Well, I don't know if it's been on the news back home (probably not) but it's certainly a big deal here — the entire educational system in Chile is on hold, advocating for reform. Among many, many things, there's some moldy old law hanging on from the days of Pinochet that has been taken to mean that whatever person, qualified or not, can open a highschool. View it in all it's fascist glory here, www.cnormativa.uchile.cl/ley18962.html The result is a "private" highschool on every block and plummeting levels of education in Chile. And this has been protested before. Many, many times.
The parro (stop) started on Tuesday with the highschools — meaning, no class — but a lot of university students participated as well. In Valparaiso there was a peaceful march of 10,000 + students who marched to Congress and submitted their requests. Today was a little bit more confusing…as some carerras (or departments…like the English department, the History department, the Pre-law department, etc) hadn't voted to stop attending classes in protest. I guess all the first year students in X Dept. vote on if they want to protest…then all the 2nd year students vote, etc, and then based on the majority, the department joins the protest or doesn't join. The History, Math and Education departments are famous for protesting, so the U seperated the main offices for each department to make organizing a protest a little more difficult.
In Santiago things were a little bit uglier as the police beat up some reporters and sprayed firehoses through the windows of some university while the students inside hurled rocks outside. Police are not allowed to enter the university without permission from the director of the U, but for the director to give permission is considered very extreme. Police have never entered the U in Valparaiso. Anyway, from the very northern desert of Chile to the extreme Patagonian south, students are organizing parros and are getting a lot of attention for their good behaviour and maturity in interviews, etc.
This is Bachelet's first big social protest and she has said "No, I won't talk with the students because they're violent." The reality is that this is an exemplary protest…the first really big, really important protest in about 30 years and the students are not violent compared to other years. Pedro (grammar proff) told us that in other years, a really violent student march would go down a street and pull down all the street signs along the way, knock over semaphores, smash windows, cars, pretty much destroying anything they could. Whereas there has been nothing of the sort this week.
The next big step is a toma where the students take over the university and deny entrance to all faculty, administrators, janitors, security…anybody who is not a student. The message is that "This is OUR university" and they live, sleep, eat and guard the university night and day to make their point. Pedro was in a toma that lasted 28 days and in the end, the students peacefully left the university without being 'evicted' by the police. He told us that there was a toma in Mexico that lasted a year…because the students were asked to pay an extra 3.00 a month to finance something to do with the school that had been promised to them by the State. Yeesh. He told us that during the toma that he participated in, the students invited writers and various speakers to come to the school and give talks and hold discussions and they continuously played documentaries and the like in the theatre…or people just studied on their own… Of course, there's not 100% participation. More than half of the students are like, "Sweet. We're in toma. Let's go to the mall."
Anyway, because Pedro is bacan (that is to say, Extremely Cool) the student leaders of the parro for the U came to him and wanted to discuss a toma. They're planning to take the U tonight. Pedro's all in favor of a meaningful protest but he explained to them that a toma is an extreme step and that it means that the security guards who watch the front entrance don't get paid for the days that the students don't allow them to work, and that the science labs where experiments are being conducted are going to sit idle, and that if a computer is stolen, it's not only the cost of the computer, but also the cost of all the research and the tax money that was invested in the research that is stolen. I would feel safe with Pedro in charge of the toma and he said there's a few students who have the same kind of vision as he does but I don't know about the rest.
I don't know what's going to happen. The toma could last the rest of the week, it could last longer…and as long as professors aren't allowed to have class, that means I don't have class. Which is a tantalizing thought. The sour side is that if we're on hold for a month, that means we work right through 'winter' break…that is to say, no 2 week vacation in July.
There's kind of an … electricity in the air for me, right now. I'm excited to be here for this and want to support the students, but I don't want to get deported if some idiot throws a fire bomb while I'm in the same building.
We'll see how this goes.
