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...
This article was sent to LAB by a correspondent based in Santiago.
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,...
Immediately following the military coup in Chile on September 11 1973, the Pinochet dictatorship set about destroying as much as they could lay their hands on of the hugely popular wave of commited art and culture which had supported and given a voice to Popular Unity, its supporters and to millions of ordinary Chileans.
Bem viver, the good life, is possible -- LAB Newsletter December 2019
Distributing medicinal plants to houses in Cabelo Seco.
This has been an extraordinary year, with many setbacks but some remarkable signs of hope. To celebrate the latter, we report on our partner project Rios de Encontro, in Marabá,...
On 20 November, a
group of four women known as Las Tesis from Valparaíso, Chile, unknowingly
started what would become an international phenomenon in the global struggle
against sexism and gender-based violence: they performed the anti-machista
anthem and routine ‘Un Violador en tu Camino’ for the first time.
The group hoped that the song would spread feminist theory
in...
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A wave of protest sweeps the continent
On the 18th of October 2019, mass
fare dodging in Santiago de Chile expanded into city-wide protests and
violence. Initially in response to a transport price hike, the situation
subsequently developed into a
nation-wide movement against Chile’s stark inequality issues. Amongst the
cities where protests and marches are in full swing is Talca, where students of
the University of Talca have voted this...