Commemoration of the 2019 Uprising in Chile
Featured image: Leaflet containing statement by Anti-imperialist Front Chile on the October Revolt. Source: FAI Chile Instagram
Revolutionaries in Chile have recently commemorated the struggles during the popular uprising of 2019, which began on October 18. In that year a raise in metro fares was the spark that lit the powder keg, which had been brewing based on factors like unemployment, sharp rises in cost of living, resistance against privatization plans, etc.
According to official numbers – during the uprising that lasted until March of the following year – 36 people lost their lives and thousands were arrested. At the time the struggles were headed by the popular youth, as we also observe currently in the struggles in Europe in France, Spain, Albania, Italy, Portugal, etc.
Already in the lead-up to the commemoration a flag of Yankee imperialism was burned, denouncing the crimes committed by the Pinochet military regime together with the US.
The Anti-Imperialist Front Chile has also reported on leaflets being handed out, graffiti painted, and posters put up:
During this they also expressed their solidarity with the ongoing struggles in France:
On October 18 itself, a demonstration and commemoration was held, highlighting that none of the causes that led to the 2019 uprising have been resolved, but have in fact worsened:
Below we share an unofficial translation of the speech given during the protest:
This Sunday, October 18, 2026, we are gathering to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the heroic Popular Uprising in Chile.
It was sparked by working-class youth who were fed up with the miserable conditions in schools and high schools, tired of seeing their parents and grandparents working themselves to the bone for meager wages and a pension that leaves them in poverty, spending nearly half their pay on transportation to their schools and jobs.
They call us criminals, they call us terrorists, they label us as lazy and filthy. Precisely those who live off the labor of others, who through inheritance, plunder, and dispossession have amassed fortunes; the owners of the country’s major economic sectors, the Luksic, Matte, Angellini, Sayeh, Paullman, and Piñera families, among others, are the lazy, immoral, and terrorist ones, because they prioritize their million-dollar profits at the expense of our people’s sweat, misery, and death, because they defend their profits with blood and fire. Why should we continue to put up with these leeches?
Systematic injustice is the legacy of Pinochet’s fascist military coup, perfected by each and every government since the return to democracy. Because joy never reached the people, nor will it ever come through this system that treats us as mere disposable numbers destined to build the wealth we will never be able to enjoy.
If the current far-right, coup-backed government of Kast-Quiroz and the International Monetary Fund has cut back on each and every one of our social rights, it is because rights are won in the streets and without permission, and maintaining and expanding them requires more struggle and more organization. Let go of illusions! Get ready to fight! Our well-being and happiness as a people do not depend on Candidate A or Candidate B; they require a conscious and organized people who defend each of their hard-won gains tooth and nail.
Today we know with greater certainty than ever that this old State and each of its right-wing and left-wing governments are puppets of Yankee imperialism, which dictates what is and is not done in our nation.
Yankee imperialism continues to step up its interference in our country: it is blocking the undersea cable project and canceling the civil registry tender with Chinese social imperialism; it is negotiating lithium deals for Pinochet’s granddaughters through his company SQM; direct sellers to Elon Musk and Silicon Valley; they’re signing the “Shield of the Americas” to massacre the people who are fighting and secure natural resources for their monopolies; US Ambassador Brandon Judd openly states—without even trying to hide it—that Kast is his puppet; and a long list of other examples showing that we are just another one of their semi-colonies.
Trump’s Donroe Doctrine is nothing more than an affirmation of US patronage in Latin America, a sharp turn of the helm against the leaders of the Latin American Third World. They kidnapped the president of Venezuela and installed Rodríguez’s puppet government; they are intensifying the blockades against Cuba and threatening to invade it; and they are imposing abusive taxes on all the economies in the region. They finance the plunder and genocide in the Middle East through their enforcer in the region: Israel.
But in the face of this, the peoples of the world are taking up arms and resisting the imperialist counterrevolutionary offensive; national liberation struggles are gaining strength, and their influence is growing. We recently commemorated the third anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Flood by the Palestinian people, an unprecedented offensive against the genocidal State of Israel. Iran, for its part, is defending itself and attacking all US military bases in the Middle East, and has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 25% of the world’s crude oil flows. Yemen is once again rising up and attacking imperialist interests in the region.
African nations are resisting the onslaught of the French, British, and Yankee imperialists. We must see in these anti-imperialist struggles the concrete paths of resistance against plans of plunder and starvation.
But there are shining beacons of revolutionary struggles that not only resist imperialism but are also building a new way of organizing society: the New Democratic Revolutions in India, Peru, the Philippines, and Turkey.
These revolutions, which are the natural course of events for countries where bourgeois revolutions never took place, as in Europe, are led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Parties, which carry out their revolutionary program through their People’s Armies and build a new people’s State based on democracy for the people and dictatorship over the former exploiters.
BECAUSE A NEW WORLD IS POSSIBLE!
DEATH TO IMPERIALISM AND ALL ITS LACKEYS!
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S WARS!
Honor and glory to the martyrs of the people!
Down with Kast’s government that starves the people and sells out the homeland!
Long live the people’s uprising!
