The student movements at the vanguard of Chile's protests are allied with former student leaders now serving in Congress

Chile's months-long uprising was led by student activists protesting neoliberal reform, galvanized around the seemingly trivial issue of public transit fare-hikes.

Chile is ground zero for the neoliberal revolution, starting on 9/11/73, when the US backed a coup d'etat against the democratically elected, popular leader Salvador Allende. American business scholars from the University of Chicago, including Milton Friedman and Freidrich von Hayek, worked with the new military autocracy to intern 80,000 people on the basis of their political beliefs, to torture tens of thousands of those people, and to execute and "disappear" thousands more.

The "Chicago Boys" and the Chilean military and business community imposed a new constitution on Chile that ensured massive wealth transfers from the poor to the rich, with safeguards to keep the wealthy in place, including mass privatizations and prohibitions on labor organizing and democratic opposition movements.

The result was the creation of one of the most unequal societies in the world, where the rich waxed ever-wealthier while everyone else slipped into debt and precarity.

But the people thus immiserated were not content with their lot. In 2006, massive protests led by high-school students rocked the country. In 2011, university students (many of them part of the high-school movement five years earlier) led another wave of massive protests. These protest movements wrung concessions from the government, and rather than being placated by them, the student radicals saw this as evidence that their tactics worked, and they have not abandoned them to this day.

As students take the vanguard again in Chile -- braving brutal, lethal police violence -- they have an important group of allies: former student radicals who were subsequently elected to Congress, who support the movement's goals. Read the rest