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<h1><b>Student Mobilizations Produce Chile’s Largest Protests Since the
Fall of
Pinochet</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1882.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1882.html<br><br>
</a></font><h2><b>While President Bachelet Cracks Down on Demonstrators,
Chilean People Reject Neoliberal Education Policies Created By
U.S.-Backed Dictatorship<br><br>
<br><br>
</b></h2><h3><b>By Liz Munsell<br>
Special to The Narco News Bulletin</b></h3><font size=3>June 9,
2006<br><br>
<b>VALPARAÍSO, CHILE:</b> 800,000 high school and college students
persist in a fourth week of strikes throughout Chile while student
leaders attempt to reach an agreement with the Ministry of Education over
their complex set of demands. What began in May as set of requests for
free id cards, public transportation and more accessible prices for
Chile’s college entrance exam has since grown into the largest
mobilization the country has seen since the protests that ended military
rule in the late eighties. Secondary school students on strike were
joined by university students last week as both an act of solidarity and
a way to push their own demands. While university student are
participating in strikes and marches the face of the movement and the
force behind it are <i>los secudarios</i> – secondary school students,
age 13–18. A poll taken following Monday’s general nation-wide strike
shows that the secondary school movement enjoys an 87 percent approval
rating from their compatriots, while only 16 percent of Chileans support
the presidency’s response to the mobilization. With this political
leverage in hand, the generation that was born into a democratic,
post-Pinochet Chile is demanding a reform of education policies created
by the dictatorship that remain in place today.<br><br>
Student and worker mobilizations typically develop every May in response
to the president’s annual address on the 21st. This year, however, the
price of copper (one of the few state industries not privatized under
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue41//narcoyear2000.html">Augusto
Pinochet</a>, now accounting for about half the country’s exports) prices
hit record levels, producing a large trade and budget surplus for the
government. This raised Chileans’ expectations for what the newly elected
executive government can and should provide in response to their demands.
Workers in the health field also went on strike last week, inquiring
about resources owed to them by government. In Valparaíso, employees of
LIDER, Chile’s largest department store, marched alongside students
during Monday’s general strike. Also present were several indigenous
Mapuches bearing their nation’s flag, who were thanked for their presence
and offered solidarity with their political prisoners in a speech by
student leaders.<br><br>
Following the non-violent march of 14,000 in the streets of Valparaíso,
one of various new stencils spray-painted around the city reads loud and
clear, “Bachelet give up the money for free education.” Beyond street
art, the strategies that the current secondary school movement is
employing are forms of protest that have a history in Chile. During the
dictatorship of 1973-1990, schools and universities were the only spaces
that enjoyed any kind of legal protection from police and military
intervention. Only a school or university’s rector can grant permission
to police to enter school premises; for this reason, during Pinochet’s
rule, rectors were often appointed by the dictatorship. School
<i>tomas</i>, or take-overs, in the eighties typically lasted for a
matter of hours before rectors authorized police to enter the building,
often resulting in on-site violence and the imprisonment and torture of
students as young as 14 years old. According to one participant in the
first school <i>toma</i> that took place during the dictatorship, this
strategy of protest “was transmitted orally, through
<a href="http://www.actoressecundarios.net/">documentaries</a>, through
the memories of the youth of the eighties who are the parents of the
youth today.” With this political consciousness present, students have
occupied 46.7 percent of secondary schools throughout the country in the
last two weeks.<br><br>
Although inside their schools student have received more petty threats
from neo-nazi groups than they have from police, on the streets of
Santiago the “special armed forces,” or riot cops, have reacted harshly
to student protests. Over 1,000 students have been arrested in Santiago
in the past two weeks and police have used their traditional tactics of
tear gas and tanks equipped with contaminated water to force protestors
away from a march or action. Despite president Michelle Bachelet’s
dismissal of the chief of police responsible for ordering acts of police
brutality that occurred on May 30th, violence has persisted in the
capital. An
<a href="http://santiago.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/51244.php">Indymedia
Santiago post</a> reported that even police who have been “sanctioned” by
the government continue to repress marched in the center of Santiago. On
June 5th Indymedia collaborating journalist Jorge Zúñiga San Martín was
hit in the head by police and dragged to shelter in the Universidad de
Chile by students participating in the demonstration. While student
leaders in Santiago requested that students remain in their schools for
the Monday’s national strike in order to avoid potential police
conflicts, 20,000 took to the streets downtown.<br><br>
Behind the locked the gates of their schools, students have been
organizing both the practical aspects of living on campus and caring for
each others’ needs, as well as the future of their movement. In
Valparaíso’s municipal school Liceo B-30, students take turns occupying
their building, ensuring that at least 30 students are inside during day.
The 10 students with the most understanding parents sleep over at night.
They take turns shopping, cooking and soliciting donations for food.
They’ve even dragged a stereo system into school premises, ensuring that
sound waves of reggaetón fill the space of the nearly empty halls. A vast
majority of the youths’ time is spent in discussion of the movement’s
course and in the basic maintenance of cleaning and caring for their
school.<br><br>
Since the strike began on the 27th many secondary school students have
embarked on the process of understanding the law that structures
education in Chile. The students of Liceo B-30 and many other have been
able to do so with the help of university students who have provided them
with materials and given them brief lectures about the politics that
effect the quality of education in Chile. Student organizer of Liceo
B-30, Paloma, recounts that “in three days, really, <i>really</i>
quickly,” she and her classmates began to have an understanding of the
politics in the background of their education, a realization that in
effect changed the objectives of the secondary school movement from
simple demands for lower student costs to a complete upheaval of the
politics of education in Chile.<br><br>
The Organic Constitutional Education Law (LOCE) of 1990 was dictator
Augusto Pinochet’s last stab at reforming Chile’s social institutions.
LOCE officially makes the management of primary and secondary schools the
business of whoever has the money to purchase and run a school. Miguel
Paz of <i>La Nación Domingo</i> reports, “it should not come as a
surprise, then, that the most prestigious and successful schools are
linked to the big businesses of the right, to Opus Dei, to the Legions of
Christ, and to other ex-authorities of the dictatorship.” According to
Article Two of LOCE, even while the government is not charged with
providing education to its citizens, it is still has the responsibility
of “protecting the exercise of the right [to education].” As a result,
the owners of many schools, whether they be wealthy individuals or
companies, are paid government subsidies per student in attendance at
their school.<br><br>
While the government offers monetary incentives to the owners of schools
for disadvantaged children, it does not have a concrete system of
regulating how such money is spent in the actual education of each
student. The Minister of Education recognizes that approximately 4% of
its funding for education, or USD $160 million is lost to fraud committed
by schools’ owners annually.<br><br>
With this massive mobilization, secondary school students have produced
the most powerful voice in favor of reforming leftover dictatorial
policies in Chile in sixteen years. The Student Federation of the
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (FEPUCV) is among four
university groups in Valparaíso that have mobilized to both support the
movement and further its causes to address legal reforms of education.
FEPUCV spokesperson Andres Cortés comments, “It is important to recognize
that… of these 30 thousand students [organizing in the fifth region], I
don’t believe that more than a third know what LOCE is. Because of this,
we as an executive board have made a commission that goes to various
schools and informs them.”<br><br>
While many students may not have been familiar with the policies that
shape their education before the movement began, Universidad del Mar law
student Iván Lara Lara insists, “beyond the recent external influences
[of the university students], this movement developed because [secondary
school students] have lived the last stage of the prejudices that the
educational system of the free market can have…<br><br>
Even in the industrialized city of Valparaíso, students are confronted
with basic problems such as leaky roofs and underpaid teachers. While
LOCE requires students to be in school two extra hours a day, a policy
referred to as the Jornada Completa, or whole school day, professors are
not paid extra and as a consequence students report that they are not
learning anything during this time. At Liceo B-30, student leader Claudia
exclaims, “Chile imitated the jornada completa stupidly, because other
countries have the resources to do it, like Spain, United States but
Chile, how can we? …We leave high school and chao… there’s nothing that
says that ‘these girls specialized in computation, they studied the human
body or knitting,’ some knowledge of <i>something</i>. We leave high
school like this, with bare hands.”<br><br>
A survey completed last year in Chile found that only 2.1 percent of high
school students from municipal schools earned the minimum score required
to enter a university on the country’s college entrance exam. Even while
Liceo B-30 is on the second-highest of four tiers of classifying the
quality of a school in Chile, not one of its graduated students went
directly to college last December. Within this context, the Ministry of
Education’s offer to grant the poorest fifth of the population a free
entrance exam seems irrelevant; students from lower tier schools don’t
just lack the $45 dollars required to take the exam, they lack the
preparation required to stand a chance at entering a university.<br><br>
This year in Chile, students who live the effects of these policies daily
have consolidated their frustrations in the secondary school
mobilization. Although the more concrete demands of student activists
have been resolved through negotiations with the Ministry of Education,
the strike persists due to the complexity of students’ demands. Major
constitutional reforms will have to precede any type of reform or repeal
of LOCE. Through the experience of a mass mobilization, students have
come to understand both the politics that structure education in Chile
and the incapacity that Bachelet’s center-left coalition has in
addressing these issues. Professor Alejandra Briones at la Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Valparaíso explains, “This forth government of La
Concentración (Chile’s ruling center-left coalition) doesn’t have the
real freedom of making drastic decisions because they are a
post-dictatorial government; they’re bound to a totally right-wing
constitution.”<br><br>
While Bachelet’s major claim throughout her run for the presidency was
her desire to augment the participatory side of democracy, her current
challenge is how to convince her electorate that their say matters, when
Chile’s constitution is based in a profound mistrust of the people’s
ability to positively effect the future of their country.<br><br>
In an open letter to the student activists of today’s movement, Lawerence
Maxwell, Chilean novelist, sociologist and student activist of the
eighties, reflects “What you all have done, the marches, the long days of
striking and <i>tomas</i>, has shaken a national consciousness that had
been sleeping and this already is important. Hopefully this with result
is a process of democratizing education, and in the search of a less
exclusive model, but this is, from my point of view, secondary, only an
effect of something much more transcendent, which is an act of
recuperating dignity, something that occurs in the movement of
protesting, taking the streets, opposing injustice, of letting out your
voice and saying no.”<br><br>
In a press release on Wednesday, Spokesperson of the Coordinating
Assembly of Secondary Students (Aces) Karina Delfino announced that
students will continue to strike until the government agrees to give half
of the seats on a committee that will look into reforming education in
Chile to student participants. With the strength of 800,000 behind her,
the 18-year-old told the country, “We are not disposed to accept this
commission as it is proposed by the President.”<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Liz Munsell</b> is an independent journalist and photographer from
the U.S., currently working and doing research in Valparaíso,
Chile.<br><br>
<br>
</i><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
</dl><font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
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San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
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