Social movements and media in the neoliberal Chile - Jorge Antonio Saavedra Utman (Goldsmiths College, University of London) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Media and the Neoliberal Transition in Chile
Latin American Perspectives, 2003
Reflecting on the possibility that Chile's ruling Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia might have lost the close 2000 presidential runoff election between its candidate Socialist Ricardo Lagos and his right-wing rival Joaquín Lavín, the video producer Hermann Mondaca voiced a frustration common among journalists and other media producers who had risked their lives to create the impressive array of independent media that so tenaciously fought the Pinochet dictatorship (interview, Santiago, August 9, 2000): If we had lost the government, what would we have been left with? We would have had much less than we had in 1989. In '89, we had organized social movements, mobilized with demands and strategies, and in '99, we didn't.. .. More than that, we had a systematic voice on the radio, in the press, in the mass media and micromedia, and also in the audiovisual area, and in '99 we no longer had those media. Coldly putting it like that, one has to ask, "What was it we worked so hard to achieve?" The decline of both media diversity and social mobilization during the Chilean transition are interrelated manifestations of the limitations of neoliberal democracy. Although the Chilean media no longer face the overt repression that killed or disappeared 40 journalists and communication workers, sent another 300 into exile, and left approximately 1,000 more unable to find work (Uribe, 1998: 31), the dramatic decline of media diversity since 1990 highlights the Concertación's failure to treat the media as a crucial democratic site whose openness to all sectors of civil society should be actively supported by public policy. Instead, the Concertación's embrace of the neoliberal conception of media democratization has facilitated national and transnational corporate control of the principal means of public expres-39 Rosalind Bresnahan lived in Chile from 1969 to 1972 and conducted research there during the summers of 1998, 2000, and 2002, interviewing approximately 100 people involved in media production, distribution, and policy making during the dictatorship and the transition to democracy. She most recently taught in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University San Bernardino, and her research was funded by two faculty professional development grants and a Latin American studies travel grant.
Social protests, neoliberalism and democratic institutions in Chile
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES, 2022
With the case of contemporary Chile at hand, the article examines the institutional contradiction between neoliberalism and democracy as a source of social protests and popular rebellions. Chile transitioned in 1990 to a representative democracy, presumably encouraging political equality and participation. However, given the orientation of governments toward fostering capitalist accumulation, Chile did not develop mechanisms for fully incorporating into the political arena the emerging and increasingly resourceful civil society. After decades of incubation, this contradiction produced collective grievances that activated social movements and popular revolts. This coalesced in 2019 when a national-scale social uprising opened a process of constitutional change and democratic innovation. I illustrate this argument by examining contemporary student, indigenous, women and labor mobilizations. Democratic governments responded differently to the demands of these four movements depending on the extent they threatened capital accumulation and state sovereignty. I also pay special attention to the 2019 social uprising and the ongoing constitutional change process (until March 2022), which brings exciting innovations to deliberation and democracy.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023
As an introductory framework to the dossier, this article analyzes the Chilean political process based on the images that (re)emerged with the 2019 revolt and that were deployed in the constitutional process channeled into a Constitutional Convention (2020–22). It shows how the old ghosts of class, gender, and the nation appear in these “mental images,” the same ghosts that have historically operated in the defeat of transformative projects and contributed to the reproduction of an authoritarian and elitist society, whose neoconservative/neoliberal oligarchy has managed to restore the conditions of its domination. The article proposes these observations to stimulate the reading of the contributions to this dossier, which problematize different aspects of the political process under discussion: the aporetic relationship among revolt, violence, and law; the citizenry's turn from a desire of community and transformation expressed in the revolt to a feeling of fear and attachment to private property; writing as a practice, support, and challenge of the people's critical expression; the tension between the performance of the revolt as a failure and as a reset of neoliberal performativity; and the territorial and deterritorializing wagers in relation to affective infrastructures that became revolt and that continue through other means.
Relying on a critical cultural political economy approach (CCPE), this paper shows how the past four decades of Chilean history can best be understood by examining the interaction between the material and semiotic dimensions. Analyzing the shifting and mutually-constitutive interaction between material (structural) and semiotic (meaning-making) practices is crucial for assessing (1) continuities and ruptures enacted by center-left Concertación (1990-2009) and the Nueva Mayoría administrations (2014-2018); (2) debates about how Chile's "progressive" public policies shift the boundaries between the commodified and non-commodified realms of social life; and (3) possible outcomes to the crises of legitimacy and representation currently afflicting Chile's political and economic institutions. Using a critical cultural political economy approach (CCPE), I examine the major transformations experienced by Chilean society over the past four decades and draw implications for contemporary struggles to reform economic, social and political structures. The analysis presented here suggests the urgency of developing a more comprehensive definition of "neoliberalism," one more attentive to the articulations among the accumulation of capital, hegemonic practices and the production of subjectivity.
Media and communicative practices in the quest for the commons : Chile's 2011 student movement
2017
This thesis is an in depth analysis of the communicative and media practices displayed by the Chilean students movement, in 2011, and the way these practices contributed to the building of a commons with capacity for the political to exist in Chilean neoliberal democracy. The thesis interrogates the concept of the commons and in the process questions literature on democracy, social movements, and media and communication studies. I argue that in the context of the Chilean student movement the concept of voice should be seen as a political commons that has been expropriated from people in three ways: as a resource that is no longer relevant for the way neoliberal democracies are run; as a relationship curtailed by flawed space of mediation; and ultimately as a form of entitlement. Under these conditions, this thesis investigates the ways in which the commons of voice can be rendered from below and the political can be opened up in spite of the hollowing out of democracies in (neo)libe...
Comunicación y medios, 2020
This paper analyzes the use and appropriation of digital media by the Chilean social movement No + AFP. Specifically, the spotlight is placed on the movement's digital video activism practices and its communication activity, organizational and collective action strategies mediated by new information and communication technologies. A qualitative (content analysis) methodology was developed to analyze the movement's most relevant videos regarding three aspects: (1) political strategy; (2) actors, and (3) the locations in which videos were filmed. The main conclusion is that video activism was central to supporting the movement's offline strategy. The videos were basically used for propaganda and informational purposes and became a challenge against hegemonic media production in Chile; the main actors were citizens opposing the corporate, the hegemonic media and the government ; and the streets, the traditional protest setting , were the preferred location.
This research aims to understand how the Chilean post-Dictatorship generation (born between 1990 and 1996) utilizes both shared inherited memories of the dictatorship, and the Chilean welfare state prior to the Dictatorship, in anti-neoliberal social mobilization. The researcher uses Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory (1997) to understand how shared postmemories influence current social struggles in Chile. After conducting a series eleven of semi-structured interviews, it is clear that members of the Chilean, intellectual left are mobilizing against a neoliberalism they trace back to the Dictatorship, and use shared post memories to mobilize against neoliberalism. The researcher came up with three findings that aim to explain how memory, which is one of the many reasons the respondents are inspired to mobilize, influences current social struggles. The researcher concluded that respondents are inspired to change the system due to a shared nostalgia for the historical Left, stories they have heard from family and friends, and their distance from the dictatorship and subsequent lack of fear of repression.
THE BOTTLENECK OF NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHILEAN REVOLUTION
THE BOTTLENECK OF NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHILEAN REVOLUTION, 2019
A blog article published by the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education of the University of Bristol Website https://cire-bristol.com/2019/11/20/the-bottleneck-of-neoliberalism-and-the-chilean-revolution/ During the last three weeks, Chilean unrests show to the world the social crisis of neoliberalism as a structure of state formation. The international media has broken the communicational censorship imposed by the Chilean government, showing violations of Human Right (see the links The Guardian, The Washington Post). The Chilean political situation has been savage; 5.629 people have been arrested, 2.009 people injured, 197 people have lost one or both eyes. Last weekend a 21-years-old undergraduate student was blinded by rubber bullets in his both eyes. Also, there are 283 cases of police sexual abuse (you can see the violent action of Chilean police here -sensitive content-, and a New York Times report here). I share my experience in the Chilean unrests while I was running my fieldwork.