Social Outburst (Spanish: Estallido Social) were a series of massive demonstrations and severe riots occurring mainly between October 2019 and March 2020, in response to a rise in the Santiago Metro's subway fare, a probity crisis, cost of living, university graduate unemployment, privatisation, and inequality prevalent in the country. It originated in Santiago and took place in all regions of Chile, with greater effect in the regional capitals.
The protests began in Chile's capital, Santiago, as a coordinated fare evasion campaign by secondary school students which led to spontaneous takeovers of the city's main train stations and open confrontations with the Carabineros de Chile (the national gendarmerie). On 18 October, the situation escalated as a group of people began vandalizing Santiago's infrastructure; seizing, vandalizing, and burning down many stations of the Santiago Metro network and disabling them with extensive infrastructure damage; and for a time causing the closure of the network in its entirety. Eighty-one stations sustained major damage, including seventeen burned down. On the same day, president of Chile Sebastián Piñera announced a state of emergency, authorizing the deployment of Chilean Army forces across the main regions to enforce order and prevent the destruction of public property, and invoked before the courts the Ley de Seguridad del Estado ("State Security Law") against dozens of detainees. A curfew was declared on 19 October in the Greater Santiago area.
In the following days, protests and riots expanded to other Chilean cities, including Concepción, San Antonio, and Valparaíso. Widespread looting occurred at shops and businesses. The state of emergency was extended to the Concepción Province, all of Valparaíso Region (except Easter Island and Juan Fernández Archipelago), and the cities of Antofagasta, Coquimbo, Iquique, La Serena, Rancagua, Valdivia, Osorno, and Puerto Montt. The protests have been considered the "worst civil unrest" having occurred in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship due to the scale of damage to public infrastructure, the number of protesters, and the measures taken by the government.
On 25 October 2019, over 1.2 million people took to the streets of Santiago to protest against social inequality in what was called "the biggest march of Chile". As of 28 December 2019, 29 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured, and 2,840 had been arrested. Human rights organizations have received several reports of violations conducted against protesters by security forces, including eye mutilation, torture, sexual abuse, and sexual assault. On 28 October 2019, President Piñera changed eight ministries of his cabinet in response to the unrest, dismissing his Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick.
On 15 November 2019, Chile's National Congress signed an agreement to hold a national referendum that would rewrite the constitution if it were to be approved. On 25 October 2020, Chileans voted 78.28 percent in favor of a new constitution, while 21.72 per cent rejected the change. Voter turnout was 51 percent. On 16 May 2021, a vote was held resulting in the election of the 155 Chileans who formed the convention which drafted the new constitution. On November 18, Chilean security services discontinued an investigation as to the presumed involvement of Cuban and Venezuelan agents in the protests, having found no conclusive evidence.
The scale of the protests was ultimately diminished with the emergence of COVID-19, which prompted the implementation of social distancing measures and government-imposed lockdowns. An estimated 3.5 billion dollars and 300,000 jobs were lost due to the destruction and damage to public and private infrastructure, including the Santiago Metro, as a result of the protests and vandalism carried out mainly between October and November 2019. During the second half of 2020 and most of 2021, the demonstrations continued almost exclusively around Plaza Baquedano, where every Friday between 100 and 500 people confronted the police and vandalized the surroundings, demanding the liberation of the so-called "Prisoners of the Revolt". This conduct was labeled by the government as "acts of crime that do not respond to a demonstration or social demand."
On 19 December 2021, former student leader and constitutional agreement negotiator, 35-year old leftist Gabriel Boric, was elected president of Chile in the 2021 Chilean presidential election with 55.86% of the vote. Under his government, on 4 September 2022, the 2022 Chilean national plebiscite was held in order to determine whether the public agreed with the text of a new Political Constitution of the Republic drawn up by the Constitutional Convention. The proposed constitution was rejected by a margin of 62% to 38%, leaving the constitutional process open, and effectively putting an end to the so-called "octubrismo" (octoberism).
The price of public transport in Greater Santiago is determined by the Panel of Public Transport Experts (Spanish: Panel de Expertos del Transporte Público), which uses an automatic calculation formula to adjust fares on a monthly basis. The Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications is advised by the panel and must be notified of any price changes.
On 1 October 2019, the Panel determined the quarterly adjustment of fares for the public transport system of the Province of Santiago and the communes of San Bernardo and Puente Alto. They decided that a fare hike of 10 Chilean pesos for buses and 30 pesos for the Santiago Metro and Metrotrén at peak hours (a rise of about 4%), as well as a fare decrease of 30 pesos at off-peak hours, was necessary. The increase was justified by the panel due to increase of the rate index, which is subject to variations in the value of fuel, the value of the US dollar, the value of the euro, the cost of labor, and the consumer price index among other variables, such that the costs to the subway have risen. The fare change was scheduled to take effect from 6 October.
Some specialists, such as former Minister Paola Tapia, have indicated that there are other factors that explain the rise. Among these factors would be the purchase without tender of a new fleet of electric buses for the Metropolitan Mobility Network and the suspension of the new tender for bus services, both decisions made by the administration of Minister Gloria Hutt.
In addition, there is criticism that rail transit fares in Santiago are the second highest in Latin America (only surpassed by São Paulo). In relative terms, the average monthly cost per person for the city's public transport is equivalent to 13.8% of the minimum wage, well above other cities such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City or Lima, where it does not exceed 10%.
According to Jose Miguel Ahumada, a political economist and associate professor at the University of Chile, the country is "one of the most unequal countries in Latin America". As described by The Washington Post, while the last three decades of neoliberal policies made Chile "one of South America's wealthiest countries, with inflation under control and easy access to credit", they also "created stark economic disparities and strapped many Chileans into debt". The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) states, that 1% of the population in Chile controls 26.5% of the country's wealth, while 50% of low-income households access 2.1%. Additionally, according to the National Statistics Institute of Chile, while the minimum wage in Chile is 301,000 pesos, half of the workers in that country receive a salary equal to or less than 400,000 pesos.
Protesters interviewed by Reuters said they were struggling to make ends meet because of the high costs of part-privatised education and health systems, rents and utilities, and a privatised pension system has been widely rejected by Chileans because of its low and often delayed payouts.
The protests against the rise in public transportation costs in Santiago, Chile, were marked by a series of mass fare evasions initiated by students from prominent high schools in downtown Santiago, including Liceo n.º 1 Javiera Carrera, Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera, and Internado Nacional Barros Arana.Under the slogan ¡Evade! ("evade"), the fare-dodging campaign continued and grew over the remainder of that week and into the next. Regarding the fees Minister of Economy Juan Andrés Fontaine commented on October 8 that "those who get up early can be helped with a lower rate" causing outrage in the public opinion. The first of these acts of fare evasion took place at the Universidad de Chile metro station on Monday, 7 October, and continued daily at various nearby stations, leading to a significant response from the Metro authorities. The Santiago Metro implemented controlled access at several stations in coordination with the 60th police station of Carabineros de Chile, situated within the Baquedano metro station, and filed a complaint with the North Central Prosecutor's Office in an effort to contain the protests.