Latin America: thousands of indignados join the “occupy” protests
WW4, Weekly News Update on Tue, 10/18/2011
Joining others in more than 900 cities around the world, Latin American activists protested on Oct. 15 to demonstrate their discontent with the global economic system. The demonstrations got a significant boost from Occupy Wall Street, a US movement that started with an action in New York on Sept. 17, but the Latin American protests also referenced the Real Democracy Now movement that developed in Spain last spring; the Spanish protests were inspired in turn by protests in Tunisia and Egypt at the beginning of the year. In Spanish-speaking countries the movement is widely known as “15-M,” from May 15, the day when protests started in Madrid. Like the Spanish protesters, Latin American participants call themselves los indignados and las indignadas—”the angry ones,” or “the indignant ones.”
Thousands of Chileans marked the global day of action by marching with music and dancing from the University of Chile campus in central Santiago along the Alameda avenue to the O’Higgins Park. They called for reform of the political system and for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution to replace the current document, which was created under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The protesters also backed the demands of student strikers for a free public education system and expressed opposition to the HidroAysén project, a plan to build a complex of five dams that environmentalists say would threaten fjords and valleys in the Patagonia region [see Updates #1081, 1100]. Organizers estimated that 5,000 people participated; the police didn’t give an estimate. Similar protests were scheduled for other cities, including Arica, Iquique, Coquimbo, La Serena and Valparaíso. (Radio Universidad de Chile, Oct. 15; Observador Global, Argentina, Oct. 15; Adital, Brazil, Oct. 14)
More than 1,000 Argentines, many wearing masks or costumes, marched on Oct. 15 from the Plaza del Congreso de la Nación in central Buenos Aires to the Plaza de Mayo. The marchers included Juan Marino, the leader of the Revolutionary Piquetero Tendency (TPR), part of a movement of the unemployed that developed in response to the neoliberal policies of former president Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-1999) and the financial crisis of 2001. “It can’t go on like this,” said another marcher, Bernardo Molina. “The rich created the crisis, and we, the poor, always end up paying.” Argentines also demonstrated in La Plata, Córdoba, Mar del Plata, Rosario, Mendoza, Tucumán, Jujuy and other cities. (People’s Daily, China, Oct. 16)
In Brazil, some 200 people, mostly youths, gathered under a heavy rain at Sao Paulo’s Museo de Arte on Paulista Avenue in the banking and commercial district, while others met in the Largo de Sao Bento, a colonial building in the center of the city. Some participants were from political parties, but one group of youths carried a sign saying they rejected parties. There were also protests in Rio de Janeiro and other cities. (ANSA, Oct. 15)
About 500 Peruvians marked the global day of action with a gathering at the Plaza San Martín in the center of Lima. Slogans on their signs included: “Wake up,” “Raise your voice, demand change,” and “The earth and the water belong to the people, not to the businesses.” The mobilization was “peaceful, apolitical and nonpartisan,” Luis Álvarez, from the Take the Plaza collective, which had called the protest, told Radio Programas del Perú (RPP). (EFE, Oct. 15, via Qué.es, Spain)
In Colombia about 70 indignados and indignadas met at Bogotá’s National Park to call for a regeneration of the democratic and economic system. The group originally planned to march to Plaza de Bolívar, in front of the presidential palace, but participants decided to stay in the park and develop the movement by holding an assembly in which they exchanged opinions on what should be the principles of the “15-O” (Oct. 15) movement. They also made signs expressing themes of the global movement, such as “Real democracy now,” mixed with references to local issues, such as “No to mining.” (EFE, Oct. 15, via El Espectador Bogotá)
Like their Colombian counterparts, the approximately 400 protesters who gathered at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City on Oct. 15 focused on both local and global issues, from the Mexican government’s “war on drugs” to consumerism and fraudulent banking practices. The group that called for the mobilization, the Permanent Assembly of Mexican Indignados, read a communiqué saying that “the country is hurling itself into the disaster of daily and widespread violence; into unemployment and hunger; into the violation of the most fundamental rights; into the destruction of the social fabric and the loss of human values.” “If those below get moving, those above fall down,” “Less tele and more vision,” and “If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep” were among the signs, along with “We’ve had it up to here” (Estamos hasta la madre), a slogan which has dominated Mexican demonstrations for much of this year [see Update #1079].
There were protests in 20 other Mexican cities, including a sit-in at the Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada de Jalapa plaza in the eastern state of Veracruz and at the Explanada de los Héroes in the central plaza of Monterrey in the northern state of Nuevo León. (Observador Global Oct. 15/11; La Jornada (Mexico) Oct. 16)
From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 16.
Chilean students clash with police
October 7, 2011
Riots erupted on the streets of the Chilean capital Santiago after talks between student leaders and the government broke down.
Security forces used water cannon and tear gas to break up gangs of protesters. Students responded with rocks and other missiles.
Over 130 people were arrested and at least 30 people injured in the latest clashes on Thursday. Those hurt included police, protesters and a journalist.
The demonstration kicked off after five hours of talks with the Education Minister Felipe Bulnes stalled over disagreement on how to cut education costs and work towards a free education system, a key demand of the students. They say high costs make further education inaccessible and leave students with massive debts.
Students have been protesting almost daily since June.
Copyright © 2011 euronews
Chile remembers its 9/11
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Thousands march to remember more than 3,000 people killed during Pinochet dictatorship that was launched 38 years ago.
Al Jazeera, 11 Sep 2011
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| Thousands of Chileans have marched in the capital Santiago to remember the more than 3,000 people killed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that was launched 38 years ago with a military coup on September 11, 1973.Organised by a group of relatives of those killed, the march on Sunday led to a memorial erected at a cemetery to commemorate the victims of Pinochet’s 17-year long regime.
They marched peacefully through the streets, unable to approach the presidential palace La Moneda because of the tight police cordon. Salvador Allende, the first and only Marxist to come to power in Chile through a popular vote, died at the palace when military forces surrounded it during the coup. He is believed to have committed suicide. Read more » |
Chile: Mapuche Teens Takeover Town to End “Police Brutality”
A decades-old is heating up as Chilean cities spend their winter under a blanket of protests. Forty teenagers staged a toma, or takeover, in Ercilla.
A decades-old debate over a 150-year-old conflict is heating up as Chilean cities spend their winter under a blanket of protests. Forty teenagers, part of 700,000 Mapuche Indians out of 17 million people in Chile, staged a toma, or takeover, in Ercilla. The small forest-farming town, 600 kilometers south of Santiago, frequently hosts brawls between the police force and Mapuche.
Since August 19, the 11-to-17-year-olds occupied the town’s government center. They’re not giving it back, they said, until Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter hears out their grievances over the “constant police presence” and a lack of intercultural education.
The clock is ticking according to Camilo Catrilanca, the 16-year-old spokesperson of the toma. “We’re not going anywhere. We haven’t had an answer,” said Catrilanca.
Mayor of Ercilla José Vilugrón said the government won’t resort to violence to break up the students’ toma. He sent a proposal over to La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, with recommendations on how resolve the issues. But the local governor, Miguel Mellado, said if they don’t go willingly, he will forcibly remove the students from the building. Read more »
Student protests rock Chile’s capital; “democratic” Chile arrests hundreds
| Police in Santiago use tear gas and water cannon to break up students’ march calling for reforms and detain 235 of them. | ||||
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05 Aug 2011
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New movie ‘Nostalgia for the Light’ spotlights the thousands of ‘disappeared’ Chileans under Pinochet’s dictatorshp
Arrests of Chilean activists, followed by torture and execution at secret detention centers
[Please read to the end of this article to see a clip from the new movie Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgie de la Lumière) which screened at the 2010 Festival de Cannes. We have also added an article that describes, with pictures, the horrors of the secret detention centers of the US-backed Pinochet regime, where thousands of executions and cases of torture took place.-ed]
In Chile, at three thousand metres altitude, astronomers from all over the world gather together in the Atacama desert to observe the stars. The desert sky is so translucent that it allows them to see right to the boundaries of the universe. It is also a place where the harsh heat of the sun keeps human remains intact : those of the mummies, explorers and miners. But also the remains of the dictatorship’s political prisoners.
Whilst the astronomers examine the most distant galaxies in search of probable extraterrestrial life, at the foot of the observatories a group of women are digging through the desert soil in search of their disappeared relatives.
Santiago’s observatory, with its old German telescope, is the starting point for Guzman’s film, as the director reminisces in voice-over about a pre-’70s era when Chile was an isolated haven of peace, and had a growing national fascination with astronomy. “The secrets of the sky began to fall on us like translucent rain”, he says.This vision of a past full of enchanting wonder is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic magical realist novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, which also starts with a telescope, brought by gypsies to a remote town to amaze the inhabitants with its distance-eliminating science. Read more »
Mapuche communities in Chile: Not underground, still fighting for their ground
Freedom for all Mapuche Political Prisoners, 2010 march
Upside Down World, October 26, 2010
Jeremy Tarbox
This year Chile celebrated the bicentennial year of its independence, 20 years since the return of elections, and its first transition of power during this democratic regime. These events received worldwide attention, but events underground have dominated international news coverage: the devastating earthquake in February; and the successful efforts to free the miners who were trapped underground since early August.
However, there is another deeper wound in Chile that has not healed, and is on the surface. The miners were trapped underground, but in southern Chile, indigenous Mapuche communities are still fighting for the right to their own ground.
Days before the bicentennial celebrations, the streets of Temuco echoed with shouts of “Free them; free the Mapuche who are fighting back!”. The protest march started outside the jail where many Mapuche were on hunger strike. The setting of the jail is steeped in symbolism. Firstly, it is right below Cerro Ñielol, the hill where the Mapuche signed a treaty with the Chilean Government in 1881 to stop what newspapers of the day called the ‘war of extermination.’ Secondly, a block away is a memorial to the detained (tortured), disappeared and murdered during the Pinochet 1973-90 military dictatorship. Many are Mapuche names: one of the events that precipitated the coup was Salvador Allende’s land reform program to return lands stolen from Mapuche communities. Read more »
Chile: Women sterilized due to HIV status
Upside Down World, October 26, 2010
by Aprille Muscara and Daniela Estrada
(IPS) – When Francisca arrived at the historic Curicó Hospital – a staple in the Chilean central valley for nearly one and a half centuries – for the birth of her first child, she didn’t know it would be her only one. ”I was in the recovery room at the hospital of Curicó when [the nurse] entered and, after asking me how I was feeling, told me that I was sterilised and that I would not be able to have any more children,” she recalls in a joint report by the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) and the Chilean NGO Vivo Positivo released Thursday.
It was 2002. Francisca (not her real name) was 20 years old and she and her husband foresaw a future in which their visit to the maternity ward would not have been their last – in which their family would grow and in which their firstborn son would have siblings.
Instead, according to the report, the attending surgeon sterilised her during her cesarean section operation without any prior discussion and without her permission because Francisca is HIV-positive.
“They treated me like I was less than a person,” she said. “It was not my decision to end my fertility; they took it away from me.”
Suzannah Phillips, one of the authors of the report – which documents cases of discriminatory treatment against HIV- positive mothers – argues that Francisca’s story is not an isolated incident. The report, titled ‘Dignity Denied,’ states that the forced sterilisation of HIV-positive women was routine in Chile prior to 2000, when its health laws were revised to include the notion of informed consent – a process of communication whereby patients voluntarily give their permission for treatment after being given adequate counseling about all possible options.
But the practice continued: In a 2004 Vivo Positivo country study, 29 percent of participants – seropositive women – said that their health care providers pressured them to get sterilised, while 12.9 percent said they were sterilised without consent. Read more »
Remembering Why the Chilean Mining Disaster Happened
Dan Morgan, Santiago, Chile
After the 5th of August, for 17 days the whole country held its breath, hoping that 33 miners trapped in the San José mine would be found, and found alive. Nothing was certain. As the test boreholes advanced, so did the horror at the scandalous news that emerged, day by day, of the criminal negligence that led to the disaster. For this was no accident, it was a disaster waiting to happen.
Now they have all been rescued, in good condition, and the news coverage was of the most trivial kind. President Sebastián Piñera has had a field day, luckily he was there to greet the men before he left on a European tour, and his government has avoided any blame for the scandalous, probably corrupt, lack of regulation of this dangerous mine.
The relief when the men were found alive was wonderful. Quickly, resources were mobilised to establish communication, and good supplies of food, clean water and advice, through the 15cm. diameter borehole. TV commentators, and the nation’s president, made belittling, condescending remarks about the shift of 33 men in the San José mine. Worries that they might have lapsed into depressed apathy, or become ‘dispersed’, revealed a complete lack of knowledge of the working class (and especially of underground miners, who depend on each other daily for survival). Read more »
The abuses kept in the shadows of the Chilean miners’ rescue
The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a facade.
The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile, but is the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Copper is Chile’s gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile’s privatised mines. The San Jose mine, where the men work, became so unsafe in 2007 that it had to be closed – but not for long.
On July 30 last, a Labour Department report warned again of “serious safety deficiencies,” but no action was taken. Six days later, the men were entombed.
For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: “The forgotten past is full of memory.” This was the torture centre where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Read more »
Chile: Communique from the last Mapuche hunger strikers
On October 2, most of the Mapuche political prisoners on hungerstrike in the prisons of the Chilean state announced an end to their action while the hungerstrikers at Angol prison declared they would continue. On October 7, they released another communique explaining their struggle. The following day, after nearly 90 days without eating, they ended their hungerstrike, although without signing onto any agreement with the Chilean state.
We consider this communique to be of great importance because it clearly explains how the modifications to the antiterrorist law are simply cosmetic and do not at all guarantee the completion of the demands brought forward by this mobilization. Furthermore, and most importantly, the hungerstrikers of Angol prison want to make it plain that this action did not occur as a partial claim within the juridical realm, but as a projection of the Mapuche struggle.
This is where we see that an action such as this is not a simple pressure brought to bear against the party in power, rather it reveals the substance of what is and must be the struggle by the Mapuche against the State/Capital. A struggle that, through this kind of mobilization, continuously strengthens itself and avoids a fossilization that would prevent it from taking on a larger framework, such as a struggle for self-determination. Read more »
Mapuches End Hunger Strike after Agreement with Chile Government
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SANTIAGO – Thirty jailed Mapuche Indians ended a long hunger strike – in most cases dating back to July 12 – after reaching an agreement with the government, the archbishop who mediated the talks said.
The news, also confirmed by the spokeswoman for some of the jailed protesters, Natividad Llanquileo, was announced Friday after two extensive meetings between representatives of the Indians and the government – one in Concepcion with the participation of that southern city’s archbishop, Ricardo Ezzati, and another in Temuco with the presence of Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter.
“As is public knowledge, the government has sponsored legal reforms aimed at modifying the so-called ‘anti-terrorist law’ and the act (that allows) trials of civilians by military tribunals,” Ezzati told reporters. Read more »
Chile: The Roots of Mapuche Resistance
September 24, 2010
For Indigenous people in Chile, the struggle for life is labeled a terrorist activity
by Dawn Paley
The Dominion – http://www.dominionpaper.ca
The Mapuche struggle, at its roots, is in defense of their territory and culture and in that way is similar to the struggles of Indigenous peoples around the world.The hunger strike has entered into a critical and possibly deadly phase: Bobby Sands, an Irish revolutionary and a well known casualty of hunger striking, died after 66 days. Other hunger strikers have survived for longer, including ex-political Mapuche prisoner Patricia Troncoso, who refused food for 112 days to protest the “predatory and inhumane economic model” in Chile and the still active anti-terrorist laws used to criminalize the Mapuche people.
The central demands of the hunger strikers and their supporters are that Mapuche people be tried in civil courts instead of in both civil and military courts, and that dictatorship-era anti-terrorist legislation not be used against them. Their struggle, at its roots, is in defense of Mapuche territory and culture, a plight common to Indigenous peoples around the world. Read more »
Chile: At the Roots of Mapuche Resistance
Freedom for all Mapuche political prisoners
Freedom for all Mapuche political prisoners
Backgrounder on the situation facing Mapuche people in Chile and a look at Canada’s role
by Dawn Paley
More than 34 Mapuche political prisoners in Chile have entered into day 69 of a hunger strike to bring attention to their struggle and force significant changes in the way the Chilean state treats Mapuche people.
The hunger strike has entered into a critical and possibly deadly phase: Bobby Sands, an Irish revolutionary and a well known casualty of hunger striking, died after 66 days. Other hunger strikers have survived for longer, including Mapuche woman and ex-political prisoner Patricia Troncoso, who refused food for 112 days to protest the “predatory and inhumane economic model” in Chile and the still active anti-terrorist laws used to criminalize the Mapuche people.
The central demands of the hunger strikers and their supporters are that Mapuche people be tried in civil courts instead of in both civil and military courts, and that dictatorship-era anti-terrorist legislation not be used against them. Their struggle, at its roots, is in defense of their territory and culture, and in that way is similar to the struggles of Indigenous peoples around the world. Read more »
