Chile Forum

A teenage Chilean girl was in critical condition Monday, 35 days into her hunger strike demanding quality public education, as the government of Sebastian Pinera readied for a national strike backing reforms.

“It is serious and she could be left with irreversible neurological and kidney damage” from the action, warned a health ministry official of 19-year-old student Gloria Negrete.

The girl's health is especially weak as she is plagued by chronic asthma — during her protest she has lost 12 kilos (26 pounds) and is down just 49 kilos (108 pounds) in body weight. She is, however, still refusing food and only drinking water.

...foreigners in Santiago don’t seem to be losing sleep over the roaring demonstrations.

“While the majority of the protests have been peaceful...

...the university students say they are holding out until their demands are met.

The students sleep in school without attending class, march en masse, hunger strike, run laps around the presidential palace and stage kissing sessions all to protest what they call their unequal education system.

Mentiraproducciones uploaded this video on YouTube featuring students in the education march:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-nPpDAKnCVw#!

Robert L. Funk, an assistant professor at the University of Chile's Institute for Public Affair blogged:
This video says a lot about what is going on in Chile. While the government has tried to portray the students as ideological, or manipulated by ideologies, or just as molotov-throwing criminals, here we see something else. It is, of course, somewhat romanticised, but it is not too far off, and portrays something far closer to what most Chileans see than to what the government is suggesting

The U.S. Embassy urges its citizens to stay away from the action and “use common sense” when faced with potentially dangerous situations. But Eileen Smith, an American expatriate from Brooklyn, New York, brought her camera into the heat of the August 9 student protest comprised of, who she called, “149,999 of my closest friends.”

Smith wrote on Bearshapedsphere:
The teargassing was my fault. I was at a lovely, kms-long protest with singing and drumming and pretty pretty signs and great cleverness, and I went to go investigate what I knew to be a conflict zone. Bad me.

Several others from outside of Chile also said they side with the students on education reform. ...an English teacher from South Africa, said, “I don’t feel threatened. I would join them if I wasn’t a foreigner.”

Adrien Fallou, 21, flew away from his home near Paris to intern in the upper-class neighborhood of Las Condes, Santiago, for the past two months. He said, “I don't really feel that the protest make the city any more dangerous because what you actually see is mostly peaceful students marching.”

Many other embassies, such as France, Ireland and South Africa have not alerted their citizens in Chile to avoid the marches.

greg~judy wrote:
Mentiraproducciones uploaded this video

patagoniax wrote:

greg~judy wrote:
Mentiraproducciones uploaded this video

Eso lo dice todo.

...just a bit of tongue-in-cheek, lovey-dovey-kissy stuff...

greg~judy wrote:

first, one of the "hungry" students isn't doing too well...

A teenage Chilean girl was in critical condition Monday, 35 days into her hunger strike demanding quality public education, as the government of Sebastian Pinera readied for a national strike backing reforms.

“It is serious and she could be left with irreversible neurological and kidney damage” from the action, warned a health ministry official of 19-year-old student Gloria Negrete.

patagoniax wrote:

greg~judy wrote:
first, one of the "hungry" students isn't doing too well...

A teenage Chilean girl was in critical condition Monday, 35 days into her hunger strike demanding quality public education, as the government of Sebastian Pinera readied for a national strike backing reforms.

“It is serious and she could be left with irreversible neurological and kidney damage” from the action, warned a health ministry official of 19-year-old student Gloria Negrete.

The original from which the above was extracted also contained this:

Government is accusing others of participation in "assisted suicide" of the hunger-strike students, and talking about prosecution of those who have been pressuring those students.

Chilean students end hunger strike
September 29

SANTIAGO, Chile (AFP) — Two Chilean secondary school students yesterday ended a hunger strike that lasted 71 days in support of a large protest movement seeking better funding for education in the South American nation.

Maura Roque, 18, and Johanna Choapa, 17, who are students at a Santiago high school, ended their liquid-only fast amid deteriorating health, and a day after the main student federation agreed to open talks with the government on education reforms.

"We ended the strike as a sign of strength," Roque told reporters at a hospital where the two girls were being treated.

"The movement in secondary schools needs organisation in every high school. We are not abandoning the struggle."

The two teens were transferred last week to San Borja hospital in Santiago, after suffering a fall in blood sugar levels from their fast. Other students had undertaken hunger strikes for shorter periods.

The announcement came a day after Chile's student federation agreed to talks with the government of President Sebastian Pinera on education reforms after nearly five months of demonstrations.

But student leaders said they would be calling for no classes to be held while the talks are ongoing, to maintain pressure on the government.

Classes have been on hold in many schools and universities during the long-running protests, the largest protest movement in Chile since General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship ended in 1990.

Some 250,000 school students and several thousand college students have been out of class for nearly five months as part of the protest.

Students' demands for increased funding for public education have support of up to 80 percent of Chileans, according to different surveys, while Pinera's approval rating has dropped to between 26 and 22 per cent.

"Occupying" Chile’s education budget

Chilean students pledge to continue protests

SANTIAGO - Chilean student groups vowed on Sunday to continue their mass-scale protests against the government's 2012 education budget.

Chile's main student confederation Confech said it was very disappointed with the government's final budget for 2012 approved by the conservative-dominated Senate without increasing funds for education as the students had demanded.

"Unfortunately the political system did not meet our demands, and the government made the budget the way they wanted without even considering the proposals we made," said Confech's spokesman Noam Titelman.

Over 100,000 middle school and college students supported by university professors and many of the general public have been involved in more than 42 protests since May against what they called poor budget funding for higher education and a lack of will to change the policies.

"We expect that during the coming year we will be able to gather more support to help bring about the deep changes we need," said Titelman.

After a marathon session, Chile's Senate approved late on Friday a national budget worth 11.5 billion dollars, with an 8-percent increase from the 2011 budget, including a 60-percent rise in education funds, according to lawmakers.

The Chilean government rejected the latest protest as unnecessary. Spokesman Andres Chawick said lawmakers were holding intense discussions about the student's appeal.

Education Minister Felipe Bulnes met last week with opposition congress members to discuss possible education reforms. The opposition rejected the education fund in the 2012 budget, saying it was not enough to resolve the actual crisis in the education sector.

Students, especially those from middle schools, were also dissatisfied with the government's plan, saying it only covered the university sector.

chernandez wrote:So the best way to revolt about not getting much education is by not getting educated.
These people are fucking brilliant!!

Chile protest winds down, at least for now

SANTIAGO, Chile — Chilean students have little to show for their seven-month protest to demand major education reform.

But unlike the Occupy movement that sprang up this summer in the US, the Chilean movement eked out a few concessions from their government.

High-school and university students flooded the streets of Santiago, the capital, and cities across the country, and staged demonstrations on campuses that kept classes out-of-session. They demanded free, and improved education.

The movement was the largest since leftist demonstrations under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled for nearly two decades beginning in 1973.

The seven-month standoff had commenters comparing President President Sebastian Pinera with hardliner Pinochet. His popularity plummeted as he refused a compromise.

Then in November, the Chilean Congress approved a modest increase in the federal education budget, a nod to the protesters’ demands. But it was hardly a victory, leaving students with an academic semester in shambles and little changed.

Still, it was a striking example of how widespread protests, even without powerful leaders, can effect change if they focus on a narrow agenda.

The Chilean protest has it roots in a smaller high-school student movement aimed at reforming the education system. At the time, then President Michelle Bachelet promised some changes, but only a few were enacted.

They took to the streets this year with often lighthearted demonstrations. There was a coordinated performance of “Thriller,” at least one kiss-a-thon, and students running laps in plazas with protest signs in tow.

Most protests were authorized by the police, although some students threw up smoldering roadblocks on various occasions, actions that were condemned by the national student leaders. And young people, not all of them students, clashed with police.

National student leaders, including the charismatic Camila Vallejo, appeared on all the popular TV talk shows. To achieve anything, the students knew they needed widespread support.

By July, they had it.

On August 4, people took to the streets banging pots and pans — an echo of protests during difficult economic times under former socialist President Salvador Allende — to protest widespread police repression of students during unauthorized marches earlier in the day.

But by October, the protests began to die down, worn down by police crackdowns and students anxious not to lose their whole semester to the cause. Students went back to class to take exams they had stopped studying for months ago.

Still, after months of pressure, the Senate approved a 7.2 percent increase in education spending for a total of $11 billion in next year’s national budget.

It’s a concession, but a minor one. Student leaders say the new funding will only cover some students’ first year of studies. Then, they’ll be paying out-of-pocket or taking out massive loans.

The Pinera administration says education is a privilege, not a right. The president, himself a billionaire, supports for-profit, and in many cases government-subsidized, educational institutions.

In addition to the budget increase, student leaders also claimed some broader victories. First among them: putting education on the top of the government’s agenda. Chile's most prestigious professors, economists and journalists now publicly discuss what’s become considered an imperative need to change the education system.

They even analyze the students’ own proposals for doing so.

Student leaders also say they’ve galvanized the public, along with their fellow students.

"We have awakened a whole country to question the most important pillars of the current economic system, that without a doubt does not respond to the reality of human-rights issues, particularly education," said Isabella Pérez, a spokeswoman for the University of Antofagasta's student federation.

Andrés Alegre, a geology student at the Northern Catholic University in Antofagasta, said the demonstrations had given him " the political conscious I have today.”

Now, they are looking ahead to next year.

Student federations hold open meetings for any university students interested in helping to direct the movement’s future.

At a recent meeting at the University of Antofagasta, students discussed the need to unify student federations, and how to mobilize while remaining in classes next semester.

One student, Jennifer Mundak, encouraged students to get involved in the political process: "We are the ones who have to save education in Chile. How? By participating."

Chile’s Student Protests Claim Their Second Ministerial Victim
December 29,

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Chile’s student protest movement claimed its second ministerial victim today when President Sebastian Pinera named Harald Beyer to replace Felipe Bulnes as education minister.

Bulnes took over from Joaquin Lavin in July, a month after the start of protests that shuttered hundreds of state schools and led to almost weekly clashes with police in the streets of Santiago in the second half of the year.

While the scale of protests has subsided, Beyer will face an increasingly radicalized student movement. Earlier this month, University of Chile students ousted Communist Party member Camila Vallejo as president in favor of Gabriel Boric, who advocates a harder line against the government. The protests helped push Pinera’s approval rating to 23 percent, the lowest for any president since the return of democracy two decades ago, according to an opinion poll released today. Pinera also named Luis Mayol as the new agriculture minister today.

“This was motivated by resignations for personal and private reasons and not political factors,” government spokesman Andres Chadwick told reporters today in Santiago. “The president decided to make the replacements immediately after resignations were submitted.”

Bulnes had responded to student protests by proposing increased access to credit and improved supervision of universities.

“Generally speaking, Bulnes did a pretty good job,” Robert Funk, a political scientist at the University of Chile, said today. “He brought some order to the mess.”

Protest leaders have suspended demonstrations as Chile enters its summer vacation period. Students last week abandoned a seven-month occupation of the University of Chile’s central campus in downtown Santiago, vowing to resume protests in 2012 for lower cost and higher quality schooling.

“At the end of the day, it seems that the student movement was more defeated -- it sort of fizzled out -- and the government didn’t really hand over very much,” Funk said.

That success came at a political cost and not only for the education ministers. Pinera’s approval rating fell to 23 percent in a poll conducted between Nov. 11 and Dec. 11 from 26 percent in June and July, Santiago-based pollster CEP said in a report today. The survey of 1,559 people has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

“Chile needs deep educational reforms that are cost- effective and build on the system already in place,” Beyer wrote in an article published last week in Que Pasa magazine and reprinted on his think tank’s website. Education is key to a more equal society, he said, advocating the greater use of income-assessed student loans to finance university education for pupils who cannot afford it.

Student leader Boric said the movement would resume in March, after taking the summer to come up with new tactics.

“There’s a perception among citizens that we haven’t done enough to come to agreements, and we have to be capable of asking ourselves what more we must do and to evaluate ourselves critically,” Boric said in an interview on CNN Chile. “We’ll be in that process in January and February so in March we can start with all our strength and energy renewed to take up topics that remain unresolved.”

While the election of new student leaders will further polarize the dispute, their capacity to mobilize students is in doubt, said Mauricio Morales, a political scientist at Diego Portales University in Santiago

“I don’t know if students are willing to miss a second school year,” Morales said by phone. “We’ll likely see a very active movement that probably won’t have the extended number of activities we saw this year.”

Police in Chile break up first march of year by students demanding education reform


SANTIAGO, Chile Associated Press — Police used water cannons and tear gas to break up a march by thousands of Chilean students on Thursday, the first protest this year by student groups whose demonstrations demanding education reform paralyzed major cities in 2011.

Protest leaders said between 5,000 and 7,000 high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue, while police put the number at 2,000 and said they had detained 50 protesters.

Police broke up the march when a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry. The streams of water knocked over some protesters and others dodged tear gas canisters.

“The government is giving us a clear signal that it is intransigent, but we are strong, we know that we are strong, and the government is afraid of us,” said student leader Maximiliano Salas.

Police in Chile’s capital said the march wasn’t authorized by municipal authorities because the students didn’t apply for permission 48 hours in advance.

Police detained a cameraman for Colombia’s NTN 24 station for allegedly “blocking and impeding” the officers, according to Chile’s Foreign Press Association.

The mobilization was called by the Coordinating Assembly of High School Students to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Some university students also joined them.

The crisis over education reform in Chile remains unresolved despite seven months of mass demonstrations last year by students, teachers and families. The marches have generally been peaceful but often end with clashes between police and a minority of hooded activists throwing stones and molotov cocktails.

Now that summer vacations are over in Chile, both sides expect many more clashes to come.