Santiago burning

I walked home tonight to the sound of helicopters circling the city, pots and pans banging, people sneezing.

I walked home to the feeling of my eyes watering, my nose running, my throat burning.

I walked home because the buses weren’t running their normal routes, because the ones that were were stuck in a never-ending traffic jam as people took to the streets or left fires in their wake, because walking away from downtown Santiago seemed wiser than standing still as I felt the effects of tear gas where I was.

I walked home because tonight there was a protest for education reform. For almost two months now, schools from elementary to university have been on strike, their students, parents and teachers demanding access to education for all, not only the rich. Their cry is “educación sin lucro,” education without profit, and their complaint is the fact that in Chile, most universities are private, money-making ventures which have created what many see as crisis-levels of student debt.

Of course, if you’re reading from the US you might be wondering what the big deal is with a little student loan. Chalk it up to cultural differences, and trust me – it’s a BIG. DEAL. Big enough that I can’t possibly hope to explain it in anything approaching a reasonable amount of words, although others have done their best. Big enough that people are out in the streets, braving the tear gas and water cannons used by the Chilean police, trying to make a change.

Chilean students are well-organized. They go on strike pretty regularly in fact, and at both the high school and university levels they have student federations which take their demands to administrators. So a strike was nothing out of the ordinary. Having high schoosl and universities en toma, taken over by the students, isn’t new. Neither, sadly, is the use of tear gas at protests.

What is out of the ordinary is how long this has gone on. These things are usually solved in a matter of days or weeks. This time, however, there is no solution on the horizon, the students having only today rejected the government’s latest proposal. The Minister of Education was replaced as part of President Sebastian Piñera’s cabinet shake-up last month, but that was no consolation for people who are fighting for what they see as an essential and fundamental change in the Chilean education system.

It goes hand in hand with the general feeling in Chile lately. Earlier this year, people took to the streets for weeks on end to protest theHidroAysén hydroelectric project which will destroy part of Patagonia. Many of those protesters weren’t your usual crowd, by which I mean they weren’t students. Some of them were wealthy, some were older, some were foreign, and many were shocked to see first-hand the police violence which I’ve heard Rodolfo and friends speak of so many times.

Of course, there is violence on both sides. At one of the HidroAysén protests, a policeman was brutally beaten over the head with a skateboard, the attack caught on camera. Often the criminals who loot banks and destroy bus stops aren’t even there for the cause, they’re just delinquents looking for an excuse to throw a rock or two.

During the HidroAysén protests, Spanish newspaper El Mundo published claims that the tear gas used regularly in Chile is abortive and can cause damage to reproductive organs, claims that are more than a little disturbing for anyone who’s received a face full of the stuff. The Minister of the Interior banned the use of tear gas, promising to investigate the claims, only to re-allow its use two days later in advance of another protest. Recently a TV report confirmed what many have long insisted, that plainclothes police officers infiltrate the ranks of protesters with the goal of causing disturbances which will then justify the use of excessive force by their uniformed colleagues.

There’s an anger bubbling just below the surface of many Chileans, and rightly so. This year has been a study in big business screwing over the people.

Whether or not you agree with HidroAysén – I’ve gone on record with my confusion as to whether it’s the lesser of several evils or simply a destruction of natural beauty – the whole thing was managed horribly, with the company making no effort to win over the public. Department store La Polar took advantage of its lower and lower-middle class credit card clients with illegal credit term changes which its auditors didn’t bring to light, and this case will go down as Chile’s Enron. And now attention is being focused on the fact that Chile’s educational system is based on profit rather than education.

I am nothing if not a capitalist, don’t get me wrong. But there needs to be a balance between the interests of businesses and those of the people. Right now, there is a feeling in Chile that this balance is out of whack and that people won’t stand for it anymore. While I may not agree with some of their methods or even some of their messages, I admire those who are passionate enough about their causes to go out into the streets and demand change.

Reglogged with permission from Emily in Chile

Photo credit: www.abbysline.com