Chilean girls stage 'occupation' in education rights protest

[luke]

Chilean girls stage 'occupation' of their own school in education rights protest
For five months, girls demanding free university education for all have defied police to occupy their state school


Chilean demonstrators are hit by a jet of water during a rally against the public state education system in Santiago

Sleeping on a tiled classroom floor, sharing cigarettes and always on the lookout for police raids, the students of Carmela Carvajal primary and secondary school are living a revolution.

It began early one morning in May, when dozens of teenage girls emerged from the predawn darkness and scaled the spiked iron fence around Chile's most prestigious girl's school. They used classroom chairs to barricade themselves inside and settled in. Five months later, the occupation shows no signs of dying and the students are still fighting for their goal: free university education for all.

A tour of the school is a trip into the wired reality of a generation that boasts the communication tools that feisty young rebels of history never dreamed of. When police forces move closer, the students use restricted Facebook chat sessions to mobilise. Within minutes, they are able to rally support groups from other public schools in the neighbourhood. "Our lawyer lives over there," said Angelica Alvarez, 14, as she pointed to a cluster of nearby homes. "If we yell 'Mauricio' really loud, he leaves his home and comes over."

For five months, the students at Carmela Carvajal have lived on the ground floor, sometimes sleeping in the gym, but usually in the abandoned classrooms where they hauled in a television, set up a private changing room, and began to experience school from a different perspective.

The first thing they did after taking over the school was to hold a vote. Approximately half of the 1,800 students participated in the polls to approve the takeover, and the yays outnumbered the nays 10 to one.

Now the students pass their school days listening to guest lecturers who provide free classes on topics ranging from economics to astronomy. Extracurricular classes include yoga and salsa lessons. At night and on weekends, visiting rock bands set up their equipment and charge 1,000 pesos (£1.25) per person to hear a live jam on the basketball court. Neighbours donate fresh baked cakes and, under a quirk of Chilean law, the government is obliged to feed students who are at school – even students who have shut down education as usual.

So much food has poured in that the students from Carmela Carvajal now regularly pass on their donations to hungry students at other occupied schools.

Municipal authorities have repeatedly attempted to retake the school, sending in police to evict the rebel students and get classes back on schedule, but so far the youngsters have held their ground.

"It was the most beautiful moment, all of us in [school] uniform climbing over the fence, taking back control of our school. It was such an emotional moment, we all wanted to cry," Alvarez said. "There have been 10 times that the police have taken back the school and every time we come and take it back again."

The students have built a hyper-organised, if somewhat legalistic, world, with votes on everything including daily duties, housekeeping schedules and the election of a president and spokeswoman. The school rules now include several new decrees: no sex, no boys and no booze. That last clause has been a bit abused, the students admit.

"We have had a few cases of classmates who tried to bring in alcohol, but we caught them and they were punished," said Alvarez, who was stationed at the school entrance questioning visitors. Alvarez, who has lived at the school for about four months, laughed as she described the punishment. "They had to clean the bathrooms," she said.

Carmela Carvajal is among Chile's most successful state schools. Nearly all the graduates are assured of a place in top Chilean universities, and the school is a magnet, drawing in some of the brightest minds from across Santiago, the nation's capital and a metropolis of six million.

But the story playing out in its classrooms is just a small part of a national student uprising that has seized control of the political agenda, wrongfooted conservative president Sebastián Piñera, and called into question the free-market orthodoxy that has dominated Chilean politics since the Pinochet era.

The students are demanding a return to the 1960s, when public university education was free. Current tuition fees average nearly three times the minimum annual wage, and with interest rates on student loans at 7%, the students have made financial reform the centrepiece of their uprising.

At the heart of the students' agenda is the demand that education be recognised as a common right for all, not a "consumer good" to be sold on the open market.

Currently, many Chilean schools are for-profit institutions, run as businesses. Until recently, the classified section of the leading newspaper, el Mercurio, regularly featured schools for sale, in adverts that often described the institutions as highly profitable investments.

The Chilean uprising has changed that. Now owners of public schools have begun posting employment ads in local newspapers for security guards to fend off attempts by students to seize the schools. One advert offered employment to able-bodied men who could use dogs to repel potential student takeovers. ("No experience necessary," it read.)

Politicians and many parents fret that the cancellation of classes has turned 2011 into "a lost year" for public education, but for many of the students the past five months has been the most intensive education of their life.

"I have become a lot more mature. I used to judge my classmates by their looks. Now I understand them and together we stand up for what we believe," said Camila Gutierrez, 15, a freshman at Carmela Carvajal. "It has been exhausting, but if you want something in life, you have to fight for it."

The first murmurings of the "Chilean Winter" came in in late May with the first takeover of a public school. Five months later, around 200 state elementary and high schools as well as a dozen universities have now been occupied by students. Weekly protest marches gather between 50,000-100,000 students throughout the nation, with especially large turnouts in coastal cities of Valparaiso and Concepcion. Charismatic student leader Camila Vallejo - known as Comandante Camila - has become a cult hero across Latin America. Initially, the protestors's demands for free universal education was flatly rejected by the conservative administration of president Sebastian Pinera, but the government is now moving incrementally towards meeting their demands.

Talks between the ruling conservative government and striking students collapsed on Wednesday evening with irate students accusing the government of failing to provide new proposals. But Government officials responded that the students would be welcomed back to negotiate.

On Thursday when thousands of students gathered for a protest march in downtown Santiago, Government officials refused to authorize a march route that included a central thoroughfare and defiant students used social media to send out a singular message – the march is on. For much of Thursday, downtown Santiago was awash in tear gas and rioting youth. Smashed cars, 137 arrests and mutual accusations that the violence was avoidable further highlighted the gulf between student leaders and the Pinera government.

With imaginative protests including a kiss-a-thon in which 3,000 couples groped and smooched for exactly fifteen minutes, the Chilean student movement has captured the imagination of a long dormant but apparently disenchanted Chilean public. The unified front of students also counts on support from an estimated 6 of 10 adults in Chile, far higher than the nation's political coalitions or President Sebastian Pinera whose recent approval ratings has ranged from 22% to 30%. However the frequent violence which accompanies the street marches has outraged many Chileans who see their cherished stability now on the edge of social chaos.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/07/chilean-girls-occupation-school-protest

Camila Vallejo – Latin America's 23-year-old new revolutionary folk hero
Chile has been engulfed by student protests – and their young leader has huge public support in her fight against the elite


Chilean student leader Camila Vallejo sits among a peace sign created from empty teargas canisters used by police against protesters.

As the Friday afternoon sun dipped towards the horizon, some students at the University of Chile played ping pong or football and couples lounged and kissed in the last warmth of the day. But others had more serious matters on their minds: the wildly popular student uprising that has transformed the nation's political agenda. And for many of the protesters involved and those who sympathise with its aims, the face of the uprising is Camila Vallejo.

In a basement auditorium a group of 60 student leaders planned the next steps in their burgeoning revolution for free university education, with Vallejo centre stage.

Vallejo sat behind her battered laptop, a small blue notebook on her desk and a rapt audience in front of her. When she speaks, her hands fly about, like birds snatching invisible prey. Her language is pointed and clear but, mixed with constant doses of humour and self-deprecation, she keeps her charges laughing.

As the second female president of Chile's leading student body, known as Fech (Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile), Vallejo – who is also a member of the youth arm of the Communist party, the JJCC – has presided over the biggest citizen democracy movement since the days of opposition marches to General Augusto Pinochet a generation ago.

The government response has reminded many older Chileans of that same dark era. Three days ago, on Thursday, Chilean riot police ambushed Vallejo and a group of fellow student leaders just after a press conference in downtown Santiago. "They [police] targeted the leadership with violence," said Ariel Russell, a University of Chile student who witnessed the attack. "We had not even started the march and the police apparatus was upon us."

Vallejo, a 23-year-old geography student, was singing and marching with a handwritten sign when a squad of military vehicles closed in and attacked her with jets of tear gas. A pair of trucks mounted with water cannons unleashed a barrage of water fierce enough to break bones and scrape a person across the pavement. Vallejo was soaked, a cloud of tear gas was then blasted on to her body. With her skin wet, the chemical reaction was massive and incapacitating. Vallejo was paralysed. Her body went into an allergic reaction and welts from the gas erupted over it.

"At first, we resisted, but it was intolerable," she told the Observer. "You could not breathe, it was complicated, we had to run away from the carabineros [police] then another water cannon hit us in the face with a different chemical, this was much stronger … my whole body was burning, it was brutal."

Over the next four hours, journalists were beaten and 250 people arrested. Twenty-five police were injured as masked youths with paint bombs and handfuls of rocks counter-attacked. All Thursday afternoon, downtown Santiago was awash in running street fights between heavily armoured police units and hundreds of protesters decked in shorts and tennis shoes, with scarves to shield them from the gas.

As squads of police attacked students, pedestrians and even an ambulance, Vallejo huddled up in an office, receiving medical care and monitoring the situation through mobile phone reports from a team of scouts at the edges of what quickly became a riot.

The government blamed Vallejo for the chaos; after all, she had made the much publicised call, mobilising her followers to congregate at Plaza Italia, a public park and march along the Alameda, the capital's main thoroughfare, which sits less than two kilometres from the lightly guarded presidential palace. Vallejo was quick to retort that public gatherings need no authorisation and that the police had illegally attacked students standing in a park.

Vallejo, an eloquent and attractive young woman who exudes self-confidence and style, took the violence in her stride and focused on what she sees as the positive achievements thus far. "For years, Chilean youth have been consumed by a neo-liberal model that highlights personal achievement and consumerism; it is all about mine, mine, mine. There is not a lot of empathy for the other," said Vallejo in her office, decorated with a large photograph of Karl Marx.

"This movement has achieved just the opposite. The youth has taken control… and revived and dignified politics. This comes hand in hand with the questioning of worn-out political models – all they have done is govern for big business and powerful economic groups."

In just a matter of months, Vallejo has been catapulted from anonymous student body president to Latin American folk hero with more than 300,000 Twitter followers. Type her name into Google and there are more than 160,000 results just from the past 24 hours. Brazilian students now parade her as a VIP guest at their marches, the Chilean president invites her to negotiate a settlement and when she calls for a show of strength hundreds of thousands of students throughout Chile take to the streets. As an adept and wildly popular social media phenomenon, Vallejo has risen to become the most recognisable face of the student protesters.

Throughout the six-month revolt, Chilean students – in many cases led by 14- and 15-year-olds – have seized the streets of Santiago and major cities, provoking and challenging the status quo with their demand for a massive restructuring of the nation's for-profit higher education industry. In support of their demands for free university education, since May they have organised 37 marches, which have gathered upwards of 200,000 students at a time.

Police repression has been frequent. Vandals who often use the cover of student marches to attack banks, pharmacies and utility companies are met by an armed force of riot police who routinely attack pedestrians and tear gas crowds of innocent civilians.

What began as a quiet plea for improvements in public education has now erupted into a wholescale rejection of the Chilean political elite. More than 100 high schools nationwide have been seized by students and a dozen universities shut down by protests.

Classes for tens of thousands of students have been suspended since May, and the entire school year might have to be repeated. Polls show an estimated 70% of the Chilean public backs the students' demands and an equal percentage find the government's proposal insufficient, according to figures from Chile's leading newspaper, La Tercera.

Widely admired for her eloquent speeches on Chilean television, Vallejo has gathered a cult following around the world that ranges from German folk rock tributes to videos from Latin America's largest university, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (Unam). "This internationalisation of the movement has been very important to us," says Vallejo who receives a daily deluge of fan mail and invitations to speaking engagements and seminars. "Here in Chile we are constantly hearing the message that our goals are impossible and that we are unrealistic, but the rest of the world, especially the youth, are sending us so much support. We are at a crucial moment in this struggle and international support is key."

In stark contrast to the students' popularity, the once beloved coalition known as La Concertación, which organised the overthrow of Pinochet and then ruled Chile from 1990 to 2010, has fallen into political obsolescence. La Concertación is now polling at just 11% approval. Sebastian Piñera, Chile's president, a billionaire businessman, has just 22% public approval ratings, the lowest ever in Chilean history.

"For 20 years they [La Concertación] reinforced the Pinochet model, they institutionalised it, modernised it without any profound changes. Now that this model is in crisis, they can't be part of the discussion as they are effectively comp- licit," explained Santiago student Ariel Russell. "Camila has an ability to deliver a very wide populist message, not populist just in terms of communicating to the poor, but also to the middle class… The youth now have more credibility than the traditional politicians."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/08/camila-vallejo-latin-america-revolutionary

theres another earlier interview with camila here;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/chile-student-leader-camila-vallejo

[faceless]

more power to them - that's the first I've heard of this.