'Security to study, freedom to live!': School and University Student Resistance to Military Dictatorship in Chile, 1973-1990

This thesis investigates the opposition to military dictatorship in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by students in Santiago's secondary schools, and at the University of Chile, the country's largest and most important teaching, learning and research establishment. It examines three movements: an artistic and cultural movement, the struggle for democratic student representation at the university and the corresponding campaign in secondary schools. This study shows that the essential first step in the resistance by students to General Pinochet's autocratic rule was re-establishing their right to free assembly. This was followed by the creation of networks of discrete groupings, which then unified into single movements. Opposition-minded school and university students adopted a directly democratic approach to decision-making, within a multilateral structure that included party-political and non-partisan activists. When the horizontally configured student oppositions were well established, priorities shifted towards the re-establishment of their banned representative federations, which had traditionally been dominated by the larger, and hierarchical, political parties; these bodies then coordinated the students' contribution to the key national protests between 1983 and 1986, alongside their peers, the youth from Santiago's shantytowns. The fundamental units of opposition, the cultural workshops and 'participation committees' at the University of Chile and the 'democratic committees' in Santiago's state schools, are evaluated and compared for the first time. Their shared preference was for consensual, participatory democracy; this reflected the legacy of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government (1970-1973) while consciously embodying the society they sought. Within their inclusive forums, they incorporated disciplined cells of clandestine party-political activists. The advantages and tensions this arrangement brought, for the three movements and for individual student militants negotiating both a social movement and a political party, are appraised using a horizontal-vertical frame of reference. The vertical party structures delivered expertise, resources and focus through hierarchical efficiency; the horizontal social movements delivered critical mass, safety in numbers, anonymity and democratic credibility. Whereas horizontal and vertical tensions within political movements have been studied before, such as between a party leadership or vanguard and its grassroots supporters, this investigation demonstrates how the (vertical) underground parties, denied the possibility of defining their own arenas, chose to work together within the (horizontal) democratic forums that opposition students had established. In exploring three student movements in Chile and uncovering their common features, this thesis provides a correction to scholarship that has focused on the shantytown youth of Santiago as the driver of youthful opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship and contributes to a growing understanding of political contention outside the major advanced industrialised economies of Europe and North America