the neoliberal system of today. In doing so, the protests offer a complex demonstration of temporal bridging that provides a window onto protest culture and the persistence of the past in contemporary Chile.