This important article was originally published in Spanish in August 2019 (read the original here). Cristina Flores has translated it for LAB as a contribution to our ongoing project Voices of Latin America, represented by our book of that name, and the ongoing website which continues the work of the book.
Chile's protests were thwarted when the arrival of Coronavirus forced the population to stay at home. As the impact of the quarantine takes its toll and people are becoming desperate for food, one art collective is censored and attacked for highlighting the struggle.
Main image courtesy of _dibujossad.
This is the second of two articles with testimony from Chile’s protest movements. The first can be read here.
See also our January article 'Chile's long hot summer of discontent'
Stop Press: there were new street protests in Santiago over the weekend of 16-17 April in...
This is the first of two articles with testimony from Chile’s protest movements and the impact of Covid-19.
See also our January article 'Chile's long hot summer of discontent'
Sebastian Piñera’s government has taken the opportunity of Chile’s self-imposed isolation measures to paint over the...
At the
Frankfurt Book Fair early in the 1990s, Beatriz de Moura from Tusquets
publishers asked a Chilean journalist living in Germany if he had heard of a
Chilean writer who was having great success in France. The book was by someone
called Luis Sepúlveda. Laughing, the journalist admitted it was him.
Luis
Sepúlveda (Ovalle, Chile, 1949) died...
This article was translated for LAB by Chloe Budd. You can read the original (in Spanish) here.
Main image: Raya, an old Nahua. More than half of his village was destroyed after the land opened to oil exploration. Image: Survival International
They...
Chilean
politics are marked by several long-running and highly divisive controversies,
many deriving from the most consistently neoliberal economic policies and
property arrangements in the world. One
of these is the management and control of water resources. Water is unevenly
distributed throughout the national territory – scarce in the north of the country and abundant
in the south – a problem accentuated by...
When
students jumped the turnstiles at the Baquedano metro station in Santiago on 18
October 2019 in protest at the 30-peso fare hike, nobody could have predicted
that it would lead to a full-scale social uprising and the largest protests since
the military dictatorship.
Within
days, disaffected social groups such as the No to AFP campaign (the
controversial pensions...
Social media outlets, such as Twitter and WhatsApp, played a major role in the protests that spread across the Americas in 2019. In Chile, hashtags raised awareness of the protests online and explained the reasons why Chileans were taking to the streets. #Chiledespertó (#Chilewokeup) and #ChileQuiereCambios (#ChileWantsChanges) were two commonly used examples. This also meant that...
It’s 11 January 2020, and I am sitting on a hot and unforgiving cement esplanade, at the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of Chile’s national Memory and Human Rights Museum. The mood is generally good natured, but somewhat restive: in between the official acts and speeches, the crowd spontaneously breaks into chants. These compare right-wing president...