“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” — Karl Marx, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

A FEW days ago, when neofascist candidate Jose Antonio Kast was winning the first round of the country’s presidential elections, Chile’s 2019 rebellion aimed at burying neoliberalism appeared to be at an end.

However, it has been greatly reinvigorated with the landslide victory of the Apruebo Dignidad (“I Vote For Dignity”) candidate, Gabriel Boric, who obtained 56 per cent of the vote in the second round — nearly five million votes, the largest ever in the country’s history. At 35 Boric is the youngest president ever.