IN A ritual marking the start of the academic year, last month the streets of Santiago were full of students dressed in colourful combinations of rags and body paint politely seeking donations from passers-by in the late-summer sunshine. Many of their predecessors had spent their summer holidays swotting, having devoted last year to occupying classrooms and taking to the streets in their tens and hundreds of thousands, in sometimes violent demonstrations to demand free and better higher education. This mass popular protest, and the huge public sympathy it aroused, took the centre-right government of Sebastián Piñera by surprise, leaving it floundering.
