Camila Vallejo Dowling

(born 1988)

“We do not want to improve the actual system; we want a profound change.”

Years in political office: 2014–present

Position: member of the National Congress of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, 2014–present; president of the University of Chile students’ association, 2010–2011

Party affiliation: Communist

Hometown: La Florida, Chile

Top causes: education reform, labor rights, and wealth redistribution

Life Story

Awareness of class politics came early to Camila Vallejo Dowling, who grew up in an eastern suburb of Santiago, the Chilean capital. Her great-grandfather was a member of the National Congress of Chile, and Vallejo’s parents were Communist Party members. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father owned an air-conditioning and heating business. “They never tried to influence me politically,” Vallejo says. “But they educated me on the values of solidarity and social justice.” Nevertheless, as a teenager, she began to follow in her parents’ footsteps by joining a communist youth group.

Once enrolled at the University of Chile, Vallejo realized the injustices of the education system in her country. At the time, public university degrees cost the equivalent of $3,400 USD a year, making the degrees extremely expensive relative to the average annual income of $8,500. These policies placed education out of reach for many Chileans. “I became conscious that what was happening in the public university was the most important thing in the country,” Vallejo says.

Education’s impossibly high price tag was a holdover from the regime of General Augusto Pinochet, who rose to power with financial support from a US government rattled by the popularity of South American socialism. Pinochet spearheaded a bloody 1973 coup that resulted in the death of democratically elected President Salvador Allende, as well as an untold number of citizens who stood up to the general’s new military regime. At least ten thousand dissenters disappeared during the Pinochet administration, though many say the actual number is closer to thirty thousand. Until 1990, when he accepted the results of a referendum in which Chilean voters denied him more time in office, Pinochet instituted policies that made Chile one of the least economically equitable countries in the world.

Talented at expressing complicated political ideas in straightforward language, and inspired by Chilean communist feminist heroes such as Mireya Baltra and Gladys Marín, Vallejo became a leader in campus politics. In 2010 she was elected president—though reluctantly—of the University of Chile’s powerful student association, FECH. She would later admit to feeling pressured by her peers to accept the role. The conventionally attractive Vallejo was only the second woman to lead the then 104-year-old organization, and detractors said she’d been chosen based on her looks. “Machismo was very present in all leftist movements, and changing that was not something among the demands of the student movement,” she remembers. “But it was in my discourse and that of my women comrades.”

She would go on to rise to near-folklore status by leading the Chilean Winter, the largest civil uprising the country had seen since resistance to Pinochet. It was driven by students’ demand for education reform, and they had support from all parts of society. At the height of the protests—which saw hundreds of thousands of citizens take to the streets in raucous, impassioned revolt—the movement’s approval ratings stood at 80 percent, shaming President Sebastián Piñera, whose rating dipped as low as 26 percent.

Vallejo did not win reelection as the president of FECH. Her fellow students saw her as too willing to work within the system and collaborate with institutions that weren’t as radical as their own. She proved them right when she successfully ran for the National Congress of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies in 2013, representing her hometown, La Florida, for the Communist Party.

The politician has a daughter, Adela Sarmiento, with Julio Sarmiento, a Communist Youth leader. Vallejo’s favorite painter is Gustav Klimt, and she loves to dance salsa and cumbia. She says she dreams of leaving politics someday to work in geography, in which she majored at the university.

What’s on Her Agenda

Under Vallejo’s watch, the Chilean Winter movement was in turn joyful and hard line. Kiss-ins at La Moneda, the presidential palace, alternated with violent clashes with the Chilean police. When Piñera said there was no way the government could lower education costs, students brought $70,000 USD–worth of used tear gas bomb canisters to the plaza in front of La Moneda—bombs police had used to injure their peers during protests. They formed a peace sign with them and the nose ring–wearing, twenty-three-year-old Vallejo posed in the middle of the arrangement. Such high-profile moves earned her vehement critics. A minor government official in the ministry of culture was once fired for saying of Vallejo, “Kill the bitch, problem solved.”

The challenges based on her gender also proved to be constant. “When I saw what came out in the press it was shocking,” she said. “Everyone was talking about how I was a woman, and that I was a woman, and that I was a woman . . . they didn’t ask me about my political goals or what it was that I represented, what I wanted to do.”

Global media fell in love with Vallejo, with readers of the UK Guardian voting her Person of the Year in 2011. But much of the media coverage focused on her looks as much as her organizing prowess—the New York Times published a 2012 Vallejo profile with the headline, “The World’s Most Glamorous Revolutionary.”

Vallejo eventually made her peace with the attention. “You have to recognize that beauty can be a hook,” she told a reporter. “It can be a compliment, they come to listen to me because of my appearance, but then I explain the ideas.”

By the time she made it to the National Congress of Chile, Vallejo was generally regarded as a key leader in Chilean politics. She parlayed that power into support of labor rights and has never given up her focus on education. She continues to fight to ensure free secondary education to Chilean teens, many of whom have no access to affordable schools.

Her presence has reverberated in the Chilean student movement. In 2018 feminist students shut down nearly every university in Chile, demanding better solutions for sexual harassment on campus and educational offerings that prioritized the academic contributions of women. Vallejo offered her full support to the protesters. “This is a feminist movement and in my eyes, revolutionary,” she told the press.

The following year, after a price hike on subway tickets, many Chilean people decided they had had enough of the government’s disregard for the working class. Starting in October 2019, some of the largest protests the country had ever seen erupted, with citizens calling for the resignation of Piñera and a replacement of Chile’s Pinochet-era national constitution. Vallejo avidly supports the movement, using her platform to publicize the military police’s abuse of demonstrators and denouncing the government’s misdeeds against the Chilean working class.

Awesome Achievements

Quotables

“We realized the problem was bigger, the problem was structural.”

“We don’t want violence, our fight is not versus the police or to destroy commercial shops . . . our fight is to recover the right to education, on that we have been emphatic and clear.”

“Today I am a feminist for the same reasons that I am a communist, because I believe [in] and want equality and emancipation for all.”

“The youth has taken control . . . and revived and dignified politics.”