Higher Education, Student Activism, and Military Dictatorship in Chile: From “Top-Down” Restructuring to “Bottom-up” Resistance

The role of student activism in opposition to Latin American Cold War military regimes has been widely debated in scholarship examining university student mobilization and social movements. Scholars focus on top-level student mobilization narratives, describing students as revolutionaries, rebels, and reformers. My paper analyzes the bottom-up mobilization of student activism. I focus on quotidian changes that Chilean university students experienced in the transition from life under a democratically elected government to authoritarian military rule. Military rule lasted from 1973 to 1990, under the control of General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet and the military junta adopted a staunch anti-communist stance, in line with the Cold War policies of other Southern Cone military dictatorships, the United States, and other western powers.  In conforming to this ideology, the junta enacted social control mechanisms and terror tactics to discourage what it perceived as subversive ideologies. My analysis links the Chilean Dictatorship’s efforts to control higher education to the political strategies of student organizing. While the military used violence and the threat of torture and “disappearances” to silence the opposition, censorship and attempts to manipulate university education were other important control mechanisms applied by the regime.  Exploring student activisms at the University of Chile and universities in other, less studied urban settings, I argue that students connected multiple islands of resistance that effectively challenged some of the junta’s control efforts.  I illustrate under what conditions students not only contributed to the restructuring of higher education, but also to the weakening of military control and its disintegration in the 1980s. Through an analysis student federation publications, documents, oral histories, and regime records, I will reveal links between the concerns students faced on a daily basis and the networks they created in order to mobilize for changes they perceived as necessary.