This is the first issue of Voz, LAB’s new series of guest-written quarterly dispatches, available exclusively to patrons (paid subscribers). Natalia addresses poverty and inequality under Pinochet’s lasting neoliberal economic model, the student uprisings that led to the estallido social, her traumatic eye injury and her political beginnings.
Chile's constituent process, which, led by the consistent work of social movements, seeks to dismantle the first laboratory of neoliberal capitalism, offers lessons to the left in the UK and worldwide.
Through one character's journey meeting everyday heroes of resistance and telling their stories, Luis Manuel Claps documents the wave of organised resistance to large-scale industrial mining that spread from from the south of Patagonia as far as the Amazon.
La mirada incendiada (The Burning Gaze, 2021) attempts to work through recent trauma, yet risks sensationalising a catastrophic event remembered by many Chileans, not least the families of the aggrieved.
In 'Animales Extintos', Lucas Quintana takes a closer look at the cultures within which machismo exists, offering a sensitively rendered vision of the toxicity of certain male friendships, and their potentially noxious consequences.
The iniquitous ISDS system allows mining companies to sue Latin American governments for massive amounts of 'compensation' every time their mining activities are blocked by local community opposition or environmental concerns.
Vale mining is finally forced to pay compensation to Minas Gerais state, but the victims of the Brumadinho disaster are not consulted. In Chile, Antofagasta mining faces strike action. From LAB's London Mining Network blog.
A small community takes on mining giant Anglo American which drains aquifers of water while households are forced to queue at water tankers ... just part of Chile's dictatorship legacy where water, like everything else, is a trade commodity
Carole Concha Bell interviews Nick MacWilliam about his new Alborada Films documentary 'Santiago Rising', digging deeper into the estallido social in Chile and how to effectively capture the sentiments and events of this social movement.
“I wanted to capture what was happening in Chile and to pay homage to the strength and commitment of the Chilean people. They are taking on neo-liberalism and a militarised state with stones and trumpets. This is a lesson for the rest of the world, we can learn so much from them."