Indigenous Mapuche protests were systematically under-covered relative to student marches in capital cities.

Evidence

Five years later in 2011, the same generation launched an altogether more spectacular set of demonstrations. A conservative was now in power, the billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera, which meant that progressives didn’t have to worry if a bit of contention might be bad for the executive. The protests were organized by elected student leaders at the country’s most important universities, and they were aimed at the for-profit, neoliberal education model. They had formal associations, they had resources (often money raised from their families or professors), and they had the attention of a sympathetic media. The country’s Mapuche indigenous people also began to embark on a set of active protests in defense of their rights in the same years, but social scientists find that they received far less attention than student actions that took place in the capital. The student leaders disavowed the destruction of property, caused by some protesters in hoods, and instead generated the kinds of images that for-profit media love to reproduce. They employed carnivalesque or even affective tactics, staging parades in their underwear, or putting on “kiss-ins.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 276

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth investigating how geography and media logistics shape which movements get covered, versus ideological bias.
• XREF: connects to: Protest frames broaden from local grievances toward systemic targets as movements grow. — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds: Solidarity…, 93

Broader Connections

• Protest frames broaden from local grievances toward systemic targets as movements grow. #complicates (0.72) — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds, 93