BTS, the Arirang tour, and the crisis of a government that never understood that the twenty‑first century is also governed by culture.
This is not about a concert.
That is the first truth the Chilean government failed to grasp. And perhaps that is why it went wrong from the start, from its tone, from its calculations, from the bureaucratic and small‑minded way it chose to confront one of the greatest cultural phenomena of this century.
BTS does not come to Chile as just another foreign band on an international events calendar. BTS comes—or should have come—in the midst of the Arirang tour, one of the most anticipated tours of the year worldwide, after years of absence marked by its members’ mandatory military service in South Korea. For millions of people, this is not simply about seeing seven artists on stage again. It is about the return of a complete symbolic body. Of an emotional generation that waited. Of a global community that sustained the memory, the music, the messages, the campaigns, the bonds, and the promise of reunion during the time the band was forcibly fragmented.
That context matters.
It matters because no serious state can administer an event of that scale as if it were authorizing the rental of a pitch for some ordinary activity. BTS is today one of the most influential expressions of contemporary popular culture. Its name condenses music, industry, youth and young adulthood, cultural diplomacy, global consumption, language, identity, community, technology, social media, and economics. BTS—Bangtan Sonyeondan, a name that can be translated as “Bulletproof Boy Scouts,” and also projected internationally under the formula Beyond The Scene—is not just a K‑pop band. It is a cultural architecture.
And ARMY—Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth, although long ago it ceased to be only an acronym and became a planetary identity—is not a fan section nor a lost adolescent tribe on the internet. ARMY is the most powerful fandom on Earth. Literally. A global, organized, multilingual, disciplined community with the capacity for simultaneous mobilization on social networks, in the streets, in humanitarian campaigns, in cultural consumption, in media pressure, and in soft political action. Anyone who does not understand that does not understand BTS. And anyone who does not understand BTS does not understand a decisive part of twenty‑first‑century culture.
The government of José Antonio Kast believed it was discussing the use of the Central Arena of the National Stadium. In reality, it was entering into conflict with one of the most influential cultural phenomena produced by recent humanity.
And it shot itself in the foot.
Not to protect a pitch. Pitches are protected. Not to demand technical conditions. Technical conditions must be demanded. Not to request mitigation plans. That is part of the natural logic of any mass event. The problem is not that the state evaluates, regulates, or even rejects a request if there are serious technical grounds.
The problem lies in the form. In the timing. In the silence. In the delay. In the clumsiness of management. In the lack of cultural understanding. In the subsequent pretension of reducing everything to an administrative phrase: “there was never authorization.”
As if that were enough.
As if an unsigned decree could erase months of public signals, conversations, meetings, sales, advertising, expectations, travel, hotels, family plans, debts, hope, collective organization, and social trust.
As if the state could watch for months the growth of an international‑scale event and then wash its hands by saying that, formally, it never stamped the final signature.
That is the point.
The real question is not only why the use of the National Stadium was rejected. The real question is why the government waited so long.
In recent days, the official defensive line has been insistent: there was never a formal authorization for BTS to use the Central Arena of the National Stadium, and therefore responsibility for selling tickets would lie with the producer DG Medios.
From a strictly administrative point of view, that argument may have a basis. A signed decree is the formal act that authorizes the use of the venue. But reducing the entire discussion to the absence of that document amounts to ignoring how large‑scale shows actually work in Chile.
And precisely there the major controversy arises.
The very authority has publicly acknowledged that it has become common for producers to start selling tickets before there is a definitive authorization. This is not, then, some anomaly unknown to the state, nor a clandestine maneuver executed in the shadows. It would be a practice known, tolerated, and normalized by the same institutional framework that now tries to present it as if it were a unilateral rashness by the private company.
If that is so, the question immediately ceases to be whether DG Medios sold tickets without a decree. The dates for the entire Arirang production at the National Stadium were already separated, communicated, discussed, analyzed, and above all scheduled.
The question becomes another.
If the government knew the project existed; if it had known for months the design of the show; if it held official meetings with the producer; if it requested a mitigation plan to protect the pitch; if it technically evaluated the proposal for months; if the National Consumer Service (SERNAC) intervened early because of the volume of consumers involved; if the entire country observed for weeks a massive advertising campaign and hundreds of thousands of people bought tickets, why did no authority decide to publicly warn that the use of the Central Arena could still fail?
That silence is today the core of the political problem.
One thing is that an administrative procedure remains open. Another very different thing is to allow an expectation of national and international dimensions to keep growing without communicating promptly that there were technical obstacles capable of preventing the final authorization.
The governmental defense rests on a partial legal truth, but that legal truth does not answer the political question.
No one disputes that a decree can be signed at the end of the process.
What is being discussed today is whether the state responsibly exercised its duty of leadership.
The known background shows that there were meetings between the Ministry of Sport and the producer. There were technical conversations. There was a request to present measures aimed at protecting the turf. There were evaluations over months. None of that corresponds to a nonexistent, invisible, or improvised process.
Everything indicates that the state knew the magnitude of the project perfectly.
That is why it is insufficient to simply state that “there was never authorization.”
The citizenry does not expect only legality from its authorities. It also expects foresight.
If technical reports already warned that the 360‑degree stage, the weight of the structure, the assembly times, drainage, irrigation, the hybrid turf, or the sports calendar could make the show in the Central Arena unfeasible, at what point did that conclusion arrive?
Was it known weeks before?
Was it known months before?
When was the producer informed?
Was there any moment when the government understood that the probability of authorizing the venue was very low?
And if that occurred, why was the public never warned?
These questions are not rhetorical.
Each of them points directly to the political responsibility of the Executive.
Because governing does not consist only in signing decrees. It also consists in managing risks, anticipating conflicts, and protecting public trust.
The governmental argument tries to shift all the burden onto DG Medios. It is evident that the producer will also have to explain its commercial decisions and demonstrate which certainties, signals, or reasonable expectations it received during the process. But the existence of a possible private responsibility does not extinguish public responsibility.
Quite the contrary.
When the state administers the country’s main sports venue, participates in official meetings, requests mitigation measures, keeps a process open for months, and observes that ticket sales become a national event, it ceases to be a simple spectator.
It becomes part of the process.
And whoever is part of the process must answer for the way that process was conducted.
Here, a concert is not only in question.
The trust between public administration and citizenry is in question.
Thousands of people organized vacations, bought tickets, reserved hotels, and planned national and international trips on the basis of a show whose realization seemed to be advancing normally. Meanwhile, no authority publicly raised an alert commensurate with the magnitude of the risk.
That is precisely what today generates indignation.
Not because the government protected a pitch.
Not because there is an administrative procedure.
Indignation arises because the state seems to have reacted only when the problem was already impossible to contain.
And that difference is enormous.
If tomorrow it is shown that technical reports always made the project unfeasible, the question will be inevitable: why was it waited until July to communicate it?
If, on the contrary, the decision changed during the evaluation, the government will have to explain which background facts modified a negotiation that had been developing for months.
In either scenario, the official explanation remains incomplete.
Because the real debate no longer revolves only around BTS.
Nor does it revolve exclusively around DG Medios.
The real debate is to establish whether the state administered this process with the transparency, timing, and responsibility that a decision of such impact demanded.
So far, the answers offered by the government explain why there was no decree.
They still do not explain why it allowed the entire country to believe, for months, that the show was advancing toward an authorization that ultimately never arrived.
And when that show is called BTS, that omission is no longer an administrative detail. It is a cultural crisis.
Because BTS does not belong to the usual size of the music industry. BTS operates on another scale.
Each performance by the band mobilizes complete local economies: transport, hotel accommodation, commerce, gastronomy, tourism, digital platforms, sale of products, circulation of national and foreign visitors. Each host city becomes, for a few days, a point of cultural pilgrimage. It is not exaggerated to say that a BTS tour moves much more than tickets. It moves economic, affective, symbolic, and diplomatic flows.
South Korea understood this long ago.
It understood that culture is also power. That a song can open more doors than an embassy. That a band can install a language, an aesthetic, a sensibility, and a form of national presence in territories where before only goods or official discourses arrived. K‑pop is not merely entertainment. It is part of a historical strategy of cultural, economic, and symbolic projection.
The so‑called “soft power,” or soft power, is not an academic abstraction when it comes to BTS. It is an observable fact. BTS has contributed to placing South Korea at the center of global conversation. It has led millions of people to study Korean, consume film, series, food, fashion, cosmetics, literature, and South Korean tourism. It has modified maps of cultural desire. It has made young people in Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America relate to South Korea not as a distant country, but as an everyday emotional presence.
That is power.
Cultural power.
Economic power.
Power of identification.
Power of community.
And ARMY is the great planetary nerve of that power.
There is no serious way to analyze this conflict without understanding it.
ARMY is not only the name of those who listen to BTS. ARMY is a social infrastructure. It has national accounts, translation teams, information networks, diffusion protocols, the capacity to position trends, raise funds, organize humanitarian actions, sustain global campaigns, defend causes, pressure brands, dialogue with media, and activate complete communities in a matter of hours.
That is the actor the Chilean government underestimated.
Perhaps it believed it was facing a dispersed mass of juvenile fans, that old prejudice with which traditional politics looks at everything it does not understand: young women, young men, adult women and men and even very adults as well, pop culture, social networks, emotion, digital language, transnational community. But ARMY does not function under the old codes of Chilean politics. It does not wait for a party to give it direction. It does not need a visible central command. It does not depend on a single spokesperson. It does not ask permission to exist.
It organizes.
It contrasts information.
It pressures.
It marches.
It publishes.
It translates.
It internationalizes.
And when it moves, it is noticed.
That is why Kast’s government did not commit only an administrative error. It committed an error of its time.
It believed it could respond with bureaucratic language to a community that speaks a global language.
It believed it could reduce the conflict to the word “decree,” when in front of it it had millions of people who perfectly understand the difference between formal legality and political responsibility.
It believed it could establish that the blame lay with a producer without taking into account that the state had been present during the process.
It believed it could hide the lack of leadership behind the nonexistence of a piece of paper.
And it forgot something fundamental: in the twenty‑first century, culture also audits.
Culture observes.
Culture organizes.
Culture punishes.
Culture leaves a mark.
The government that does not understand this is not simply behind. It is out of the world.
