When applications opened on 30 July 2020 for Chileans to withdraw part of their individual pension savings, people queued in Santiago to complete the procedure. The measure was introduced to support households that had lost income during the pandemic, and roughly three million applications were made on the first day.
What distinguishes this queue is that people were not collecting a new public benefit. They were moving their own retirement savings into the present. The procedure for surviving an immediate crisis was tied directly to a reduction in future pension resources.