On her way to an interview for a school project, Francisca Hale, a 21-year-old journalism major university student, walked to the Plaza de Maipu subway station in Santiago, Chile at around 5 p.m. on Friday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd October, 2019) On her way to an interview for a school project, Francisca Hale, a 21-year-old journalism major university student, walked to the Plaza de Maipu subway station in Santiago, Chile at around 5 p.m. on Friday. To her surprise, the station was shut down by local authorities as a group of police officers guarded the entrances.By Friday, the Chilean capital had been hit by a civil disobedient movement for more than two days, after secondary school students called on passengers to evade paying for the subway to protest against the planned fare hike by 30 Chilean Pesos (about $0.04) per ride. To prevent a large number of passengers from riding the subway for free, local authorities decided to shut down a number of stations, enraging others who just needed to use the subway to return home after work.
"By the time I had to use the subway on Friday, the station I always used was closed. There were hundreds of people protesting. If they kept the station open, nothing would have happened. But the police were there. So people were calling them [the officers] names and said: 'We need to use the subway!' But they wouldn't let people in," Hale told Sputnik.
Just when Hale decided to take a bus to go to another subway station close by, the police started to fire tear gas into the angry crowd gathered outside the closed station.
"While I was waiting for the bus, the police started to teargas people. There were still many children and old people around. I remember people rushing into buses to take cover from the tear gas. There was this little boy, maybe about four years old, was crying and covering his eyes, because he also was hit by the tear gas," she said while stressing that the angry crowd was simply chanting against the police, without other violent acts, when tear gas was fired.
Tensions between the protesters and the police escalated quickly shortly afterward. According to footage from local media, entrances of the Plaza de Maipu were completely ransacked with windows smashed and escalators destroyed.
Violence continued to worsen on Friday night when a number of subway stations were lit on fire, a public bus was burned and several shops were looted. In response, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera declared a state of emergency in the early hours of Saturday, introducing curfews at night and mobilizing the nation's military as part of the efforts to restore order.
To pacify the protesters, the president suspended the plan to raise subway fares in Santiago. But the concession did little to please the angry demonstrators, who continued to march into the streets demanding authorities to address other social and economic injustices.
According to Santiago's Mayor Karla Rubilar, at least 11 people have been killed in the unrest so far, as many of the deaths occurred when supermarkets were set on fire by looters.
What started as protests against a proposed subway fare hike in the nation's capital rapidly expanded into nationwide chaos, as violent protests erupted in a number of other cities including Valparaiso and Concepcion, where states of emergency were declared.
For young students in Chile, the protests against the proposed subway fare increase simply ignited their accumulated grievances over a series of social issues.
"This detonated a social bomb that has long threatened to explode. The political landscape in Chile has been very complicated in recent times due to a series of social demands: improvements to the pension system, salary improvements, free education, etc. The subway business ended up being the tip of an iceberg," Leonardo David, a 24-year-old law student from the city of Concepcion, told Sputnik.
David painted a bleak picture about the current situation facing young students like him in Chile.
"As a student, my greatest anger is related to the current economic reality of Chile, in which job opportunities are scarce, wages are precarious, and on the other hand, we have very high living costs, at levels of first world countries. This is serious considering that the cost of living must be added to the monthly living costs. In Chile, even state universities are not free and many students are forced to borrow from the bank to pay for their studies, through abusive contracts, with shameful interests and a debt that can be extended for up to 20 years," he said.
To finance his law degree, David took a loan of about $27,900 which would take him more than ten years after graduation to pay off, as an average monthly salary for college graduates stood at around $600.
Political analysts suggested that the growing social grievances in Chile came as a result of the privatization of the country's economy.
"The protests, from a wider perspective, are against the free market economy that has been applied in Chile in the last 20 years. Massive amounts of privatization have continued, for example, in the areas of water, gas and electricity. This is a combination of anger against this free market economic model. This is what the students, who are now being supported by broader sections of the population, are rebelling against," Rodrigo Acuna, an independent researcher on Latin America politics and Associate Lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia, told Sputnik.
The expert pointed out that voters in Chile were disappointed in the Pinera administration as the president failed to fulfill some of the campaign promises after taking office in March 2018.
"The difference is, under President Pinera, these policies [of privatization] have intensified. That's something Pinera supporters did not expect to occur. They believed because he is a multimillionaire and one of the wealthiest men in the country, he was going to spread that wealth with the way he managed his businesses and provide prosperity to the country. But that actually hasn't been the case. What has occurred is that more privatization has continued and living standards have not increased," he said, noting that the anger from the general public spilled well beyond the students who were against the subway fare hike.
For a nation deeply scarred by the horror and cruelty under the military dictatorship during former president Augusto Pinochet's time in office, the scenes of soldiers and armored military vehicles in the streets brought back those bitter memories.
"As a country, we have a big trauma when it comes to [seeing] military in the streets. My grandfather was tortured during the military dictatorship. When he found out that the soldiers with full-on combat gears were in the streets, he was really nervous. He didn't even want to turn on the TV or hear people talking about it. A lot of people like my grandfather began to have panic attacks and anxiety attacks. They didn't want to go outside and often said:' we need to store food and water, because we may have to face another dictatorship,'" Hale, the university student from Santiago, said.
Hale's grandfather was working with a group of doctors in September 1973, when a large military envoy stormed his offices, accusing him of hiding weapons to support a planned communist uprising against the government. As a result, her grandfather was tortured after being taken to the national stadium while many of his colleagues were imprisoned for many years.
"There're so many pictures [on social media] comparing what happened in 1973 to what's happening now because the military were shooting people and asking them to do humiliating things," Hale said.
Amid rising violence in different cities in Chile, President Pinera declared the nation is "at war against a powerful enemy" during a televised speech on Sunday when he extended a state of emergency to more cities.
The government's heavy-handed response to the protests drew criticism from young students like Hale.
"The president's slogan [during his election campaign] was 'better times," which promised 'if you vote for me, you're going to have better times.' But we've only been protesting for two days. And he couldn't handle two days of protests and just declared a state of emergency and threw the military into the streets. He even said on TV 'we're at war.' But how can you be in a war, if only one side is armed? Did he just declare war against the people of Chile?" Hale said.
David, the law student from Concepcion, argued that the rising violence acts from protesters were triggered by the government's harsh responses.
"I would like to point out that what is currently happening in Chile is an exaggerated and unjustified state response to a situation that began to be quite simple and harmless. The government decided to invoke a law created to combat terrorism when what initially happened was a simple mass evasion of payment in the subway. This generated discomfort among citizens for the criminalization of a social demonstration," he said.
The mindset from the era under the military dictatorship may have played a role in the way Chilean police handled protesters, Acuna, the political analyst, explained.
"The idea that high school students should be repressed by the strongest, the toughest and the most militarized sections of the police force is something has been continuing. The way the Chilean police handle protests has not really changed in its fundamental basis since the dictatorship. While Chile has an electoral system and it claims to be a democracy, the establishment is quite intolerant of peaceful protests," he said.
Acuna argued that certain government agencies in Chile including the police and the military had not been truly reformed since the end of the dictatorship in the country.
After witnessing heavy-handed responses from the police with her own eyes, Hale, the student from Santiago, decided to join the protests in the hope of avoiding the nation from descending into another dictatorship.
"Think about it, people haven't seen military in the streets since the 1980s! People need to be aware of the current situation [in Chile], so we can avoid another dictatorship. We're protesting because we want change and we want this country to be safe from another dictatorship. As young people, we know we have to leave a better country for our children and we also owe it to our parents and our grandparents," she said.
As more heavily armed soldiers were being deployed into the streets in Chile, young students, like Hale and David, continued to try to make their voices heard through posts on social media.
