The so-called “estallido social” in Chile became the face of the mass protests that swiped through Latin
America in 2019. These mobilizations endured not only harsh repression but also the effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken by the government during 00. Despite the extraordinary
circumstances, the movement emerged as a victorious experience with the approval of a new
Constituent Assembly, currently preparing to rewrite a Constitution that dates back to Augusto
Pinochet’s dictatorship.
The Chilean protests have much in common with the Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican and Colombian protests
from 2019: these movements identified the heritage of decades of neoliberal and elitist policymaking as
the larger cause behind the region’s democratic quandary. In response, they created citizen-led spaces,
both discursive and physical, to address the countries’ deepening inequality and institutional
insufficiency.
Understanding neoliberalism as a form of governance that uses immiseration (through the
de-politicization of inequality) and subjection (through the exclusion of citizens from decision-making
processes), this paper investigates processes of collective subjectivation in the region against the
neoliberal status quo. We focus on the epistemic value of the Chilean movement by investigating the
role of convenors and participants within popular assemblies and open, self-organized spaces of public
deliberation.
From a qualitative and reconstructive perspective, we examine how these new protest movements are
claiming agency by turning to historic forms of assemblies - based upon creating, deliberating, spreading
knowledge and making decisions through decentralized and direct participation. Relying on
documentary and interview data, we address the emergence of bottom-up, long-term mobilization
strategies as response to the conservative wave advancing in the region. We will argue that, in doing so,
they seek to bypass the oligarchic capture of representative institutions and to grant decision-making
impact to citizens, but also signal towards systemic and epistemic impediments in participatory
institutions developed until now across Latin America.