Why Are There Mass Protests in Chile?

On Wednesday, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera announced he was cancelling the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next month. It's a sign that Piñera doesn't expect the protests sweeping the country to subside any time soon. Among other world leaders, Donald Trump was planning to attend and sign the first step of a trade agreement with Chinese president Xi Jinping, but that looks unlikely now.

The government's efforts to get the protests under control haven't produced results so far. Last Friday, more than a million people marched through the city's streets. The following Tuesday, Piñera fired his whole cabinet to try to appease protesters, but that same day, thousands of people swarmed the central plaza of the capital, Santiago, home to nearly a third of the country's population. In response, Piñera announced that Chile is "at war," essentially against its own citizens.

Here's how one of the wealthiest countries in South America destabilized to the point of cancelling a major global conference.

How did the protests start?

The inciting incident, like many mass protests, was a seemingly minor event: a meager fare hike for public transit. Young Chileans started protesting en masse on October 18 when ticket prices went up 30 pesos, or about $0.04. Students called for massive fare evasions with the hashtag #EvasionMasiva, thousands swarmed metro stations across the country, jumping over and slinking through turnstiles. From there, the protests quickly escalated.

Escalated how?

The demonstrations are much bigger than just student-led metro swarming now. Last Friday, more than a million people marched through the city's streets. And the following Tuesday, thousands of people swarmed the central plaza of the capital, Santiago, home to nearly a third of the country's population. There's been some property destruction as some protesters set fire to buses, metro stations, and even banks. The government has imposed a national curfew for the first time since the country was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, and police have been liberal with tear gas, batons, and metal pellet-loaded guns.

All of this is happening over subway ticket prices going up less than a nickel?

A $0.04 increase sounds tiny, but a huge chunk of Chile's population travels on public transit multiple times a day, and half of Chilean works earn less than $550 per month. The economic discontent has been rising for a while now. One woman told The Guardian, "When the students come in all at once, they're protesting in a way that many of us who work can't." Another said, "Rather than raising salaries, they're raising fares."

What do the protesters want?

One of the rallying cries has been, "It's not $30, it's 30 years," a reference to Chile's rough economic policies in the three decades since the end of its military dictatorship. According to the World Bank, the country has managed to reduce the population living in poverty (measured as living on less than $5.50 per day) down from 30 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2017. That's a huge accomplishment, but inequality in Chile is staggering. Despite a significant chunk of the population no longer living in the direst poverty, most of Chile's major financial gains have gone to the richest people in the country. Meanwhile college tuition costs there are among the highest in the world and as much as 75 percent of the average Chilean's income goes to debt.

Aside from unrest over wealth inequality, there's also a mass push for a new constitution. Since the end of the dictatorship, Chile has officially been a democracy, but the constitution that was ratified under dictator Augusto Pinochet—who was responsible for the extra-legal execution of 3,100 people and the torture of another 29,000—makes any meaningful reform practically impossible. As historian Nancy MacLean documents in her book, Democracy in Chains, right-wing scholars and economists from the U.S. helped Pinochet's regime implement economic and constitutional overhauls that created an electoral system designed to permanently overrepresent the wealthy and the far right. And any changes to the constitution to make it more representative of the actual population would require a massive supermajority.

Did Piñera make any other announcements on Wednesday?

Yes. The 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP25, was supposed to take place in Chile in December, with thousands of world leaders and government officials attending. No more. Ironically, the focus of this particular climate change conference was economic and social inequality.

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Originally Appeared on GQ