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El Ciudadano

Original article: La ministra Lincolao y la metáfora del espejo de Rafael Gumucio

By Leopoldo Lavín Mujica

When a deep social contradiction erupts in Chile—illustrated by the incidents surrounding Minister Ximena Lincolao’s visit to the Universidad Austral—skeptical commentators quickly characterize it as a matter of the soul.

One such commentator is Rafael Gumucio. His column, «The Broken Mirror» (April 2026), appears sophisticated at first glance. However, sometimes elegance hides those unwilling to confront the wall.

Gumucio suggests that the students who assaulted Lincolao did not attack a minister but rather a mirror. They saw in her what they could not become. Thus, their anger is hatred of their reflection—violence turned against themselves. It’s a clever trick, yet it also serves as a trap.

Fanon Didn’t Write About Souls, He Wrote About Structures

Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist, who dedicated his life to understanding the subjectivity of the oppressed, would recognize this mechanism. He describes it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961): the violence of the colonized turning against themselves, finding the nearest enemy in close proximity. All of this is present in Fanon’s work.

However, Fanon doesn’t stop there. This is where Gumucio and he diverge. For Fanon, such psychology does not float in the air; it is not a phenomenon of the soul or the destiny of a wounded identity. It is the almost deterministic outcome of concrete material and political conditions: underfunded universities, reduced scholarships, a neglected south, and an education system that pretends to teach students who act as if they are learning.

Gumucio does mention these issues, but merely as a bleak backdrop to a tragedy centered on psychological themes. Fanon would place these issues at the forefront—not as a context for violence but as its structural cause, without which a specific subjectivity cannot take root.

Hegel, the Master, and the Minister

Before Fanon, it was Hegel (1770–1831) who articulated the grammar of this problem.

In his master-slave dialectic—developed in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)—he described something that no individual psychology can explain alone: the identity of the dominated is constituted in relation to the dominator. The slave knows who the master is. The master, conversely, knows themselves only through the recognition of the slave.

What Fanon does is take this dialectic out of philosophy and bring it to the streets of Algiers, the plantations of the Caribbean, and the underfunded universities of southern Chile. The colonized do not hate the colonizer because they are psychologically dysfunctional. They hate the colonizer because the colonizer has organized the world in such a way that the colonized can only exist as their shadow, their reverse, their negation.

In this framework, Ximena Lincolao is not merely a broken mirror; she embodies the entire dialectic: someone who has gained the master’s recognition and now manages, from a position of power, the living conditions of those who have not achieved it.

The master is not Lincolao. The master is the social order structured according to the interests of the dominant class, fully represented by Kast. Gumucio sees the mirror but does not acknowledge the master who set it up.

A Memory with Name, Date, and River

In southern Chile, that memory has precise geographical coordinates. In 2011, public opposition to HidroAysén—the mega-project aimed at damming the Baker and Pascua rivers in Patagonia—reached 74% among the populace. This was more than just an environmental dispute; it was a battle over who decides the future of the south.

In 2017, after eleven years of resistance, companies relinquished their water rights. This victory is etched in collective memory.

Today, Johannes Kaiser—a figure closely associated with the government—has proposed reviving HidroAysén. For southern students, for the Mapuche communities, and for those whose lives revolved around that struggle, this is not just a technical proposal about megawatts. It signals that the current government not only cuts scholarships and defunds universities but also threatens to dismantle what cost a generation to build.

Frantz Fanon would say that when the colonized perceives the colonizer retreating in time to reclaim what was taken from them, the rage that ensues is not irrational; it is activated political memory. It starkly contrasts with what Gumucio describes as a broken mirror: it clearly exposes who is on the other side and what they intend to do with the river.

The Colonized with Police Credentials

This mechanism does not necessarily require anger; sometimes, it only requires a uniform and salary. The images circulating from the United States are a real-time lesson in Fanon. Many ICE agents featured in videos of mass detentions during the Trump administration are Latino or African American—children or grandchildren of the very communities they are now handcuffing, deporting, and humiliating.

This happens not from particular cruelty or conscious betrayal but because the late colonial system learned long ago that the most effective tool of domination is not a blonde guard with a Texan accent. It is the guard who speaks the detainee’s language. That guard does not need to hate their victim; they merely need to have internalized the legitimacy of the order they represent.

Fanon called this the colonized administering their own colonization. Today, they wear federal credentials and a bulletproof vest.

Kast is Not a Perception: He Represents Real Power Discourse

The elegance in Gumucio’s writing reveals its most significant limitation right here. His column treats Kast’s government as a nearly neutral contextual fact. He mentions reduced scholarships and university defunding but fails to elucidate what these policies signify in terms of historical continuity.

The government of José Antonio Kast is not just a right-wing administration cutting budgets; it is a regime whose leader has explicitly upheld aspects of the Pinochet regime and downplayed the human rights violations of the dictatorship. This is not a perception derived from the left; it is in his own words.

That students at Universidad Austral, many of whom are children of generations that endured the dictatorial violence or inherited that trauma, see Lincolao not just as an official but as a representative of something deeper and older is not paranoia or irrational rage. It is memory. And memory, as Fanon insisted, is political.

The Metaphor as a Cover

Certain columnists engage in an operation without realizing it: the trivialization of conflict through aestheticization. They turn violence into metaphor, transform political contradictions into psychological tragedies, and find in brutal episodes a cause for reflection on the human condition.

This is a literary aesthetic operation, and it also serves as a way to avoid confronting the root of the problem. Because the problem is not metaphorical. It is the scholarship cuts that close off the last remaining path to advancement for a provincial student. It is the underfunded university that can’t pay its professors. It is the south that remains the south: forgotten, exploited, treated as the periphery of a centrality that never fully acknowledges it.

Fanon did not aestheticize; he insisted, until the end of his short life, that understanding the subjectivity of the oppressed requires more than literary sensibility: it demands sociological rigor. It requires naming the structures, not just the souls. Gumucio lacks this rigor in his text.

This debate will recur, dividing as always between those who psychologize and those who politicize, between those who see wounded souls and those who see wounding structures, between those who search for the right metaphor and those who seek sociopolitical causes. Fanon chose his side sixty years ago. And he chose well.

The mirror is not the problem. The problem is what the mirror cannot reflect because it lies directly behind the person holding it.

Leopoldo Lavín Mujica

La entrada Minister Lincolao and Rafael Gumucio’s Mirror Metaphor: Unpacking Social Contradictions in Chile se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.