Past is Prologue
The past as prologue; or the Chilean political cycle.
After nearly three months of the “estallido social” (social outburst) the strong distrust of a certain section of the Chilean population towards the police continues unabated and seems to increase with every burned building and metro station. It has become the one immutable constant in a flurry of misinformation and gossip that floods the collective unconscious of the Chilean body politic. For a substantial proportion of the population, the hand of the Carabineros is behind every sinister act, be it the burning of the many metro stations or the burning of the church of San Francisco, the official church of the Carabineros. This phenomenon is not confined to the police, any announcement by the government is met with complete incredulity and ridicule, even when said announcement is a simple statement of fact, such as the publication of the latest economic data. Many would claim that this is a global phenomenon and that Chile is simply an example of the distrust with which citizens view their government around the world. While this may be true, the seeds of this distrust were already present, and there is a specific Chilean aspect to this mistrust that I think is underexplored. There is something particular about how the left views the government (left or right) in Chile and it is closely related to its legitimacy in the eyes of a large proportion of the Chilean left. This is an attempt at trying to untangle this phenomenon in the larger context of Chilean history.