Statement on the events in Chile
The explosion of indignation that is now sweeping across Chile is nothing new and stems from the crisis of the neoliberal model established during the dictatorship, a model that can no longer be sustained. Chilean society has been mobilizing for several years for various causes, such as the transformation of the education system, the elimination of private pension fund administrators (AFPs), and the demilitarization of the Mapuche people. However, recent governments have been unable to incorporate these and other demands and bring about the expected transformations. Education remains unequal and profit-driven, pensions are managed by private entities, and the Mapuche people continue to be oppressed and criminalized.
Faced with inequality and the rising cost of living, in October, high school students used social media to call for mass fare evasion on the subway in response to the price hike. However, the police repression was excessive, and protests and pot-banging demonstrations quickly followed. Since then, the government of Sebastián Piñera has declared that the country is at war against a supposed "internal enemy," imposing a state of emergency and curfews in the country's main cities.
For their part, the media have focused their debate on the violence of the protesters, the burning of businesses, food shortages, and looting during these weeks of demonstrations, consistently criminalizing the young people who take to the streets to march or bang pots and pans. At the same time, they have ignored the deaths and disappearances during the protests, and to this day we have no certainty about how many deaths, disappearances, and rapes have occurred since the beginning of the uprising. We are facing a clear situation of human rights violations.
It is worth noting that the mobilizations in Chile and their underlying causes are not isolated events. On the contrary, protest actions have been taking place throughout the region, with young people as central protagonists—though not exclusively. This is the case with the recent university protests in Colombia and Costa Rica, the mobilizations and subsequent repression in Ecuador last month, and less visible but no less worrying events such as the repressive forces acting against young people in Paraguay. In Barcelona, the young people protesting and defending the independence cause frame their demands within the context of enormous inequality and the difficulties they face regarding job and educational opportunities for themselves and their families. Similarly, last year saw young Nicaraguans protesting against the government and being brutally repressed. These are just a few examples that reaffirm, time and again, the structurally unequal nature of most political projects in the Ibero-American region, and the functionality of that inequality for the
support of socio-political projects of a neoliberal nature and the
repressive vocation that makes them possible.
As a group of researchers at CLACSO studying youth and childhood in Latin America, we condemn the violence and militarization of the streets of Chile and demand that the government respond to the systematic human rights violations that have occurred in recent days. Likewise, we make visible and exercise this same demand against all governments that repress their citizens and denounce the projects, actors, and interests behind this repression, which is nothing more than a symptom of what it seeks to "defend."
We stand in solidarity with the people, our people, and with all those who seek transformative and superior changes to inequality, struggles in which the children and young people of Latin America are the main protagonists, but also the most vulnerable.
November 2019
CLACSO Working Group
Childhoods and youth
