Chile’s Social Movements and Organized Labor Are Central to the Fight to Transform Society

On June 20, Gabriel Boric’s recently inaugurated reform government announced the closing of a copper smelter in the Punchuncaví-Quintero industrial corridor. The plant, which had polluted the air and riverways of the neighboring towns for decades, was frequently responsible for public health crises in the region. The most recent occurred in May when pollutants from the factory contaminated the local water and poisoned over five hundred children. The Federación de Trabajadores del Cobre, the union representing employees of Chile’s state copper industry, also a crucial constituency of the new government, immediately responded to the announcement with a national strike. Endorsed by the general workers’ confederation, Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), miners mobilized to defend their livelihoods as well as public industrial infrastructure that Boric’s coalition had just placed on the chopping block. These conflicts indicate the new political terrain on which Chile’s left will have to struggle if it is to be successful. Crucially, workers located within the strategic industries on which the state depends for its revenue struck. In 2014, miners struck fifteen times, with strikes averaging over 1,500 lost worker-days. The following year, militancy in the copper industry erupted again but on an even greater scale. That same year, dock, transportation, and warehouse workers struck forty-seven times for total of 183,200 lost worker-days. By impairing business’s ability to extract and transport minerals to international markets, miners, truckers, and dockworkers imposed severe costs on economic elites and ruling authorities. Tensions between miners and community associations in environmental “sacrifice zones” are not necessarily about competing interests but rather about how a strong left should seek to wield the capacities of a diverse movement most effectively in pursuit of universal reforms.