For more than two weeks, students have occupied the main campus of the University of Chile in Santiago, spreading sleeping bags across office floors between empty soda cans brimming with cigarette butts. On one chilly afternoon (this is the southern hemisphere’s winter) several dozen of them rehearsed Michael Jackson’s macabre Thriller for a performance in front of the La Moneda presidential palce – symbolic, they say, of a dead or dying national education system that they feel President SebastiÁn PiÑera isn’t doing enough to fix.
It wasn’t so long ago that it seemed people were doing the cueca, Chile’s national dance, in front of La Moneda. Just late last year, in fact, PiÑera’s voter approval hit 63%, a result not just of the miraculous October rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners, but of the sense among Chileans that their center-right leader was taking Latin America’s most developed nation in the right direction. These days, however, PiÑera’s popularity has been turned on its head: 36% according to a May survey. Among the culprits: public ire over his blessing of a massive hydroelectric dam in pristine Patagonia, which has prompted tens of thousands to protest what they call Chile’s entrenched tradition
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