We decided to leave Chile after ten years of living here. I wrote down some of my impressions of the last four years, things I have thought about and will continue to chew on for a while. I don’t claim any sort of expertise, so this is just a collection of observations from some foreigner who lived in Santiago for a decade. I am sure that, with time, I will have been wrong on at least 20% of what I wrote, and I will view writing about Chile as a way to update my priors. I thought this would be a short piece, but it got really long so I decided to split it into three parts.

Part 1 (below) is my way of trying to understand the role that a section of civil society played in the estallido.

Part 2 is a collection of things I learned from the estallido.

Part 3 (still to come) is a couple of personal anecdotes that taught me a lot about the institutional fracture that the estallido provoked.

As a note, I keep using the word estallido instead of the english translation (revolt) because I find it more appropriate for Chilean purposes and I really like it.

Anatomy of a Revolt – Part 1

This is the second time I witness a popular uprising of such a massive scale. The first was in my native home, Albania, when I was 14 years old. I can say without exaggeration that my first experience was much more as a willing and passionate participant, while during my second time around, in Chile, I was a more neutral observer.

In my early teenage years, around 1990-1991, Albania went through an anti-communist revolution after 45 years of one of the most brutal dictatorships the European continent has ever known. It was a complete reset. We spilled into the streets certain that the system that had governed the country for nearly half a century had to be crushed. We were really not prepared to provide a replacement, we were just painfully aware that the whole system was so rotten, so infected by the ineptitude of party apparatchiks, so burdened by the living and dead ghosts of political repression, that it had to be uprooted wholesale. Our whole purpose was its destruction, and we were painfully incapable of providing a thoughtful answer to the question: “What would you like instead?”. We only knew that the opposite of what we had endured had to be the answer, so capitalism was really the only obvious, albeit naive response. This was, in hindsight, a measure of our own ignorance, product of a stifled intellectual environment and the depth to which propaganda had inserted itself into the minutia of daily life. We were under no obligation to build; throw a bomb and watch the world burn. It was the least orderly transition to democracy in all of Eastern Europe, a reflection of the isolation that we had suffered. Luckily not many people died, although one of those who was murdered by remnants of the security forces was a schoolmate of mine, shot by a sniper at the tender age of 15. He was my desk-mate, and belonged to a very poor working-class family that would often beg for rations to feed its three kids. They killed him to scare the rest of the protesters away, but at this point they would have to kill half the country to achieve that goal.

It would require a book to convey the level of degradation that Albanian society found itself in 1991. I cannot do it in a few paragraphs in a blog post. I write this so that I can hopefully communicate my sympathy with the urge to destroy everything without sparing a thought about its replacement. Destruction for its own sake is common in societies that have suffered heavy repression. And yet, in my old age, I find my youthful enthusiasm rather banal and embarrassing. We were right, the whole thing was evil, rotten and had to be taken down, but I wish we had been more thoughtful about what it was that we wanted to build. Demolition is for the weak minded and thoughtless, building takes strength and wisdom. Those who took over after our little revolution were just as clueless as we were, and quickly perfected the art of the scam. They fed on our naivete and ignorance like pigs in a trough, and robbed us blind, until cynicism suffocated the last ounce of idealism that had spurred the revolt.

I learned this at the time, although it took me a while to properly understand it; scammers love chaos and mass anger. It is at the moment when we are at peak resentment that they operate unchecked. They do this in a clever, albeit formulaic manner. They take advantage of mass anger to push the boundaries of the acceptable just a little bit further. In Albania’s case, it started with simple statements that were not controversial: first it was “Freedom and Democracy”, and no one was against that. Then came – “Death to communism”, which was clearly what we were after. Then they pushed things just a bit further – “death to communists” – and the crowd nodded their heads less vigorously, since we were all a bit uncomfortable with the statement, after all, we had communists in our own families. In a country where membership in the communist party was the only way to make a career, this was unavoidable. But we still nodded along because we were resentful. The communist label became the easy epithet that anyone could throw around to dismiss political opponents. It was deployed always, with ease, and most often by people who had spent their lives as members of the communist party. Eventually it lost its power to denigrate, but by then the damage was done. Dissent must be muted; revolutions tend to degrade to this uncomfortable truth. This is often done by painting any dissenting voice with the broadest brush possible, typically by associating it with the counter-revolution.

In Chile I saw a similar process. First, they came with “the pension system sucks” – which is a fair point. People were retiring with meagre pension payments, the Bravo commission had advised changes, but the right, as always, had screamed Venezuela to stop them from happening. Then came the “education system sucks”, which is true, but not for the reasons its proponents were claiming. Then, suddenly came: “it’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years” just when the burning and the looting began. At this point, there was enough anger and resentment that people began to make this claim openly, in op-eds and on television. Chile was overwhelmed by the narrative, and there was no amount of fact-checking that could stop it. The most fascinating similarity with my experience in Albania is that this claim was being made by people that had actively participated in the Concertacion and Nueva Mayoria governments. The Albanian ‘reformed’ communists that began to point fingers at their opponents and accuse them of being communists had a plausible excuse – the dictatorship heavily punished dissent, so one had to go along just to physically survive. But none of the Chilean converts could make this claim. There is a good argument to be made that these centre-left tents that governed Chile for most of the past three decades were pretty big, and deflections are understandable. But the repudiation was so verbally violent and ungrounded that one cannot but suspect a healthy dose of opportunism in this kind of behaviour.

Later, when some Chilean politicians began urging to “burn it all down”, my inner alarm bells went into overdrive. Not only had I heard this language before, I had screamed it on the top of my lungs. But there was nothing in modern day Chile that warranted it, nothing! It was infuriating to listen to well-educated Chileans, who had just returned from a government sponsored university stay in the US, talk about burning it all down (actual real life anecdote, this happened to me). It was so bizarre and incomprehensible that it was all I could do to calm down. The middle class inhabitants of the most prosperous country in Latin America, with unprecedented access to the world, freedom of movement, thought and press, years of growth and prosperity, were urging a total reset! I wish there existed a word for a mix between incredulity and rage. Parts of the middle and upper classes were out to convince the lower classes that they had been duped into thinking they were better off in the last thirty years, when it was patently untrue. There was a whole cadre of well educated, elite Chileans who were convinced that the last thirty years had been a massive scam perpetrated on an unwitting population. They wrote articles and pontificated, fist up in the air, like the comrades of old. And if you dared, even for the sake of argument, contradict the narrative, or even show the data that contradicted the narrative, you would be showered with the fury of a million tweets.

Resentment is a powerful force at the individual level, and unfailingly destructive nationally. This is something that I understood much later in life. All societies harbor resentment to differing degrees, post-dictatorship societies are especially prone to resentment, for very good reasons. Dictatorships create resentment by definition, it is possibly their most difficult legacy to overcome. There are clear winners and losers, and the line between them is arbitrary, decided by decree. It is the kind of injustice that cannot be easily overcome; the loss of human life and liberty is so severe and so abrupt that it leaves a long trail of intergenerational grievance. Dictatorships give birth to too many conflict theorists; people who, because of their lived experience, think of the world as zero-sum. Conditional on their experience with repressive regimes, they are not wrong. We tend to extrapolate from experience, not first principles. This makes the conflict theory narrative very appealing, because it is based on empirical observation, no matter how biased and unrepresentative. If you follow that kind of logic, the only way out is full vengeance, full punishment of anyone who actively participated in the machinations of the dictatorship. This point of view is seductive but eventually destructive.

Among other things, the Chilean dictatorship was different from the Albanian one in that it was confined to a small elite. There was a small elite governing the Albanian dictatorship as well, but our overlords demanded loyalty from all citizens. Membership in or proximity to the Party was essential for career advancement so it became ubiquitous. In the end, the communist dictatorship involved everyone in the orwellization of society. So when it fell, few were the people that had not been involved in some way or another. Even political prisoners were revealed to have spied on their cell mates for a more lenient sentence. No one came out clean from that nightmare, with very few exceptions, no one was morally unimpeachable. Full vengeance is impossible in a society that is so thoroughly implicated in its own destruction. Chile was different, civil society was attacked but a portion of it survived morally unstained. A strong contingent was able to escape and continued to be politically active. There was a strong intellectual pool to draw from. The desire for vengeance is stronger in a place like Chile, it exists because there are large sections of society that came out of the dictatorship having never been implicated.

Constructive people spend their lives trying to soften the rougher edges of resentment in society. These are the kind of people who have a long term view of the political process and understand that using resentment for political ends is like using dynamite to manicure a lawn. This is why the post dictatorship governments of Aylwin, Frei and Lagos were successful, they used the language of unity and did not appeal to resentment to build their coalitions. Aylwin’s speech in the Estadio Nacional is a sharp example of this, he used the language of unity rather than division, aware of the massive amount of resentment that must have been festering at the time. Frei and Lagos continued with the tradition.

Unfortunately, Chile has a strong resentment amplification machine, a large group of people whose whole public persona is built around it. There are different reasons for this; some people have narcissistic personalities and have a strong need to be adored by the multitudes, and, since resentment is a powerful, albeit negative motivator, they focus on it exclusively. Some people are just true believers, conflict theorists who see the world only in terms of class struggle. This is not to say that Chile has nothing to be resentful about; it has high levels of inequality, atypically high levels of class consciousness, segregation and many other indignities that would frustrate anyone. It’s just that the last 30 years were very successful at reducing the sources of resentment. Those who argued to the contrary, did a great disservice to this country.

Having paid attention to Chilean politics because of all of the burning/looting, and because teargas became an almost obligatory aftertaste of all my meals, I noticed that a whole class of resentment merchants arose during and after the mass protests. I suppose they were always there, waiting for the opportunity to whip the population into a hateful and paranoid frenzy, but they got their opportunity during and after October 2019. They took a high intensity fire and amplified it violently, relentlessly, into an all-consuming blaze. They were the intellectual points of reference for an angry and easily manipulated mob. They became the willing and passionate intermediaries between violence and its rationalization. Having sensed the powerful avalanche of popular anger they fed it with gusto, unconcerned with the complete breakdown of public order and its consequences. They fed on public fury like puritans on a witch-hunt, glowing with the approval of social media.

Chile is a society that has plenty to be resentful for, its social structure was born in sin, and it will take generations to wash the stink of decades of a quasi-feudal social hierarchy. Resentment peddlers have plenty to work with, and they did so with delight. After paying attention, I learned the formula. You just have to follow a few simple steps; first choose something people are really angry about, something specific, tangible. Second, create an extremely simplistic narrative about it, hopefully with villains that don’t want the bad thing to change. The more complex the problem, the easier it is to create a simplistic narrative, because anyone who could argue against it would have to twist themselves into a knot to get the point out. The inner workings of complex systems are hard to describe to a general audience, few people have the capacity to do so. Third, if anyone starts complaining that you’re being too simplistic and that your explanations are incomplete, accuse them of being a counter-revolutionary, a remnant of the old order, someone who does not want the bad thing to end. This has the added effect of preventing anyone else from trying to engage, since the cost is too high. If you follow this strategy with high frequency, in multiple platforms, flooding the system with junk, there is no way it can respond in a timely and efficient manner. Each particular narrative requires a lot of effort to debunk. If you are concerned with actually understanding, it takes a while to sit down and go through the complexity of the counterargument step by step. It’s the BS asymmetry principle in action, the idea that it takes a lot more effort to debunk a bad idea than to suggest it. The resentment peddlers applied this concept to great results. Poison the well of information, and, as some unsuspecting expert tries to filter truth from fiction, keep pouring more poison into the well, overwhelming anyone foolhardy enough to respond. If people are sufficiently angry, you can sustain this for a long time, fueling anger with more villains and more BS and more anger and so on. It’s a self-sustaining environment.

Apart from strategy, I also noticed that there is a taxonomy to resentment peddling, defined by the role that each category plays in feeding mass anger. It is likely that my categorizing is not precise, but I have found that most resentistas fit into one of four categories; the celebrity journalist, the credentialed zealot, the entrepreneur/grifter and the revolutionary tourist [1]. In the following sections I will try my best at providing both a definition and some examples of each category. There are a lot of overlaps, and the boundaries are not quite well defined, but I still think it is a useful exercise to categorize the resentistas because you learn a lot about motivation.

The celebrity journalist

What exactly defines a resentment peddler? After all, someone has to point out the injustices of a society, problems that need to be solved. You can’t fix things if no one is willing to point them out. The world is a much better place because people have been willing to raise their voice and take the risks associated with doing so. This requires genuine effort to understand the underlying problem, come up with solutions and a strategy as to how to achieve them. The first step is crucial, it needs honesty, actual effort. It also requires talent to present complex ideas in simple but not simplistic terms. Your average resentista does none of this, his or her modus operandi is simple; nuance is the death of rage, so just omit alternative explanations that might distract from it. If they have a choice between something that presents an issue in its full complexity and something that maximizes anger, they will inevitably choose the latter. When that choice is made, it hinders reasonable argument, since everyone self-assigns into opposite camps according to their political leanings. Once people make up their mind on where they stand, based on flimsy evidence but an abundance of motivated reasoning, they rarely change their position. You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into – as the saying goes.

For example, take the recent controversy about supermarket prices in Chile. Mirna Schindler, a Chilean journalist, reported large differences in prices between supermarkets in Northern Ireland and Chile. This has been a long debate in Chile, and I have always had the impression that Chilean supermarkets are too expensive given income levels. But then again, that is just an impression, I have no proof of this other than my heuristics. Maybe I am mistaken, compared to the developed world Chile consistently seems to be cheaper in official statistics. Maybe this is because Chileans don’t use supermarkets as their main point of purchase for foods and other necessities. I often don’t, I buy from La Vega whenever I can. When in season, fruits and vegetables are cheaper, and if you do enough comparison shopping, quite cheaper, not to mention fresher. Ditto for fish and seafood, you can buy fresh fish for cheap at Mercado Central and other ferias[2]. In fact, a lot of Chileans have ferias near their homes, so even if you are not close enough to La Vega, there is always a feria somewhere. Maybe it is true that there is price collusion in Chile. Given the numerous cases of collusion uncovered by the FNE[3], (a jewel of an institution by the way, one of the best Chile has) it is quite likely. Maybe Chilean regulations, meant to protect the flora and fauna of the country, as they should, make transportation more costly. It is also quite likely that one has to correct for taxes, since value added taxes are pretty high in Chile. There are a million reason for why food might be more expensive in Chile in absolute terms, assuming that it is.

According to studies however, it is not. A study done by Marcel Goic and his students at the University of Chile show that in absolute terms, Chilean supermarkets are not more expensive than those in the UK, but in relative terms they are. They are more expensive than Latin American ones in absolute terms but not in relative terms. Mirna Schindler, if she was actually interested in finding out about price differences, could have done the investigative work without leaving the comfort of her own home. Some light investigation and she would have found professor Goic’s work, made a quick phone call and asked for some clarifications. I am sure he would have spent the time to explain his findings to her, from personal experience I can attest that he is a pretty nice and patient person. It would not have been necessary that she conduct the study herself, there are plenty of people in Chile asking these questions and trying really hard to find the right answers. I am certain that if I spent a little more time digging I would find other studies that give various answers to the question. But in true resentista fashion, she cuts through the nuances and complexities of the question like a toddler painting the Mona Lisa. She holds up a few items from some supermarket thousands of kilometers away and, without the slightest hint of subtlety tells the Chilean consumer that he is being bamboozled, that his hard earned money is being siphoned away by some greater evil. The point is not to inform, it is to enrage.

During the height of the estallido, when Santiago’s mood jumped between hope and unadulterated rage, information was chaotic and almost always unreliable. Metro stations, churches, hotels and restaurants, even university campuses had been set ablaze, and no one really knew what to make of it. At the time, rumours were cheap and abundant, and many journalists fell victim to the easy and unsubstantiated scoop. The biggest one, or at least the one that seemed the easiest to dismiss, was that the Baquedano metro station had become a torture center, where police were taking peaceful protesters and torturing them. It became such an accepted and widely spread myth that both a member of parliament and a journalist cum presidential candidate from the Frente Amplio coalition repeated it. Alejandra Matus, another Chilean journalist repeated the accusation online. It was later proven to be false, and no such torture center had in fact existed. Yet a slew of journalists amplified the false myth, and the rightful indignation of the masses grew exponentially[4].

During the pandemic there was a similar tone, plenty of articles were written about how the government was hiding the true death figures, again Alejandra Matus was a protagonist of these types of accusations. She claimed, in interviews, that the numbers were much higher and that the government “did not want to be capable to …solve the problem”, basically suggesting that in the trade-off between lives and the economy, they had chosen the latter. It was revealed later that, in fact, the actual numbers were lower than previously recorded, and that Chile had done very well when looking at excess mortality. But this was reported much later. During the pandemic, these kinds of reports maximized rage, and “nos están matando” (they’re killing us) became a mantra in Chile.

There were a lot of celebrity journalists that basked in grievance’s glory. In terms of impact however, none was more effective than Daniel Matamala. Mr. Matamala has been successful because he is well-known and liked, and his columns are not part of his day job as a journalist with CNN. So he parlayed his position as a journalist into one of thought leader, effectively becoming the resentista-in-chief. I spent some time reading his columns, and in June 2020 wrote my impressions on one that I found particularly egregious. In summary, Mr. Matamala used general confusion about the fact that all pension systems, be they run by the government or private entities are forced savings schemes, and the fact that the AFP system in Chile allowed people, however crudely, to choose how much risk to take. Then, using this confusion as a false premise, he tells the already puzzled Chilean reader that his funds will go to help private companies during the pandemic. His money!! It is such a litany of unrelated and unsubstantiated complaints that makes it a perfect example of resentment peddling; it takes advantage of the difficulty of explaining a complex system to enrage the reader. It comes with the obligatory Pinochet sighting, a sure sign that the argument is weak and in search of a simple villain. There were a lot of other equally confusing columns, especially one called “Que viene el Cuco”[5], basically dismissing concerns about inflation resulting from the pension withdrawals. It was obviously wrong, but Mr. Matamala points at a small section of the people making the claim, people who can be easily villainized, and, his finger wagging, tells the reader that this is just the businesspeople trying to shaft the little guy once again.

In an interesting aside, it is fascinating to see how similar this was to “Project Fear”, the pro-Brexit campaign. It even translates to the same thing, a bit too on the nose. If you go beyond the superficial however, you can see that the tactics are similar; support a very dangerous and risky public policy not by defending its attributes, but by accusing those who object to it of being fearmongers. There is a point to be made; the Chilean right has a habit of screaming Venezuela even when minor policy changes are proposed, as I have written before, so they are not blameless here. But Mr. Matamala is playing a similarly flawed game; determine the worth a policy solely by the identity of those who oppose it. The damage from the pension withdrawals has been enormous, and the current finance minister has made the point that it will take a decade to recover the losses in capital markets, not to mention the inflationary effects that they had in 2021 and 2022.

The credentialed zealot

What is a credentialed zealot? I have not been successful at getting a precise definition, but typically these are people whose beliefs remained woefully undisturbed during their graduate studies. They believed the same thing after receiving their PhD that they did when they started it. It’s like the old Stephen Colbert joke about George W Bush: “he believes the same thing on Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday”.

Any populist worth his salt needs academics to lend a sense of scientific rigor to his or her public policy. What I learned living in Chile is that there will always be an academic willing to support your policy, no matter how silly and unjustifiable it is. Unfortunately, there are many examples of academics and public intellectuals in Chile who lent their bona fides to outright populist drivel. They gave bad and fraudulent ideas a veneer of academic seriousness. Some opportunist politician would propose a populist measure, say allowing Chileans to withdraw from their pension funds during the pandemic, and a series of academics would fall over themselves to justify a clearly detrimental policy. Fernando Atria tells us that the workers do not own their funds in the AFP’s (private pension funds), Jaime Bassa (vice-president of the failed constituent assembly) tells the public that the funds don’t even exist, and Javiera Pedersen (the economy sub-secretary) tells the world that inflation is not really a problem in Chile because….things. Ditto Ramon Lopez (an economics professor at U Chile) on inflation. I have seldom seen such a massive exercise in motivated reasoning. For most credentialed zealots[6], the whole pension withdrawal fiasco was clearly an outcome in search of a justification, however flimsy.

Fernando Atria’s case was particularly eye opening for me. I was not aware of the man or his role in the Chilean political scene and, when I became aware of him, I was told by friends that he was a trustworthy and thoughtful public intellectual[7]. So I started paying attention to Mr. Atria because it seemed like he was one of the leading intellectual lights of the new Chilean left. What I learned is that Mr. Atria is a mediocre sophist at best. He is much better at confusing his critics than the rest of his coreligionists, but his arguments are regrettably poor and reveal a certain disdain for the audience that I find particularly grating. He often complains that those who disagree have not fully understood his argument, which is typically a sign that one’s preferred method of arguing is complexity for the sake of obfuscation. It works, as it often makes the cost of entry into the debate high enough (after all you have to peel away the extra layers of bs that Mr. Atria wraps his arguments in) so that no one really wants to argue back. It is an efficient, albeit cynical way of arguing, especially if one is interested in getting to some truth that is beneficial for everyone. I will mention two instances to illustrate my point, but the man has made many, many flawed arguments.

In this article, Mr Atria argues that the idea that workers are the owners of their private pension funds is a lie, because they are not actually capable of using these funds as they see fit. Not only that, but this lie has been perpetrated by the AFP system to accuse the defenseless Chilean worker of laziness and of not saving enough for his retirement. Following the resentista trope, Mr. Atria plays on the difficulty of understanding a complex problem in its entirety, to flare citizens’ passions. The rather simple truth is that all pension plans around the world have a similar problem to varying degrees; people just don’t save enough. There is something about long term planning that eludes us as a species. So the solution is to force people to save in some centralized way. If it is a defined benefit plan, it taxes the young to pay for the old, hoping that it is sufficient. In that system, there is no ownership either. If you have a central government entity that invests its funds, allowing people to withdraw them would be a disaster. So in any real world pension system, no one has access to the funds[8]. We lock them away and open access only when a person retires and needs them. This is a crude solution, and there are a lot of people in the world trying to improve it, experimenting with creative solutions. Mr. Atria slices through the complexity like a drunk fumbling with his car keys and tells the average Chilean that he is being lied to by evil people. I found this paragraph particularly irritating:

Would those who defend the pension system accept that the law treated the property of businessmen, for example, in the same way? What would they say if the law forced them to hand over the administration of their companies or savings to a third party, with the promise that 40 years later they would receive the profits in installments? We know the answer: they would claim that even if they are told that they are still owners, it would be an expropriation. They would cite the constitutional text in their defense, in the part that states that “No one can, in any case, be deprived of their property, of the property on which it falls or of any of the essential attributes or faculties of ownership” (art. 19 No. 24 paragraph 3). This is the fundamental arbitrariness that we have claimed before the appeals courts: why should the situation be different with respect to the property of workers?

This is such a disingenuous argument to make. Of course there is no analogy here, company funds are meant for a million uses besides old age savings. If a company fails, it is not the state’s responsibility to fund their lives, they fail on their own because they take their own risks. If people fail to save, we as a society have to take over their pensions and pay them a living wage. It is incredible that this person is considered the intellectual leader of a movement, there is no room anywhere for such silly arguments.

In this interview (min 25) Mr. Atria argues that it is logically incoherent to condemn the violence during the estallido and jail the perpetrators of that violence while sitting in the constitutional assembly, which would have been impossible without that violence. This is an extremely poor argument. Let’s suppose that Chileans wanted a new constitution prior to October 2019, but the political system was jammed and incapable of delivering it to them. Does that mean that violence was necessary? If so, does it then mean that every time there is blockage in the political system it has to be resolved by violence? Suppose that a few years later the Chilean public changes its mind (as it seems to be doing now, where the constitution is no longer such a priority in the polls), does that mean that violence is no longer acceptable and its perpetrators should remain in jail? Now that security is the top concern of Chilean citizens, and the government seems to be incapable of delivering it, is vigilante violence the answer? Can Mr. Atria claim with certainty that those who used violence meant it to change the constitution? Judging by the fact that violence continued way beyond the 15th of November, the day in which the political agreement to write a new constitution was signed, at least some of the violent groups didn’t seem to think so. What fraction of the voters need to support an outcome to justify violence? Suppose that 51% of voters support an outcome, is that a sufficient threshold to justify violence?[9] Violence is sometimes acceptable because it leads to desirable outcomes is an odd argument to say the least, especially from someone who I am told is a specialist in constitutional law.

The revolutionary tourist

At the beginning of the estallido I noticed that the army of resentment peddlers had a strong international contingent. After years of not receiving much international attention, Chile’s politics were interesting once again, and some of the coverage was patently uneven. It was a bit of a caricature, almost like Chile had been frozen in time since the coup, and everything that had happened in between was some sort of extension of it. It was so formulaic I even wrote a template as a joke, although to be honest it wasn’t that far from the truth. There were multiple offenders, but The Guardian stood out for the frequency and the blatant bias of its coverage. As an aside, I have been an avid reader since it was ever available online, so the newspaper has been a constant part of my life for a good part of the past 20 years. I still read its European and NA coverage. But after I started reading its LATAM coverage I realized that resources are not spread evenly, or maybe that the Chile posting is not the most coveted.

The revolutionary tourist typically originates from western Europe or North America and refuses to grant Chileans any agency. This person has concocted a very rigid idea of what a proper and ideal Chilean should want, and any deviations are met with incredulity and an avalanche of blaming the fortunately ubiquitous forces of the global neoliberal order. When the average Chilean votes in accordance with the tourist’s image of how he should vote, she approves and takes it as proof of the virtue of the simple but noble people of Chile. When, instead, the average Chilean voter has the temerity to disappoint the enlightened soldier of righteousness, the voter is scolded for their stupidity and the ease with which she falls under the spell of the right wing propaganda machine.

A lot of the revolutionary tourism comes in the form of journalism, and is very active online. The resentment peddling goes global, but it has local effects. The tourist provides local revolutionaries with global support, in a sense providing cover through the prestige of global journalism brands. If the local reporter for The Guardian makes some unsubstantiated claim online, for example that Chile is more expensive than the UK because some guy went into a supermarket and wrote down prices, most people will weigh the veracity of the statement by the prestige of the newspaper. By the time people have worked through the problem and come up with an answer, the tourist will have moved on to some other artificial outrage. The Economist magazine does not like the new constitution? Easy, the tourist will remind you of that time fifty years ago when the same magazine assigned the blame for the coup to Allende. It matters not that none of those journalists are involved in writing today’s newspaper, the point is that anything The Economist has to say can be easily dismissed because they said a thing half a century ago. People are using the Costanera Center to commit suicide? Well, that is just the face of Chilean neoliberalism. One would like to think that these instances are unimportant and irrelevant, but I have my doubts.

The revolutionary tourist toils under the same intense saviour complex that the Anglo-Saxons of old did, the same religious fervor. The rather narrow difference being that the old missionaries were, at least nominally, concerned with the heavenly, while the current Chomsky thumping preacher is more concerned with earthly riches. Somehow, Chile is a magnet for the revolutionary tourist, although this is an old phenomenon. I suspect it is because Chile triggers a sort of nostalgia in the Western far left. This is where the revolution was brutally stopped, so it never failed. It is the last vestige of hope, the mythical place where the revolution would have worked. This is why The Guardian calls the current crop of would be revolutionaries “the best political generation in fifty years”[10]

Here is a particularly incendiary headline on an incident during the protests in 2020 from The Guardian. We all watched in horror the viral video of a moment where a policeman appears to be throwing a person off the Pio Nono bridge during a protest. I think there were very few people in Santiago who watched the video and did not immediately think that the policeman threw the boy off the bridge intentionally. But going from a video that confirms your heuristics to claiming it as established fact is beyond the pale. The Guardian’s article came the next day, immediately after the event and I found the headline extremely irresponsible, since the facts of the case were still too fresh. As the case went through the courts and more facts came out, the headline looked less and less certain. The case is still going through the appeals courts, and nothing seems guaranteed, but the damage that that headline did to the climate in Chile was irreparable. It confirmed people’s priors in the worst way and threw fuel to an already uncontrollable fire.

The entrepreneur/grifter

The estallido, like all upheavals, provided ample opportunities for personal enrichment. It is when we are at peak resentment, and willing to experiment with anything that opposes the status quo, that the estallido entrepreneur can operate unburdened by logical consistency, data and other such trivialities. Whether they were selling books, radio programs or other protest related paraphernalia, estallido entrepreneurs filled the intellectual vacuum that mass anger created with striking efficiency. There was a market for interpretation and prediction, people needed to know how to decipher the sudden explosion of mass anger and what it meant for the future. And the entrepreneurs provided it in real time, while Santiago was still burning. I also noticed that the people who actually knew what they were talking about retreated from making public statements or even engaging in debates. The few who dared to contradict the overwhelming narrative, such as Carlos Peña and Sergio Micco were mercilessly pilloried in the public square The rest learned their lesson; try not to argue, and if you have to, don’t do it too enthusiastically.

The anger amplification machine was profitable, at least for a while. Online podcasts, such as “La voz de los que sobran”[11] became hits on the back of the estallido. Pick any episode from their large and varied arsenal and you will inevitably understand why. It was a brilliant strategy led by Daniel Stingo, who, as a wily operator even became a member of the constituent assembly that wrote the ill-fated constitutional draft rejected by Chilean voters. Mr. Stingo is without a doubt one of the more productive resentment peddlers and a first rate grifter. I think the podcast and Fundacion SOL[12] could be the clearest examples of estallido entrepreneurship that I can find. Alberto Mayol is another entrepreneur par excellence, a true business visionary. The estallido had barely gotten on its way and Mr. Mayol already had a book written just for the occasion. Between 2019 and 2021, in less than two years he wrote four books on the subject, a truly astonishing intellectual output. And, if you found yourself wanting more, he will even offer you a quick diploma on the phenomenon, for a modest fee of course. As the shine of the new government wore off and they lost the constitutional referendum, he has become more critical, sensing the popular winds and repositioning himself. As all good businessmen know, the customer is king and principles can lead to bankruptcy. Felices y Forrados was another entrepreneurial venture that seized the populist moment and the anger towards AFP’s to “advise” people on how and where to move their funds. It was a scam, and eventually it got found out, but not before it did some real damage to the economy and regular people.

Arguing against myself

What’s the purpose of calling these people out? Doesn’t it just increase resentment? Why not forgive and forget, try to find some common ground? These are questions that I asked myself before writing this post. I am not quite sure if the following is motivated reasoning or not, but I have come up with some answers.

1. Resentment peddling directly or indirectly resulted in violence. In my opinion political violence is a binary proposition, it is either good or bad, there is nothing in between. That is to say, if you are living in a dictatorship, violence is justified and necessary, and people who argue to the contrary are either being naïve or have a stake in the dictatorship’s survival. If you are living in a democracy, it is not justified, and people who are argue to the contrary are either being naïve or have a direct stake in justifying that violence. In Chile, there were a lot of people who ended up fanning the flames. I do not know if they did this deliberately or not, that would imply speculating. What I do know is that either through ignorance or guile, they provided intellectual justification for that violence and attacked the capacity of the state to maintain its monopoly on violence. In the long run that has to have reputational repercussions; their opinion has to be heavily discounted and taken with a mountain of salt. Chile is much closer to being run by or Partido Republicano than ever before, it is a populist reaction to the incendiary environment that the resentistas created and will harm the country in the long run. I know that some foreigner railing in the wilds of the internet will not accomplish this, but the attempt is worth it, even if only to have a written record of resentment peddling during the estallido.
2. They won’t stop until the returns to being a peddler disappear. The Mirna Schindler case about prices in Chilean supermarkets is recent, it happened around March 2023. It’s not like they have understood that this is something that hurts the political process and Chile’s prospects in the long run. For there to be some sort of truce, both sides have to agree to put down their weapons and stop what they’re doing. Matamala won’t stop, at least until people discount his opinion and his boss starts losing money. The Guardian won’t stop, they did the same thing with Venezuela, and they learned nothing. They have no skin in the game, while millions of Venezuelans live in abject poverty, no one will hold them accountable for the part they played in the tragedy, no matter how small. This is a rinse and repeat situation with no one actually paying any price.
3. In the long run it’s better to confront than to appease. There will be a million takes on the estallido[13]. If the resentistas are not exposed in at least some of these takes, their routine will repeat at some point in the future. Long term democratic institutions are built around the deliberative process of throwing out the useless and keeping in the useful. Fundamentally, these people poison the process and result in weaker institutions and democracy.

A good question to ask at this point is[14]; what is the major difference between Peña, Micco and other commentators like Pepe Auth and the resentment peddlers? Basically, incentives. The former incurred a very big personal cost in opening their mouth and going against the grain in the early days of the estallido. This was true of them because they had been part of the centre left, so their condemnation was taken as betrayal. I think Peña was even harassed at his office at some point. They kept to their principles at high personal cost and opposed the crowd when it was personally inconvenient to do so.

Footnotes