October 2019 is a month of paramount importance in Chile’s current political imagination. On Friday, October 18, while millionaire-turned-president Sebastián Piñera celebrated the birthday of one of his grandsons in an uptown restaurant, Santiago’s downtown and working-class neighborhoods erupted in scenes of chaos not seen in decades: thousands of high-school students and enraged citizens protesting a raise in subway fares resorted to violence, seizing, vandalizing, and burning down metro stations. Looting ensued, affecting everything from large chain supermarkets to small, family-owned businesses.

The government’s decree of a state of emergency and deployment of the military failed to stop the spiral of violence in the coming days — although it did leave in its wake over a dozen dead and thousands injured. Repression, in turn, led to demonstrations demanding that Piñera end the state of emergency, send the troops back to the barracks, and instead address the perceived real sources of the problem: the country’s vast economic inequalities. Demonstrators aired disparate demands, some concrete (“A New Constitution”) and some abstract (“Dignity”), none of them easy to satisfy or enact.

One of the more concrete demands, “Resign Piñera!,” strained a presidential system ill-equipped to respond to abrupt shifts in the public mood; it particularly consternated a political elite proud for having established a stable democracy after Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship.