(Title taken from a headline in the left-wing satirical newspaper, The Clinic.)
The students created a beach scene in front of la Moneda in an effort to make fun of the then Education Minister.
Right now there are more or less four protests happening in Chile.
In my town right now, Rancagua, the contractors to Chile’s biggest and wealthiest company, have just finished protesting about the size of bonus they’re going to receive. They blocked the road to the mine, and threw rocks at the buses which go to work. They congregated in the main square every day to shout slogans, and regularly marched to Codelco’s Rancaguga headquarters. When this happened, it was difficult to enter the building, and cars regularly got damaged. They were on strike for about two months, the mine lost millions of dollars in productivity, and it was resolved seemingly unsatisfactorily for both parties.
A huge protest against the building of new dams in Patagonia has just ended with success, with the government delaying their start in favour of a further review. Patagonia is a place famous and much loved in Chile for its beauty, and these huge dams, which would need to run electricity lines up the length of this earthquake-troubled country to transport the electricity to the cities, seemed a stupid and clumsy way to generate electricity. The protests were huge, and carried out throughout the country. Television sets and facebook walls were filled with photos of bloody protestors and policemen, as the protests inevitably became violent.
Teargas in Santiago - courtesy of Heather Tang
The biggest of all have been the student protests, which are still ongoing. In every city, school and university students are protesting about the state of education – its high cost, poor quality, and the way it’s driven by the market. Wherever you look, schools are “en toma”, barred to non-students with locks and piles of chairs. On the biggest day of protest, 300,000 people protested, half of those in Santiago. The protests, in general, have been non-violent, witty, and consistently “there” – everyday, for the past two months, there have been protests. One response from the government, laughably, has been to move the school holidays two weeks forward, so the protests are taking place in the holidays rather than the school term. Another has been the replacement of the Minister for Education. In the last few days, this has turned more serious, and the government has just simply “not allowed” the protests to take place. When the students have inevitably protested, police have shut them down, sometimes brutally. Today, Friday the 5th August, the newspapers report 874 students detained and 90 policemen injured.
While all this has been happening, there has also been time and space to have a 10,000 strong march for gay rights in Santiago, and then a “march for values and the family,” of about 1000, in response.
From an Australian perspective, in which people rarely take to the streets, all this citizen action is very impressive. It’s good to see people in the streets, doing something that looks a bit like democracy. Other times it seems pretty futile. As a student told me in a pub, “when the government is this, undemocratic, you have to take to the streets.”
Whether, as some people think, this is all part of an expression of the people, which will force the disliked government to step down and be replaced by a genuine social democratic movement, or whether it is just part of the everyday running of a developing country, these are interesting times to be in Chile.
Paul Kearney is is currently living in central Chile and teaching English. He just finished up a year volunteering with Chile’s English Opens Doors program. To hear more about his experiences, check out his blog.
Latest posts by Paul Kearney
- Machismo Madness: Piropotos - July 18th, 2011
- A Story about Rugby - May 21st, 2011
- Still Working for Codelco - April 15th, 2011
- Beginnings - 8th April, 2010 - April 10th, 2011
