Home2022-01-14T20:27:35+00:00

Indestructible Podcast #22: Puerto Rico’s Struggle for Independence w/ Margaret Power (LISTEN)

By |31/August/2023|

in the 22nd episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to Margaret Power about her latest book book ‘Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism.’

Indestructible: Latin America with Rodrigo Acuña is a podcast from Alborada bringing you monthly discussions with some of the most interesting voices working on and from Latin America.

In the 22nd episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to Margaret Power about her latest book book ‘Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism.’

Margaret Power is professor emerita of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the USA.

The podcast is available on Spotify and other podcast streaming website.

Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

::: Episode 22:

Puerto Rico’s Struggle for Independence. With Margaret Power

Listen to episode 22 below or on Audioboom and a range of other podcast streaming websites

Click here to go to the Indestructible homepage.

Presented by Alborada contributing editor Rodrigo Acuña

Produced by Pablo Navarrete

Music by Chylez Productions.

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Get in touch with the podcast: info [at] alborada [dot] net

 

Indestructible Podcast #22: Puerto Rico’s Struggle for Independence w/ Margaret Power (LISTEN)

By |31/August/2023|

in the 22nd episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to Margaret Power about her latest book book ‘Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism.’

Indestructible: Latin America with Rodrigo Acuña is a podcast from Alborada bringing you monthly discussions with some of the most interesting voices working on and from Latin America.

In the 22nd episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to Margaret Power about her latest book book ‘Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism.’

Margaret Power is professor emerita of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the USA.

The podcast is available on Spotify and other podcast streaming website.

Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

::: Episode 22:

Puerto Rico’s Struggle for Independence. With Margaret Power

Listen to episode 22 below or on Audioboom and a range of other podcast streaming websites

Click here to go to the Indestructible homepage.

Presented by Alborada contributing editor Rodrigo Acuña

Produced by Pablo Navarrete

Music by Chylez Productions.

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Get in touch with the podcast: info [at] alborada [dot] net

 

Latin American News Roundup #1

By |2/September/2023|

News in brief from around Latin America.

Here is a roundup of recent news stories from Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia.

Progressive candidate elected to Guatemalan presidency in surprise result

There has been a major political shift in Guatemala with the victory of progressive candidate Bernardo Arevalo in the presidential election on 20 August. A rank outsider until barely two months earlier, Arevalo roused voters tired of the inequality, corruption and autocracy entrenched under Guatemala’s business and political elite. His Semilla party won 17 of the country’s 22 regional departments, an astounding performance, on a platform of respect for democracy, indigenous rights and social investment. However, right-wing opponents tied to the traditional oligarchy have turned to the courts in an attempt to block Arevalo’s ascension, while the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights warned of an assassination plot against the president-elect. Read more here.

Progressive Luisa González and millionaire Daniel Noboa head to runoff elections in Ecuador

Via Globetrotter

On 20 August, over 13 million Ecuadorians took part in the early general elections to elect the country’s next president, vice president and 137 members of the National Assembly amid a wave of violence and record rates of homicide.

After 60 per cent of the votes had been counted, at around 9pm on 20 August, president of the National Electoral Council Diana Atamaint gave a public address and confirmed that Ecuadorians would return to the polls for a runoff election on 15 October, since no candidate hit the threshold to win outright.

Luisa González of the left-wing Citizen Revolution Movement party won this first round of elections with 33 per cent of the vote, while Daniel Noboa of the right-wing National Democratic Action alliance trailed behind her with 24 per cent. Both candidates will now head to the second round in October.

The key concerns among voters as they headed to the polls on 20 August were sharp increases in crime, which the government of incumbent conservative president Guillermo Lasso blames on drug-trafficking gangs, and the struggling economy, which has caused a rise in unemployment and migration.

González, a protégé of former leftist president Rafael Correa, has promised to address the security crisis by strengthening the institutions and entities in charge of managing security, which she alleges Lasso and ex-president Lenín Moreno dismantled. She also promised to address the root causes of violence, such as poverty and inequality. She has vowed to increase public spending and revive Correa’s large-scale social welfare programmes and public infrastructure projects.

Musician Lisandro Vallecilla Riascos killed during Colombian music festival

Cali’s famous Petronio Alvarez festival was marred by tragedy on 20 August when musician Lisandro Vallecilla Riascos a member of the internationally renowned Pacific folklore group Canelón de Timbiquí, was killed in a shooting. From the coastal region of Guapi, Canelón de Timbiquí blend traditional African-Colombian rhythms with socially conscious messaging (read this review from 2012 by Alborada co-editor Nick MacWilliam). Lisandro was a well-known community organiser whose death adds to the shocking figure of more than 1,500 social activists killed in Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement.

The Americas Uncovered: Chile’s Chicago Boys (LISTEN)

By |14/August/2023|

In episode seven of our podcast The Americas Uncovered, host Dr Peter Watt of Sheffield University in the UK, speaks to Maria Vásquez Aguilar and Pablo Navarrete following an in-person screening of the documentary, The Chicago Boys.

Maria Vásquez Aguilar is a PhD candidate at te University of Sheffield, a child exile and co-founder of Chile Solidarity Network and Chile 50 Years UK.

Pablo Navarrete is the founding editor of Alborada and director of Alborada Films.

Click here to go to The Americas Uncovered homepage.

Presented by Dr Peter Watt (University of Sheffield, UK)

Music by Peter Watt

Artwork by Simon Díaz-Cuffin

Listen to the podcast here or below.

Cuba Reaffirms Socialism while It Reckons with Its Private Sector

By |1/August/2023|

Amid the challenges of a global economy marked by crisis, Cuba strives to maintain its socialist project, meet the needs of its people and assert its independence.

Seventy years have passed since Fidel Castro and a daring group of young Cubans launched an assault on the Moncada Barracks in eastern Cuba, aiming to topple the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. Despite the military failure of that attempt, it served as the catalyst for the revolution that has now held power in Cuba for more than 63 years. Today, a new generation of revolutionaries is grappling with the challenges of meeting the needs of the Cuban people while fostering a socialist project within a global economy marked by crisis. They are doing all this under an intense campaign of maximum pressure from the Biden administration.

The United States’ agenda of global hegemony has continually clashed with Cuba’s pursuit of independence and sovereignty and more intensely since the revolution’s victory in 1959. The Kennedy administration initiated a blockade against Cuba in 1962, launching a relentless campaign of starvation and deprivation against the island’s 11 million inhabitants. However, despite enduring the longest embargo in modern history, Cubans have managed to build world-renowned public education and health systems, as well as an innovative biotech industry, and have secured a higher quality of life for its citizens than many developing countries.

Yet the US has intensified its blockade against Cuba over the past six years, starting with former president Donald Trump who implemented 243 new sanctions, reversing the normalisation process initiated by former president Barack Obama in 2014. Despite campaign promises of a more balanced approach toward Cuba, President Joe Biden has amplified pressure on the nation.

In 2017, the US accused the Cuban government of deploying sonic attacks against its embassy officials, a claim that was later proven false. However, this accusation served as a pretext to freeze relations with Cuba, causing a collapse in tourism and leading to revenue loss as more than 600,000 annual US visitors ceased their travels to the island. Under Trump’s sanctions, Western Union halted operations in Cuba in 2020, disrupting remittances. Visa services were suspended by the US embassy in Havana in 2017, sparking the largest wave of irregular migration since 1980.

Cuba’s economy has suffered under this extensive blockade, with the country’s GDP shrinking to a staggering 15 per cent in 2019 and 11 per cent in 2020 as the government and other entities found themselves unable to purchase basic necessities due to banking restrictions imposed because of the blockade. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Cuba’s robust healthcare system was pressured by the sanctions as the number of Delta variant cases surged and the country’s only oxygen plant was rendered non-operational due to its inability to import spare parts. Even as Cuban patients struggled to breathe, Washington refused to make exceptions, only offering US-made vaccines after most Cubans had been vaccinated with domestically developed vaccines.

In his last

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The Battle for Colombia

By |20/July/2023|

Gustavo Petro’s government ends its first year in office attempting to balance the demands of the social movements that propelled it to power with those of a political class that retains legislative sway.

In Cali, memory lines the walls. Colombia’s third-largest city is adorned with murals depicting the estallido social: the immense protests that shook Colombia from April to June 2021, sparked by crushing social conditions and met with fierce state repression. Five-metre paintings of young people killed by police overlook congested highways, signalling residents’ refusal to forget the crimes committed under the authoritarian regime of Iván Duque. This year, on the second anniversary of the uprising, the city’s puntos de resistencia (or ‘resistance points’) were reimagined. New works of street art went up, while communal meals and musical performances brought together those affected by the events: the parents of activists killed in the crackdown, protesters left with life-changing injuries. ‘The police didn’t like us meeting like this before’, said one graffiti artist, spray can in hand. ‘But since the election, they tend to leave us alone.’

In June 2022, the revolt against Duque culminated in the election of Colombia’s first progressive government, headed by President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez. The last time a leftist made a serious bid for the presidency was in 1948, when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s likely victory was thwarted by his assassination. Since then, the country’s peasant and indigenous populations have been excluded from its political institutions – dominated by the interests of agribusiness and extractivism, propped up by Washington with the aid of right-wing paramilitary groups.

Colombian GDP is around the Latin American average, yet inequality levels are among the highest in the region. For decades, peasant, Indigenous and African-Colombian populations have been forcibly displaced to facilitate increased land concentration. As the extractive economy spread from the 1980s onward – along with ranching, intensive agriculture and cocaine production – paramilitaries cleared swathes of the countryside of their inhabitants. Under the right-wing presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002-10), the landowning oligarchy, accounting for only a tiny fraction of total landowners, increased its holdings from 47% of agricultural land to 68%, while 80% of peasant farmers lived in poverty. The urban working class suffered low wages and job instability, its capacity to organize for improved conditions fatally weakened by systematic violence against trade union leaders and community activists. During Duque’s tenure, 42% of the population were impoverished, thanks to a combination of hyper-neoliberal policies and mismanagement of the pandemic.

Such asymmetries are partly a result of Colombia’s rigged political system. In 1958, the two parties of the ruling elite, the Liberals and Conservatives, agreed that power would rotate between them as part of a National Front arrangement. This antidemocratic duopoly was contested by the guerrilla movements that emerged in the wake of the Cuban Revolution: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), which aimed to defend peasants against state violence and establish a new national settlement based on popular participation and anti-imperialism. The FARC, in particular, found

In Chile, Having a Good Constitution Doesn’t Guarantee Social Change

By |17/July/2023|

A conversation with Bárbara Navarrete, secretary-general of the Communist Youth of Chile.

‘We are a generation totally interested in taking power,’ says Bárbara Navarrete, the new secretary-general of the Communist Youth of Chile. This generation came of age with examples such as Gabriel Boric, Chile’s president, who is only 37 years old, and Camila Vallejo, the president’s chief of staff, who is only 35. By constantly engaging in the political arena and reaching the highest levels of the government, people like Boric and Camila—as they are known—’push us to get involved, to take sides,’ Navarrete says. Fifty years after the coup that devastated Chile, people like Navarrete oscillate between hope in a government led by former student leaders (such as Boric and Camila) and devastation at the defeat of a new constitution in 2022. They also have to contend with the rise of the right wing, which now holds offices in the legislature, including the presidency of the Senate.

Navarrete’s own story is an example of, in her words, ‘the crossroads of experiences that affect this new generation in their way of doing politics.’ Her family directly experienced the consequences of the dictatorship in a peripheral part of Santiago. Born a few years after the end of the dictatorship, Navarrete learned about politics in the student mobilisations of 2011, while she studied at an important women’s school in the city. For nine months, the students took over the school in protest against Chile’s private education model. Two political tendencies dominated the school – anarchism and communism; Navarrete opted for the latter.

During her time in the student protests, Navarrete says she saw ‘clearly the institutional alienation’ of her generation. They may have grown up after the dictatorship, but they were surrounded by its institutions (including the coup constitution of 1980). ‘We felt,’ she says, ‘a detachment from laws and institutional culture,’ and they were left with a feeling of ‘incomprehension’ toward the institutions’ legitimacy. This resulted, she says, in ‘an overwhelming need to change everything, including the constitution.’

The Results Are Not Random

Enshrining a new constitution for Chile before the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup would have been a major achievement. But the draft constitution – produced with immense democratic input – was defeated in the elections on 4 September 2022. In the aftermath of that election, the government set up a committee of experts to produce a new draft that would be approved by 51 members of a constitutional council (elected by direct vote on 7 May 2023). The rightwing Republican Party won 35.4 per cent of the vote, which gave it 23 constitutional council members. The Communist Party of Chile headed a coalition that won the second-most votes, with 28.6 per cent.

For Navarrete, the victory of the Republican Party ‘is neither a surprise nor an isolated event.’ In the first round of the 2021 presidential elections, the Republican Party’s candidate José Antonio Kast took the lead. ‘The right has polarised the country,’ she said, and it has defined the centre-left government

Indestructible Podcast #21: The Politics of Nicaragua w/ Dan Kovalik (LISTEN/WATCH)

By |5/July/2023|

In the 21st episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to author, lawyer and human rights activist Dan Kovalik about Nicaraguan politics, past and present.

Indestructible: Latin America with Rodrigo Acuña is a podcast from Alborada bringing you monthly discussions with some of the most interesting voices working on and from Latin America.

In the 21st episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to author, lawyer and human rights activist Dan Kovalik about Nicaraguan politics, past and present. Kovalik’s latest book is ‘Nicaragua: A History of U.S. Intervention & Resistance’ and was published earlier this year by Clarity Press.

The podcast is available on Spotify and other podcast streaming website.

Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

::: Episode 21:

The Politics of Nicaragua. With Dan Kovalik

Listen to episode 21 below or on Audioboom and a range of other podcast streaming websites

Watch the episode here or below. 

Click here to go to the Indestructible homepage.

Presented by Alborada contributing editor Rodrigo Acuña

Produced by Pablo Navarrete

Music by Chylez Productions.

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Get in touch with the podcast: info [at] alborada [dot] net

 

The Americas Uncovered: Central American Migration & US Intervention (LISTEN)

By |4/July/2023|

In episode six of our podcast The Americas Uncovered, host Dr Peter Watt of Sheffield University in the UK, speaks to Jorge E. Cuéllar about political resistance in El Salvador, migration from Central America to the US, the Bukele governmentt and Bitcoin.

Jorge E. Cuéllar is Assistant Professor, Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

Presented by Dr Peter Watt (University of Sheffield, UK)

Music by Peter Watt

Artwork by Simon Díaz-Cuffin

Listen to the podcast here or below.

Indestructible Podcast #20: Beyond the Headlines – Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) (LISTEN)

By |25/May/2023|

In the 20th episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to academic Étienne von Bertrab about the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico.

Indestructible: Latin America with Rodrigo Acuña is a podcast from Alborada bringing you monthly discussions with some of the most interesting voices working on and from Latin America.

In the 20th episode of Indestructible Rodrigo speaks to academic Étienne von Bertrab about the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico.

The podcast is available on Spotify and other podcast streaming website.

Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

::: Episode 20:

Beyond the Headlines: Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). With Étienne von Bertrab

Listen to episode 20 on Audioboom and a range of other podcast streaming websites

Listen to the episode here or below. 

Click here to go to the Indestructible homepage.

Presented by Alborada contributing editor Rodrigo Acuña

Produced and edited by Pablo Navarrete

Music by Chylez Productions.

Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Get in touch with the podcast: info [at] alborada [dot] net

 

The Americas Uncovered: Coup (LISTEN)

By |17/May/2023|

Our latest podcast examines the 2019 US-backed overthrow of Evo Morales’ elected government in Bolivia, as Peter Watt speaks to Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker about their book Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia.

In episode five of our podcast The Americas Uncovered, host Dr Peter Watt of Sheffield University in the UK, speaks to Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker about their book, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia. The book dissects the events around the 2019 coup against the government of Evo Morales following his victory in the presidential election.

Linda Farthing is a journalist and independent scholar who works in Bolivia.

Thomas Becker is the Legal and Policy Director and a Senior Clinical Supervisor at the University Network for Human Rights.

Presented by Dr Peter Watt (University of Sheffield, UK)

Music by Peter Watt

Artwork by Simon Díaz-Cuffin

Listen here or below.

Latin America, Mainstream Media Misrepresentation & the Independent Media Fightback (LISTEN)

By |12/May/2023|

Listen to a podcast of our recent ‘Latin America, Mainstream Media Misrepresentation & the Independent Media Fightback’ panel at a Latin America solidarity conference in London.

In London recently for the Latin America Adelante Conference, Alborada organised the panel ‘Latin America, Mainstream Media Misrepresentation & the Independent Media Fightback’.

For more information on the panel including the list of speakers, click here.

Panel recorded by Peter Watt, host of the Alborada podcast The Americas Uncovered.

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Listen to the panel here or below.

 

On May Day, Colombians Mobilise to Defend the Petro Government (WATCH)

By |11/May/2023|

In stark contrast to previous years of anti-government protests, Colombians are now rallying to support their new president — and push his administration to go further.

The popular forces of Colombia have been at odds with the forces of their state for decades. Yet this year on May Day, crowds of people mobilised not in opposition to their government but in support of its labour reforms and efforts to produce a lasting peace.

This video report was originally commissioned and released by The Real News Network.

Swept into power last year in the aftermath of a popular uprising, President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez have prioritised an agenda to reform the country and build power for working people and oppressed groups such as Afro-Colombians and Indigenous peoples. While conservative elements continue to obstruct this agenda from within the state, the new administration is turning to popular mobilisations such as the ones on May Day to sustain momentum. TRNN reports on May Day from Cali, Colombia, one of the cities hit hardest by the crackdown against anti-government protests in 2021 by the previous Ivan Duque administration.

This story, with the support of the Bertha Foundation, is part of The Real News Network’s ‘Workers of the World’ series, telling the stories of workers around the globe building collective power and redefining the future of work on their own terms: https://therealnews.com/workers-of-th…

Producer: Nick MacWilliam
Videographer: Nick MacWilliam
Video editor: Leo Erhardt

We Need the Method of Revolutionary Cinema

By |10/May/2023|

Alborada co-editor Pablo Navarrete recalls the achievements of Third Cinema in Argentina and Cuba for the sake of socialist film-makers today.

In their 1969 manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema, Argentinian film-makers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino defined Third Cinema as “a cinema of liberation” that stood in opposition to the values of the first and second cinemas.

They described first cinema as “the dominant commercial cinema,” in the service of US capitalism and imperialism; second cinema was “the avant-garde and experimental cinema which has been born as an alternative to the dominant one.”

Instead, Third Cinema film-makers sought to create a cinema that was rooted in local cultures and traditions, and that reflected the realities of life for ordinary people.

Often, this involved using non-professional actors and improvisation, as well as incorporating elements of documentary and other forms of non-fiction film-making.

In Argentina, the right-wing Ongania military dictatorship had taken power in June 1966 and the forces of the left had been heavily persecuted, with widespread censorship of media and cultural manifestations such as cinema.

It is in this political context that a year earlier, in June 1968, Solanas and Getino had first shown The Hour of the Furnaces (La Hora de los Hornos), one of the seminal works of the “Cine Liberacion” (Liberation Cinema) wave of revolutionary films from Latin America.

In this four-and-a-half-hour film, the directors had travelled across Argentina, and as a 1970 review of the film in Cineaste magazine points out, “made contact with, discussed with, and eventually filmed most of those who are actively involved (clandestinely as well as openly, outside as well as within the “legal” institutions of Argentina) in the struggle for a revolutionary transformation of Argentine society.”

The documentary’s title was rooted in the region’s colonial and revolutionary past and present.

When the first European “explorers” sailed along the south-eastern coast of South America during the early part of the 16th century, they reported seeing hundreds of cooking fires along the coast of Tierra del Fuego.

The expression “la hora de los hornos” (the hour of the cooking fires) was then regularly used by Latin American poets and historians, and by the time of the film’s release had become an anti-imperialist rallying cry taken up by the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

In calling for a socialist revolution to sweep Latin America, he quoted the 20th century Cuban revolutionary leader Jose Marti and proclaimed: “Now is ‘la hora de los hornos’; let them see nothing but the light of the flames.”

As with “el Che,” Third Cinema also has a symbiotic link to Cuba and its revolution.

Just two months after the January 1959 revolution, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) was created, and it went on to play a crucial role in the development of Third Cinema.

The ICAIC provided a model for collective production and distribution, as well as a source of funding and support for film-makers who might otherwise have struggled to get their work made.

The Cuban experience also demonstrated the power of cinema as a tool for social change and provided a template for other

Photography

Kiev, 26 May 2018

By |27/May/2018|

Liverpool supporters attending the Champions League final carry banners in solidarity with Brazilian former president Lula Da Silva and Catalan political prisoners. Polls show that if Lula ran in this year’s presidential election, he would win by a landslide and restore the Workers’ Party to government.

Video

Chile’s Student Uprising (Documentary)

By |2/April/2020|

Watch this documentary on the student protest movement in Chile in 2011 (Director Roberto Navarrete, 35 mins, Alborada Films, 2014).

Mass student protests took place in Chile between 2011 and 2013 demanding a free and state-funded education system and radical change in society. The documentary puts these protests in their historical context of widespread dissatisfaction with the economic model put in place under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), but that still remains largely in place.

The film’s director travelled to Chile between 2011 and 2013 to speak to then student leaders (now Members of Congress) such as Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, and also to other students, to explore why their protests had caused such effect in Chile and inspired others in the country and beyond.

“Roberto Navarrete’s is the most complete and compelling visual account of Chile’s student uprising to date. All the lessons from Patricio Guzmán’s path-breaking style of documenting in film are there: poetic visuals, an engaged narrative, the focus on personal feelings and stories combined with subtle and accessible analysis, plus a sense of the tragic tempered by the optimism of the will. Navarrete adds to it the passion and distance of the exile’s gaze, and a Latin American Beckettian flare for celebration while thinking. This is a must see for all those interested in the current sway of global rebellions that show us all the shape of things to come. Superb!”

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor in Law, Birbeck, University of London and author of ‘Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11th, 1973’

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Video

Chile’s Student Uprising (Documentary)

By |2/April/2020|

Watch this documentary on the student protest movement in Chile in 2011 (Director Roberto Navarrete, 35 mins, Alborada Films, 2014).

Mass student protests took place in Chile between 2011 and 2013 demanding a free and state-funded education system and radical change in society. The documentary puts these protests in their historical context of widespread dissatisfaction with the economic model put in place under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), but that still remains largely in place.

The film’s director travelled to Chile between 2011 and 2013 to speak to then student leaders (now Members of Congress) such as Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, and also to other students, to explore why their protests had caused such effect in Chile and inspired others in the country and beyond.

“Roberto Navarrete’s is the most complete and compelling visual account of Chile’s student uprising to date. All the lessons from Patricio Guzmán’s path-breaking style of documenting in film are there: poetic visuals, an engaged narrative, the focus on personal feelings and stories combined with subtle and accessible analysis, plus a sense of the tragic tempered by the optimism of the will. Navarrete adds to it the passion and distance of the exile’s gaze, and a Latin American Beckettian flare for celebration while thinking. This is a must see for all those interested in the current sway of global rebellions that show us all the shape of things to come. Superb!”

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor in Law, Birbeck, University of London and author of ‘Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11th, 1973’

Chile’s Student Uprising (Documentary)

By |2/April/2020|

Watch this documentary on the student protest movement in Chile in 2011 (Director Roberto Navarrete, 35 mins, Alborada Films, 2014).

Mass student protests took place in Chile between 2011 and 2013 demanding a free and state-funded education system and radical change in society. The documentary puts these protests in their historical context of widespread dissatisfaction with the economic model put in place under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), but that still remains largely in place.

The film’s director travelled to Chile between 2011 and 2013 to speak to then student leaders (now Members of Congress) such as Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, and also to other students, to explore why their protests had caused such effect in Chile and inspired others in the country and beyond.

“Roberto Navarrete’s is the most complete and compelling visual account of Chile’s student uprising to date. All the lessons from Patricio Guzmán’s path-breaking style of documenting in film are there: poetic visuals, an engaged narrative, the focus on personal feelings and stories combined with subtle and accessible analysis, plus a sense of the tragic tempered by the optimism of the will. Navarrete adds to it the passion and distance of the exile’s gaze, and a Latin American Beckettian flare for celebration while thinking. This is a must see for all those interested in the current sway of global rebellions that show us all the shape of things to come. Superb!”

Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor in Law, Birbeck, University of London and author of ‘Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11th, 1973’