The 1980s Generation: Radical Militancy from Dictatorship to Democracy in Chile

This paper focuses on the political and cultural activities of the Movimiento Juvenil Lautaro (MJL) during both the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the first four years of the Center-Left alliance that followed. While at its peak the MJL attracted no more than 300-500 members, and an unknown number of supporters, their novel, creative, and eroticized politics caused a national stir. Newspaper coverage of MJL activities was sensational at best. Mostly, they figured in the press as dangerous, delinquent, psychopathic, terrorist, monstrous, lumpen. Such representations demand a careful engagement with the MJL’s ideology, politics, and practices. During the civilian government of Patricio Aylwin, the MJL was labeled as a “terrorist” organization, deserving of new legislation aimed at their annihilation and subsequent incarceration in maximum security prison. As a group composed almost exclusively of poor youth from Santiago’s poblaciones (poor, urban settlements), the MJL offers a privileged position from which to conceptualize the emergence of politics at the margins. This paper’s aims are twofold. First, it contributes to nascent debates about the role of armed actions in the Chilean transition to democracy. Second, it situates MJL’s ideology and political tactics in the context of the 1980s renovations within the Chilean and the broader Latin American Cold War Left. In so doing, I argue that what distinguished MJL from the traditional Chilean Left was not their embrace of armed struggle, but their conception of politics from the margins that encompassed symbolic, affective, and subjective realms.