Chile: from ‘Oasis’ to Neoliberal Dystopia
Since massive protests started in October, Chilean police forces have committed widespread human rights violations with impunity, including eye mutilations, torture, arbitrary detentions and sexual abuse.
On 8 October 2019, speaking on the TV programme Mucho Gusto, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera described the country as a ‘real oasis’ and ‘stable democracy’ with a ‘growing economy’. Ten days later, Piñera had fallen into a nightmare: across Chile people were mobilising against his government, not only due to a 30-peso (three pence) rise in public transport fares, but to fight the social inequality and neoliberalism imposed during General Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Piñera chose to answer these demands with repression. During peaceful student protests, Chile’s police force, the carabineros, shot a teenaged girl in her leg, causing profuse bleeding. The resulting Pandora’s Box exposed the carefully-constructed lie repeated in Piñera’s Mucho Gusto address: the reality is Chile is Heaven for a few but Hell for many. When Piñera implemented a State of Emergency on 19 October, in an attempt to contain the protests, it became clear that Chile had neither a stable democracy nor a growing economy.
After a week of mass mobilisations that set the country on fire, Piñera called for a ‘return to normality’, as TV coverage of the protests faded and daily routines gradually began to reappear. Nevertheless, this raises the question: what was ‘normal’ in Chile before 18 October?
Although local and international organisations – including the United Nations – released four lapidary reports condemning human rights violations in Chile and called on the government to confront the escalation of abuses committed by carabineros, Piñera turned a deaf ear. Instead, he implemented a series of measures to strengthen repression, including a law against hood-wearing and an anti-barricade project.
Human rights violations in so-called ‘democratic’ times are not a novelty in Chile. On 14 November 2018, people took to the streets to protest the police killing of an indigenous Mapuche farmer, Camilo Catrillanca. One month earlier, the secretary of a fishing union, Alejandro Castro, was found dead in the port city of Valparaíso. While mass media reported that Castro had committed suicide, there was strong suspicion of state responsibility.
Unfortunately, the deaths of Castro and Catrillanca are not isolated cases. Similar characteristics can be identified in, among others, the killing of Mapuche activists Macarena Valdés in 2016 and Matías Catrileo in 2008. Human rights violations in Chile, especially against state opponents, are often covered up with the tacit support of mass media.
Furthermore, the fact that people go to protests with lemons, bicarbonate water and gloves to resist the effects of teargas reflects the naturalisation of police violence. Beyond the use of teargas, carabineros habitually engage protesters with water cannon trucks, rubber bullets and physical aggression. Since 18 October 2019, state violence has intensified, with police employing the particularly disturbing tactic of firing rubber bullets and teargas at people’s heads.
Other violations documented by the National Institute of Human Rights (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, INDH) include arbitrary detentions, sexual abuses during detention,
Chile: from ‘Oasis’ to Neoliberal Dystopia
Since massive protests started in October, Chilean police forces have committed widespread human rights violations with impunity, including eye mutilations, torture, arbitrary detentions and sexual abuse.
On 8 October 2019, speaking on the TV programme Mucho Gusto, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera described the country as a ‘real oasis’ and ‘stable democracy’ with a ‘growing economy’. Ten days later, Piñera had fallen into a nightmare: across Chile people were mobilising against his government, not only due to a 30-peso (three pence) rise in public transport fares, but to fight the social inequality and neoliberalism imposed during General Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Piñera chose to answer these demands with repression. During peaceful student protests, Chile’s police force, the carabineros, shot a teenaged girl in her leg, causing profuse bleeding. The resulting Pandora’s Box exposed the carefully-constructed lie repeated in Piñera’s Mucho Gusto address: the reality is Chile is Heaven for a few but Hell for many. When Piñera implemented a State of Emergency on 19 October, in an attempt to contain the protests, it became clear that Chile had neither a stable democracy nor a growing economy.
After a week of mass mobilisations that set the country on fire, Piñera called for a ‘return to normality’, as TV coverage of the protests faded and daily routines gradually began to reappear. Nevertheless, this raises the question: what was ‘normal’ in Chile before 18 October?
Although local and international organisations – including the United Nations – released four lapidary reports condemning human rights violations in Chile and called on the government to confront the escalation of abuses committed by carabineros, Piñera turned a deaf ear. Instead, he implemented a series of measures to strengthen repression, including a law against hood-wearing and an anti-barricade project.
Human rights violations in so-called ‘democratic’ times are not a novelty in Chile. On 14 November 2018, people took to the streets to protest the police killing of an indigenous Mapuche farmer, Camilo Catrillanca. One month earlier, the secretary of a fishing union, Alejandro Castro, was found dead in the port city of Valparaíso. While mass media reported that Castro had committed suicide, there was strong suspicion of state responsibility.
Unfortunately, the deaths of Castro and Catrillanca are not isolated cases. Similar characteristics can be identified in, among others, the killing of Mapuche activists Macarena Valdés in 2016 and Matías Catrileo in 2008. Human rights violations in Chile, especially against state opponents, are often covered up with the tacit support of mass media.
Furthermore, the fact that people go to protests with lemons, bicarbonate water and gloves to resist the effects of teargas reflects the naturalisation of police violence. Beyond the use of teargas, carabineros habitually engage protesters with water cannon trucks, rubber bullets and physical aggression. Since 18 October 2019, state violence has intensified, with police employing the particularly disturbing tactic of firing rubber bullets and teargas at people’s heads.
Other violations documented by the National Institute of Human Rights (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, INDH) include arbitrary detentions, sexual abuses during detention,
Lula Free in Brazil
As Lula is released from prison in Brazil, mainstream media ignore how Washington helped put him there.
The Brazilian Supreme Court reversed a 2018 ruling on 7 November, upholding the principle of innocent until proven guilty in the 1988 Constitution and declaring it illegal to jail defendants before their appeals processes have been exhausted. Within 24 hours, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was released to an adoring crowd of hundreds of union members and social movement activists who had maintained a camp outside the police station where he was held, shouting ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon’ and ‘good night’ to him for 580 consecutive days.
The Supreme Court had previously ruled, on 5 April 2018 – after a threat from Brazilian General Eduardo Villas Bôas – that defendants could be preemptively jailed before their appeals processes played out. Directly afterwards, Judge Sérgio Moro pressed for an immediate election-year arrest warrant for the Workers’ Party founder at a moment when he was widely leading in all polls. (The far-right candidate who won in the wake of Lula’s removal from the race, Jair Bolsonaro, went on to name Moro his ‘Super Justice Minister.’)
Lula’s arrest came as part of a wide-ranging international investigation, ostensibly aimed at corruption, called Lava Jato (Car Wash), which involved the US Justice Department, US Security and Exchange Commission and Swiss federal police, working with Judge Moro and a public prosecutor team based in the conservative Brazilian city of Curitiba. The only charge that prosecutors had been able to stick on Lula was that he had committed ‘indeterminate acts of corruption’.
At the time, the Anglo media ignored US involvement in the investigation, built Moro up as a superhero, and failed to provide any kind of critical analysis of the proceedings against Lula, despite complaints from some of the world’s leading legal scholars and human rights activists that the former president was victim of a politically-motivated kangaroo court proceeding designed to remove him from the presidential elections.
There was no material evidence linking Lula to any crime. His conviction was based on coerced plea bargain testimony by a single convicted criminal named Leo Pinheiro, director of the OAS construction company, which built the building where an apartment that featured in Lula’s case was located. Sentenced to ten years and eight months for paying bribes to Petrobras Petroleum company, Pinheiro originally testified that Lula had not committed any crime, then changed his story twice, implicating Lula before having his sentence reduced to two years and six months. His third and final story stated that Lula had received free renovations on the beach-side apartment in exchange for political favours.
73 witnesses, including executives from the OAS company, testified that neither Lula nor anyone from his family had ever owned or lived in the apartment. Furthermore, a judge in Brasilia determined in January 2018, as part of a different case, that the vacant apartment still belonged to OAS. The prosecutors were unable to prove that the renovations had ever actually taken place. Although Sérgio Moro had barred the press from visiting the
Colombian Defence Minister Resigns over Army Abuses
A series of human rights scandals involving the Colombian military have severely damaged Iván Duque’s rightwing government, with defence minister Guillermo Botero forced to resign as a result.
Colombia’s defence minister, Guillermo Botero, was forced to stand down on 6 November following a string of human rights scandals involving the military. It followed attempts in the Colombian senate to sanction Botero over a military raid in August that killed at least eight children.
Botero was appointed to the role of defence minister in Iván Duque’s inaugural cabinet in August 2018. Since then, however, several high-profile cases have made his position untenable. With pressure increasing on President Duque, and with Botero facing a motion of censure that he was likely to lose, the Defence Minister was forced to resign.
Duque has faced intense criticism from opposition parties, trade unions and human rights organisations over his government’s failure to tackle chronic insecurity across the country which, according to Colombian human rights organisations, has seen more than 200 social activists killed since he took office fifteen months ago. Controversies around the military have further eroded public trust in the government’s commitment to protecting human rights.
Among the cases which made Botero’s position untenable is the army extrajudicial killing of FARC former combatant Dimar Torres, who was deliberately targeted and killed on 22 April. Dimar Torres was working on reincorporation programmes for FARC members when he was murdered. Initially, Botero falsely claimed he had tried to grab a soldier’s gun, as footage recorded by local community members on their phones showed soldiers attempting to cover up the crime by disposing of Dimar’s body.
The military’s conduct was called into further question in May, when the New York Times revealed that senior army officials had ordered soldiers to double the number of militants killed or captured, with standards of engagement lowered to help improve performance figures. This raised major fears of potential new extrajudicial killings and sparked a backlash from human rights and victims organisations.
This exacerbated the existing controversy over Duque’s appointment of General Nicasio Martínez Espinel, strongly accused of overseeing previous human rights abuses, to head of the armed forces. Between 2004 and 2006, under the hardline government of Duque’s mentor Álvaro Uribe, Martínez Espinel was second-in-command of the Tenth Battalion, which is suspected of committing scores of extrajudicial executions. Many victims were dressed in guerrilla uniforms and presented as ‘combat kills’. More than 2,000 of these so-called ‘False Positive’ army killings of civilians committed between 1988 and 2014, the majority during Uribe’s two terms as president, are currently under investigation by truth and justice tribunals established in the 2016 peace agreement. It was General Martínez Espinel who was behind the directives exposed by the New York Times.
In September, Duque suffered a major embarrassment over a report he presented to the United Nations which pertained to contain photographic evidence that Venezuela’s government was harbouring Colombian guerrillas. While the report claimed to show guerrilla camps in Tachira in Venezuela, a Colombian newspaper quickly revealed that the
Bolivia in Crisis
Bolivia has been besieged by two weeks of violence and disturbances as the rightwing opposition seeks to overturn the election result of 27 October that saw Evo Morales returned to office.
Bolivia is embroiled in one of the worst political crises of the past decade. Following the presidential elections on 20 October, the country has been paralysed by road blockades and marches, while protests in cities across the country by opposition and pro-government forces has led to three deaths amid outbreaks of street violence. On Friday, police forces in cities across the country left their posts in mutiny against the government. The sound of exploding cuetillos, or firecrackers, rings out daily in La Paz. Opposition groups cry fraud; Morales has described the strikes and blockades as an attempted coup d’etat.
Two weeks ago, President Evo Morales triumphed over his rival Carlos Mesa, of the Citizen Community (Comunidad Ciudadana) party by a narrow ten-point margin in the presidential election. Morales obtained 47.08 per cent of the vote and Mesa 36.51 per cent. Under Bolivian electoral law, to win the presidency outright, a candidate must achieve at least 50 per cent of the vote, or a ten-point lead over the closest rival.
Opposition groups accuse the president of fraud but no independently-verified evidence has yet been produced to support this. These accusations of fraud preceded the election but intensified when the ‘rapid count’ system known as the Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results (TREP) ceased counting at 83 per cent of the total vote. The TREP is used by the electoral authority, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), to publicise an approximate vote count ahead of the official result. However, that the TREP stopped counting before 100 per cent is not a sign of fraudulent activity: in 2016, it stopped counting when it reached 85 per cent, for example.
After a pause in counting, Morales appeared to take the lead over Mesa where previously he was behind. This was not wholly surprising, however, because around 10 per cent of the uncounted votes were from rural areas which tend to come out strongly for the MAS. There is currently no evidence to suggest that the election was not conducted under fair and free terms.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released a report on Friday which found no evidence that irregularities or fraud affected the official result that gave Morales a first-round victory. International observers were present during the election and, at the government’s invitation, the vote is being audited by the Organization of American States (OAS). It should also be noted that polls consistently predicted a victory for Morales over Mesa in the run-up to the election.
Yet, worryingly, the aftermath of the election has seen the resurgence of darker expressions of racial hatred and social polarisation, as political and institutional conflicts appear to coalesce with deep-rooted ethno-racial tensions. Graffiti was daubed outside the Universidad Mayor de San Andres (UMSA), the public university in La Paz, demanding ‘Indians out of UMSA’. According to social
Queremos Denunciar un Golpe Cívico y Religioso en Bolivia
Después de las elecciones han habido conflictos. Son 15 días de paro porque se ha planteado que ha habido un fraude. No han aceptado ni la oposición ni los grupos de derecha una segunda vuelta, no han aceptado la auditoría que en este momento está realizando la ONU.
Buenas tardes compañeras soy Adriana Guzmán Arroyo del feminismo comunitario antipatriarcal de Bolivia para comentarles lo que está pasando aquí en Bolivia. Ustedes saben que después de las elecciones han habido conflictos, son 15 días de paro porque se ha planteado que ha habido un fraude. No han aceptado ni la oposición ni los grupos de derecha una segunda vuelta, no han aceptado la auditoría que en este momento está realizando la ONU.
Nosotras queremos denunciar un golpe cívico, cívico y religioso porque finalmente quienes están organizando, encabezando este golpe de Estado son los comités cívicos que son organizaciones grupos fascistas, grupos racistas que han financiado, grupos armados el 2008 y que hoy han reaparecido estos grupos armados y son esos grupos que están en las calles de diferentes departamentos del país, en los barrios aterrorizando con escudos y con palos, con cascos y están armados, seguramente financiados. Hay represión en la calle por nuestra cara, hay represión a las mujeres a los hombres indígenas han habido enfrentamientos a partir de estos ataques racistas. Finalmente los militantes del MAS, organizaciones sociales han salido a las calles a marchar y han tenido que defenderse frente a estas agresiones y a esta violencia racista.
Los heridos de organizaciones sociales que principalmente son heridos de los ayllus indígenas de Potosí no quieren ser atendidos en los hospitales. Los médicos están con estos grupos que se han autodenominado en defensa de la democracia. Con estos comités cívicos entonces han cerrado los hospitales para todos los que tienen cara de masistas, es decir para todos quienes somos mujeres y hombres originarios. Hay autoridades que vienen de las organizaciones sociales que han sido secuestrados, que los han detenido en la calle los han hecho arrodillarse, los han humillado los han golpeado y ahora están secuestrados. Hay autoridades de organizaciones sociales dirigentes representantes de organizaciones sociales que han sido golpeados que también se desconoce su paradero y finalmente les informamos esto para convocarlos a pensar con nosotras cuáles pueden ser las salidas. Porque lo que vemos es un golpe desorganizado también porque no hay una cabeza se están peleando la cabeza de este golpe de Estado. Las organizaciones sociales hemos hecho este proceso de cambio y más allá de defender a Evo Morales o de defender la presidencia estamos saliendo en defensa de lo que es este proceso. Si no hubiera habido este proceso no podríamos ni siquiera nombrar ni reconocer el racismo, el fascismo, la explotación. Entendemos que hay muchos cuestionamientos al gobierno ustedes saben que nosotras también lo hemos hecho, que no se ha acabado con las políticas extractivistas. Que no se ha acabado con la matriz capitalista económica del país. Que no se han acabado con contratos con las
The Chilean Spring (Part Three): How the Elite Tricked Us All
The last in our three-part series demonstrates the scale of corporate corruption that has driven public opposition to an economic model designed to benefit the country’s elite at everybody else’s expense.
Aside from the privatisation of public services during the dictatorship, Chileans have also had enough of being tricked by the country’s elite. There are myriad examples which go beyond the left/right political dichotomy.
All the cases below took place under governments which followed the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and entail tax avoidance, embezzlement, bribes, collusion and lobbying scandals. I will lay out the most relevant cases and include the amount avoided/stolen/bribed in chronological order; the full list is significantly longer than this. This information highlights how Chileans’ present discontent has been accumulating for decades.
Fraud against the State of Chile
Total Fraud: US$477 million
It’s important to note that the punishment for these fraudulent practices is derisory. For example, both directors of Penta Bank, Carlos Alberto Délano and Carlos Eugenio Lavín, had to pay a fine, spend a few days in a special prison for economic crimes and attend mandatory ethics classes. This clearly angered many Chileans, who were given a stark example of how crime and punishment are highly dependent on one’s income status and/or place in Chilean society.
In the case of Milico Gate, high-ranking members of the Chilean military were spending obscene amounts of public funds on alcohol and gambling. One of the most appalling figures was the more than US$3 million spent at Monticello Casino between 2008 and 2014 by Corporal Juan Carlos Cruz.
Apart from these fraudulent acts against the Chilean State where both private citizens and public workers – including those in the armed forces – defrauded the population, there are even more problems when examining the illegal practices of private conglomerates. These crimes also go mostly unpunished: executives may be required to pay a fine but easily skip prison. Some of the most outrageous cases are outlined below:
Illegal practices of corporations
These cases demonstrate the extent of tax avoidance among Chile’s economic elite and the light sanctions incurred, if at all. In all of these cases, the victims are mostly lower-income workers, as they are the principal market at the Johnson’s, Hites and La Polar department store chains. These fraud cases were not mistakes but a premeditated attempt to further squeeze the already-battered working class in Chile.
Broadly, the current unrest in Chile has deep roots in a) the legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship and the privatisation of public services, b) unpunished fraud against the state and c) abuses by private companies which collude in order to make more profits from essential items such as toilet roll or medicines.
The price increase of 30 Chilean pesos in Santiago’s metro fare was the last straw. Following President Piñera’s decision to send the army onto the streets to repress protest, there has been an awakening in Chilean society, where the country’s widespread abuses and injustices have produced a mass movement to change not only several laws, but the whole
The Chilean Spring (Part Two): It’s Thirty Years, not Thirty Pesos
The second in a three-part series explains how the current protests in Chile are rooted in decades of neoliberal programmes which funnelled wealth to a small elite at the expense of millions of ordinary people.
Major news outlets seem to suggest that the current situation in Chile is based solely on the thirty-peso price hike in the underground fare. This, however, is far from the truth. While many people – especially secondary students – found the measure incredibly unfair and started fare-dodging in protest, the underlying issues now facing Chilean citizens go back more than thirty years to the genesis of neoliberal reforms which reshaped the country into what it is today.
Following the 1973 coup, the Pinochet regime started implementing a neoliberal agenda. A group of economists trained under the tutelage of Milton Friedman at the Chicago School of Economics – known as The Chicago Boys – developed a programme to implement reform in Chile. Many of the Chicago Boys held high positions in the regime: this allowed the swift imposition of neoliberal policies on a populace shocked into submission by curfew and the unleashing of military force.
Prominent members of the Chicago Boys included Sergio de Castro, who was Pinochet’s Minister of Finance between 1975 and 1977; José Piñera – brother to current president Sebastián Piñera – who was Minister of Work and Pensions between 1978 and 1980 and the mastermind behind the privatised pension system; and Christian Larroulet, who served as Minister Secretary-General of the Presidency during Piñera’s first administration (2010-2014).
The rhetoric behind economic changes imposed during the dictatorship depicted Chile as a dying patient in need of treatment. The way to pursue neoliberalisation was straightforward, as David Harvey writes: ‘They reversed the nationalization and privatized public assets, opened up natural resources (fisheries, timber, etc.) to unregulated exploitation (in many cases riding roughshod over the claims of indigenous inhabitants), privatized social security, and facilitated foreign direct investment and freer trade. The right of foreign companies to repatriate profits from their Chilean operations was guaranteed.’ Indeed, the most radical process of privatisation in the contemporary world took place in Chile between 1985 and 1989, as Chilean analyst María Olivia Monckeberg describes.
For the average Chilean, this process took place very quickly and in a way that was hard to fathom. Thousands of people were imprisoned, while many others were disappeared. Most Chileans existed in a climate of fear that shrouded what was really taking place behind the dark curtain: the neoliberalisation of the country. Those who benefitted from the looting of former state-owned companies and services were the same groups which today perceive the military and the police as armed guards whose duty is to protect ruling interests.
Neoliberalism – and the subsequent rewards it brought to a select few – was imposed on the backs of millions of Chileans who are now demanding a fairer country. In her groundbreaking 2001 book, El saqueo de los grupos económicos al Estado chileno (The Pillage of the Chilean State by Economic Groups), Monckeberg writes ‘those
Bolivia Elections: No Evidence of Fraud
The OAS and opposition’s baseless allegations of electoral fraud ahead of Evo Morales’ probable victory in Bolivia are dangerously destabilising the country.
According to preliminary results, Bolivian President Evo Morales is within one per cent of winning a fourth presidential term in the first round of voting. However, dramatic violence across the country amid accusations of fraud indicates that opposition forces will not easily swallow a victory for Morales and his Movement towards Socialism party (Movimiento al socialismo, MAS).
As of the morning of Wednesday 23 October, Bolivia’s electoral authority released figures which show that Evo Morales had won 46.03 per cent of the vote, compared with 37.35 per cent for his rightwing rival Carlos Mesa of the Citizen Community party (Comunidad Ciudadana).
This put Morales at just under ten points ahead of Mesa, meaning he would face a second-round run-off vote in mid-December against his opposition challengers. In Bolivia, to win outright a candidate must secure at least 50 per cent of the vote, or a ten-point margin over the second-place candidate.
However, with four per cent of votes left to be counted, it is perfectly possible that Morales could scoop the crucial one per cent to avoid a second round. Counting was suspended in two areas due to violent clashes on Monday night.
The accusations of fraud started on Sunday evening when the ‘rapid count’ system known as the Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results (TREP) ceased counting at 83 per cent of the total vote. The TREP is used by the electoral authority, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), to publicise an approximate vote count ahead of the official result. The Vice President of the TSE has since resigned.
The opposition and numerous corporate media journalists were quick to declare foul play and Mesa swiftly called for national mobilisations to protest the figures. This unleashed a wave of violence on Monday evening. Opposition protectors reacted with fury, burning the regional headquarters of the electoral authorities in Tarija and Chuquisaca. In the capital city, La Paz, tear gas filled the streets as protests turned increasingly violent. The opposition-supporting rector of the La Paz University, UMSA, was pictured on social media with blood streaming down his face after a confrontation. Mesa has declared that he will not concede victory.
At a press conference at the Casa Grande del Pueblo on Wednesday, Morales declared ‘a coup d’état is in progress, although I want to tell you that we already knew it before. The right has been prepared with international support for a coup d’état.’
The Organisation of American States (OAS) which has monitored the election, released a statement on Monday condemning the circumstances surrounding the suspension of the TREP. This statement was roundly condemned by Mark Weisbrot, the C0-Director of Washington DC-based think tank the Centre for Economic Policy Reform (CEPR) for lacking evidence and causing political destabilisation.
Questions should be asked as to the timing and motivations behind the OAS statement. The TREP does not represent the official vote count and by implying irregularity without supplying evidence,
The Chilean Spring (Part One): Tip of the Iceberg
In the first in a three-part series, we address the main issues behind Chile’s current unrest and the rightwing government’s disproportionate response.
On 13 October, Chile’s Transport Ministry announced that the Santiago underground fare would rise by 30 Chilean pesos, the equivalent of three pence sterling. This may seem a small amount to people in Britain or the US, but for a Chilean worker, whose average salary is under £350 a month, it means yet another burden. Commuters in Santiago spend around £50 a month on transport. Imagine having to feed a family and pay numerous bills on that salary.
In response to the rise, school students started organising fare-dodging acts all over the city during different times of the day. Soon, adults and other students joined them. The Minister of Economy, Juan Andrés Fontaine, indicated live on TV that workers should get up earlier to catch public transport when the fare is lower. His unwise comment came after a series of similar declarations by different government figures, such as suggesting people do not protest when the price of tomatoes or bread go up.
Instead of trying to appease the angry masses that joined fare-dodging demonstrations, Piñera’s office decided to deploy the police who, instead of protecting people, behaved like hired guards looking after private property. On 18 October, Transport Minister Gloria Hutt declared that fares would not go down and that the government was not evaluating ways to resolve the public discontent. The government’s overall rhetoric implied that people dodging fares were delinquents.
After the protests intensified, President Sebastián Piñera invoked the ‘Ley de Seguridad del Estado’ (State Security Law), under which anyone who commits public disorder or acts of vandalism can be charged with acts of terrorism. This clearly was disproportionate and further enflamed the situation. Some people had destroyed ticket machines to ensure every passenger could travel freely. Metro bosses decided to close the service in the face of ongoing clashes between police and protesters at underground stations.
On 17 October, the Union of Metro Workers announced it supported the protests. The union’s president, Erick Campos, said ‘the main issue is the fare increase. One can or cannot share different forms of protest, but we share the legitimacy of the demands against price increases in our public transport system. This is a moment where the government needs to remove police officers from the stations and open dialogue with workers and students’. In another important point, Campos added ‘the successive price hikes during the last two years respond to Minister Hutt’s whims and because of her bad decisions the fare increases are being paid for by students’ parents who, very rightly, protest today because they see that their salaries are not good enough to make ends meet’.
As the Metro closed its doors and workers had to find alternative routes home, it became clear that the discontent was not only related to rising transport costs. In fact, the fare increase was just the tip of the iceberg. Piñera’s vilification of the
Chile’s Piñera Government Violently Represses Student-Led Protests, Declares State of Emergency
Chilean president Sebastian Piñera announced a state of emergency in two provinces of the country this Friday, following student-led protests which have paralysed the metro system in the capital Santiago.
Chilean president Sebastian Piñera announced a state of emergency in two provinces of the country this Friday, following student-led protests which have paralysed the metro system in the capital Santiago.
The protests began when secondary school students began to jump entry barriers to the metro following a fare rise on 6 October, which put Santiago’s metro among the most expensive in Latin America at 830 pesos (US$1.17) during peak travel times. Bus prices also climbed as part of the changes. The minimum wage in Chile is 301,000 pesos per month ($421).
Watch a video of the students here.
The protests have grown and are now seen to represent opposition to a number of social injustices present in Chile today such as government corruption and the high cost of living. Friday evening saw the widespread banging of pots and pans on balconies, a traditional protest in Latin America known as a cacerolazo.
The government’s response to the protests has been increasingly repressive. Train carriages on the metro that included children have been tear gassed and videos circulated widely on social media yesterday showed the police shooting at protestors.
The state of emergency is mandated by Chile’s constitution, which was created under the 17 year-long US-supported dictatorship of August Pinochet (1973-1990). During this time hundreds of thousands of people were murdered or disappeared, tortured and forced into exile. The president’s brother was a minister for Labour under Pinochet although Sebastián Piñera claims he voted against the dictatorship continuing in a 1988 plebiscite. The state of emergency will be in place in the provinces of Santiago and Chacabuco for the next 15 days, with a possible extension. It grants the government additional powers to restrict citizens’ freedom of movement and their right to assembly. So far there have been a reported 180 people arrested, with numerous injured by bullets fired by Chile’s security services. The military are now patrolling the streets in scenes reminiscent of Chile’s dark past.
Greenwashing Bolivia’s Rightwing Opposition
With Bolivia heading to the polls this Sunday to elect its next president, the reactionary elites who seek to greenwash their opposition to Evo Morales’ government should not be accommodated by western leftists.
On 20 October, Bolivia will head to the polls to elect its next president. Recent polls indicate that the incumbent leftist president, Evo Morales, has a substantial lead over his closest opponent, rightwing Carlos Mesa and his Citizen Community (Comunidad Ciudadana) party.
As the first indigenous president in Latin America, Morales was elected in 2005 representing his social movement-backed party, the Movement toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS). Since then, he has made powerful statements on the global stage in favour of redistribution of wealth, the recognition of indigenous rights and protection of the environment. In 2010, Morales introduced the ‘Rights of Mother Earth’ law which recognises the earth as a political subject enshrined with a right to life.
Yet Morales’ status as environmental champion has been cast into the spotlight in recent weeks, owing to his handling of fires which have swept across Chiquitania, a biodiverse dry forest region bordering the Amazon. According to figures from Santa Cruz department, four million hectares have been burnt, with catastrophic damage and loss of life to animals and fauna.
With elections imminent, protests in October reportedly attracted up to a million people in the eastern lowland city of Santa Cruz. Protests also took place in the cities of Cochabamba and La Paz. Some on anglophone social media were swift to describe the protests in Santa Cruz as a mass environmentalist movement. Others excitedly proclaimed Santa Cruz to be the ‘frontlines’ of climate resistance in the global south.
Yet while these protests in Santa Cruz do relate in part to the forest fires, they are far from manifestations of grassroots environmentalism. In fact, the protests are linked to a longer and more fractious history of land distribution and regional power dynamics in Bolivia. Alongside the departments of Pando, Beni and Tarija, Santa Cruz is part of the ‘media luna’ region which has been the nexus of regional-class antagonism to Morales and the MAS. In 2008, Santa Cruz attempted to hold a referendum to acquire independence.
In cultural and political terms, this wealthy export region could hardly be situated further from the highland, Aymara-Quechua political support base of Morales. Santa Cruz is the centre of large-scale agribusiness, cultivating wheat, soya, beef and other produce for domestic and export markets. The election of Morales in 2005 signalled a reorientation of power away from the east and towards the indigenous movements in the highlands and valleys, displacing the preeminent position of Santa Cruz elites in national institutions and resource management. Santa Cruz elites have historically rejected Morales’ syndicalist, anti-neoliberal and indigenous politics and remain marginalised by the Andean flavour of the MAS and the trade union movement. Two key anti-MAS organisations are the Pro Comité Santa Cruz and the Camera Agropecuario del Oriente (CAO), both dominated by the agribusiness elites.
The opposition is also
Ecuador Rises against the IMF
Recent weeks show the spirit of resistance against neoliberalism is burning brightly.
Anyone observing events in Ecuador in recent days could be forgiven for thinking they had been transported back to the Latin America of the 1990s.
Then, huge protests against IMF-imposed austerity were regularly met with violent state repression. Such events returned to Ecuador’s streets with a bang last week.
The mass demonstrations under way in Ecuador follow new attacks on living standards designed to meet the terms of a multibillion-dollar IMF loan. The immediate spark to the huge street protests was the removal of subsidies on fuel that affects not only transport costs but drives up food prices.
Cuts in public spending were also announced, with mass public-sector lay-offs planned and an assault on public-sector workers’ conditions that includes halving holiday entitlement to just 15 days per year.
Faced with a backlash to these elite-friendly measures, Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno decreed a state of emergency that suspends the constitution for 60 days, removes the right to free assembly, allows for the censoring of the media and employs the armed forces to maintain order.
Over 350 people have since been detained. Shocking scenes of police brutality include tear gas and flares fired at head height into crowds and widespread beatings. Armoured military vehicles entered the capital city on Sunday night.
Amnesty International warned that ‘the decision to deploy the armed forces to control demonstrations only increases the risk of human rights violations’ and called on ‘all allegations of excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions and other human rights violations that have occurred in the context of the current protests and the state of emergency’ to be properly investigated.
So much of this echoes the turmoil that rocked Ecuador around the turn of the century.
Then, neoliberal assaults on living standards created such political volatility that seven presidents came and went in just ten years. A number were forced from office by powerful street protests.
Stability only returned to Ecuador when socialist Rafael Correa became president in 2007. His progressive alternative not only ended the economic crisis and achieved incredible reductions in poverty and inequality but secured 14 consecutive election victories.
That success was achieved by ripping up the IMF rule book. A regular theme in Correa’s speeches was that ‘people must prevail over capital and society must prevail over the market’.
But in the two years since President Moreno was elected — actually on a manifesto to defend and continue Correa’s policies — he has sought to purge all remnants of that progressive state-led development model.
The repressive measures over recent days are part of a pattern as Moreno has sought to close off all avenues of resistance.
Moreno has systematically targeted those challenging his lurch to neoliberalism.
Former president Correa himself is effectively in exile in Belgium, with a raft of wholly unsubstantiated allegations preventing his return to Ecuador.
Former foreign minister Ricardo Patino, a close Correa ally during his decade in government, recently received political asylum in Mexico after facing jail threats, while Moreno’s own vice-presidential running mate is in prison, in a
El Mercurio Still Lies
The ongoing legitimisation of the Pinochet dictatorship by Chile’s bestselling newspaper, El Mercurio, betrays the memory of thousands of regime victims and their families’ struggle for justice.
In 1967, a group of students at the Catholic University in the Chilean capital of Santiago challenged the status quo by raising a banner with a particularly provocative message: ‘El Mercurio miente’ (El Mercurio lies). For those unacquainted with Chilean history and politics, El Mercurio is the country’s bestselling newspaper, which dates back to the 19th century under the constant ownership of the Edwards family. El Mercurio’s conservative stance is, and always has been, reflected in the way it reports events in Chile and in its dissemination of international news.
The students in 1967 were angry at El Mercurio’s representation of their activism around university reforms that had started a few years earlier (and which were later halted by the coup d’état in 1973). El Mercurio was highly critical of the student movement, reporting that Marxist forces were using the students to disturb democratic peace: the students retaliated by raising a banner above the entrance to the university’s Central Campus in Santiago. This resistance to El Mercurio was evoked during the 2011 student movement that mobilised hundreds of thousands of students, teachers and ordinary citizens to demand universal free education at school and university level. Outside the Casa Central, a banner paid homage to the past: ‘44 years later El Mercurio still lies’. As in the 1960s, El Mercurio clearly opposed the student movement and was trying to destabilise it.
From 1970 to 1973, El Mercurio was complicit in undermining Salvador Allende’s presidency. The newspaper’s owner, Agustín Edwards travelled to the United States to push for military intervention in Chile – this is extremely well-documented in Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, published in 2003. Given El Mercurio’s conservative and pro-regime discourse, many Chileans may have been unsurprised at what happened on 11 September 2019, the 46th anniversary of the coup.
In Chile, 11 September still arouses strong emotions. Each year, relatives of people disappeared by the Pinochet regime stage protests to demand truth and justice. Yet as the years pass, this seems ever more evasive. Many members of the Chilean armed forces have died without facing trial or providing information that would ease families’ suffering. Private events commemorate the coup and are attended by members of the elite and the military, who benefited immensely over 17 years in which they exercised total control over the country. Chile’s wounds have not healed – reconciliation sometimes feels like an empty word – regardless of the attempts made by the first governments following the return to democracy in 1990.
This takes us to 2019. On the coup’s anniversary, El Mercurio published a full-page announcement stating that ‘[o]n September 11th, 1973, Chile was saved from being like Venezuela is today’. Rightwing parties have stoked anti-migrant discourse around the large number of Venezuelans who have arrived recently in Chile, a similar phenomenon to that witnessed in Donald Trump’s United States or
Photography
Kiev, 26 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.
Visit our photography homepage
Video
Aleida Guevara: We Are Very Free In Cuba
How can there be someone who thinks a country is tyrannical when that country is dedicated to teaching its people and ensuring they have the best education?
Dr Aleida Guevara, medical campaigner and daughter of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, shares her thoughts in an exclusive Alborada interview with Umaar Kazmi.
Full interview to follow.
Watch other clips here.
Visit our video homepage
Video
Aleida Guevara: We Are Very Free In Cuba
How can there be someone who thinks a country is tyrannical when that country is dedicated to teaching its people and ensuring they have the best education?
Dr Aleida Guevara, medical campaigner and daughter of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, shares her thoughts in an exclusive Alborada interview with Umaar Kazmi.
Full interview to follow.
Watch other clips here.
Visit our video homepage
Aleida Guevara: We Are Very Free In Cuba
How can there be someone who thinks a country is tyrannical when that country is dedicated to teaching its people and ensuring they have the best education?
Dr Aleida Guevara, medical campaigner and daughter of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, shares her thoughts in an exclusive Alborada interview with Umaar Kazmi.
Full interview to follow.
Watch other clips here.


