Introduction

It is impossible to ignore the role of student activism when we talk about discourses of social disorder. Protests such as the ones in May 1968 (France) or the iconic images from the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 have left a mark in the countries in which they occurred in the shape of political, economic and social changes. It would be wrong to assume that this is a past phenomenon. Over the last few years, there have been several protests in which students are the common denominator, such as the 2010 protests in London against the rise of tuition fees, the protests led by Mexican students in 2012 against the then presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (#YoSoy132), or the recent protests in South Africa against the increase in tuition fees. In this chapter, however, I want to focus on the Chilean student movement and the protests that sparked off in 2011, which resulted in a seven-month strike widely supported by civilians, the sacking of three Ministers of Education, and the later victory of four former student leaders (2011–12) in the parliamentary election held in 2013.

The Chilean student movement has always been a catalyst for social and political change in the country. In the early twentieth century, it played an essential role in the secularisation of education as well as in reforms to address social and class inequality. Most notably, its actions were crucial in the overthrow of both Carlos Ibáñez del Campo's (1931) and Augusto Pinochet's (1973–90) dictatorships. The movement's strong alliance with the Trade Union Movement as well as its influential role in the country have resulted in an antagonistic relationship with the media, in particular the mainstream press, which has been dominated by a politically and economically well-established duopoly ever since Pinochet's dictatorship (Monckeberg 2009).

The duopoly, namely the Edwards and Copesa groups, controls the main (four) newspapers in the country in terms of both readership and the acquisition of private and public funding (Monckeberg 2009; see also Sunkel and Geoffroy 2001). Their consolidation as the mainstream press was enhanced by the lack of implementation of policies that were intended to ensure fair competition and funding of the media once democracy returned, due to an assumption that the market would work as a fair regulator (Monckeberg 2009).