National Strike
When I arrived in Chile there was an ongoing tumult of student protests against various problems with the education system. Hundreds of thousands of students left classes to march in the streets of Santiago and other cities in Chile in the months before I arrived. Just before I came, the government had made a few minor concessions to the student protesters without really addressing any of their fundamental demands for education reform, and the movement, which sadly seemed to have been too unorganized from the beginning, lost its momentum and fizzled out shortly after I arrived. There were a few larger protests in Valparaíso right after I got there, but at the time my Spanish was almost nil and I didn’t know what was going on around me anyway.
On August, 29th the unions and some of the leftist political parties organized a nationwide, general strike, which was to be accompanied by as many forms of protests as possible, from marches, to gatherings to work stoppages. The organizers purposefully didn’t get permits from the government to protest. Unfortunately, their actions were also to be accompanied by a minority of presumably politically ignorant, violent youth and an equally violent response by the police. Due to the activity and the presumed danger our English classes were canceled for the last half of that day and Tyra and I decided that we needed to check out the action and carry our cameras with us to photograph whatever might take place.
Hiding behind a tree.
I left the Grants office along with my work obligations for the day with Darren and in the direction of Tyra’s apartment. Walking out of the office we saw several people in business attire walking past, obviously suffering the effects of teargas discharged by the police on Alameda, but otherwise things seemed calm and as usual. Darren and I veered away from Alameda, the main avenue through the downtown, not so much to avoid the supposedly tumultuous events taking place there but to stop by and talk to a girl that Darren was into who worked at a sandwich shop. She was all smiles but complained that the teargas was making it all the way down to her restaurant. After leaving the girl Darren and I headed up the street towards Alameda and saw a handful of people off in the distance in the street throwing things at the police and we headed in the other direction. Everything on the way was peaceful but passing every subway station the unmistakable oder of teargas lingered heavily in the air. We finally arrived at Darren’s apartment, which overlooks Plaza Italia, one of the main centers of the metropolis. Earlier that morning, he had sat on his apartment balcony and watched as a huge crowd gathered in the plaza to listen to speeches and begin the protests for the day. The plan was to march down la Alameda towards la Moneda, the Chilean equivalent to the White House in the US. There they would merge with other groups that had gathered at other parts of the city. People spoke on the megaphone and people gathered for hours as the police presence began escalating as well. Finally some kids came around and started breaking the glass displays on the bus stops and the police began to disperse the crowd with water cannons and teargas bombs. They blocked the Alameda so that they couldn’t march down towards la Moneda as they had planned. Around midday the police had dispersed the majority of the crowds gathering around the city and thwarted their intentions to congregate in front of la Moneda. By the time we had arrived to the plaza it was empty and all the remained was the ticker tape and banners left by the protesters along with the smell of the teargas. I left Darren at his apartment and continued the short distance to Tyra’s place.
I get freakin’ licked by the cops.
When I met Tyra we shared a light lunch and she gathered her camera along with her arsenal of equipment and headed over to my apartment through Parque Forestal so that I could change out of my work clothes and grab my camera as well. The day was looking beautiful and ripe for action.
The carabineros attack the press.
We headed over to the back side of la Moneda straight through the downtown and were surprised to see nothing but various contingents of police in full riot gear. We walked over to Alameda on the front side of la Moneda to find a number of curious people standing around along with a very large police presence. The government was not allowing protesters to enter the plazas in front of and behind la Moneda and the guanacos, the water cannon trucks named after an endemic and spitting cameloid, menacingly shot water into the street to scare off potential trespassers, mostly with the effect of getting the few passing buses and taxis wet. From the side of the road Tyra and I started to hear signs of the only actually political protest we would witness that day. Some protesters were marching up from the opposite side of the road carrying banners and chanting slogans, when as they tried to cross Alameda they were fiercely repulsed and broken up by guanacos and tear gas bombs in what must have been under a minute. After that things seemed to die down again and feeling a little disappointed Tyra and I decided to sit down in the grassy median of Alameda just to wait and see if anything else happened.
This guy must have experience.
It turns out that we had walked straight into the middle of where everything was about to occur, a farcical game of cat and mouse between the carabineros and a relatively small group of demonstrators probably not even old enough to be in high school yet. To my eyes it was a good old-fashioned exercise in destructive fun for both sides. Completely pointless for both parties. Some young kids in the median not far from Tyra and I started throwing rocks at the heavily armored police vehicles and the police response was to circle the strip with two guanacos spouting torrents of water heavily laced with pepper spray, with Tyra and I sitting there innocently in the middle with our cameras. If fact, almost everyone hanging out there were photographers, professional or amateur. The extremity of the response caught us all by surprise and a group of us huddled behind a large tree to avoid an oncoming gust of water. The spray caught on the branches of the tree we were sheltering behind and collected into a toxic foam, and dripped of like a giant glob of toxic snot right onto the person just in front of me. Suddenly there was a double spray from another guanaco directly behind us which caught Tyra changing the film in her Nikon and drenched her from head to toe right down to her underwear, and by the time I looked back I was caught dead between both streams of acidified water, and I raced straight towards the truck in an attempt to dive under the oncoming stream, just avoiding the heart of it but still I finding myself engulfed in the wide acidic mist and my face and arms began to burn. The trucks continued circling and spraying the median but we were able to slip away. The pain from the gaunacos spit began to diminished and Tyra, who had taken a much worse hit than I had, after calming down agreed to stick around for a while longer to see what might happen. We both felt a little emboldened at having survived the assault.
Teargasing the Univesity of Chile
After that, the game of cat and mouse accelerated and the carabineros were able to arrest a handful of kids throwing rocks by expending a lot of energy, teargas bombs, and truckloads of water spat from the cannons of the guanacos. We watched as the carabineros arrested one man selling lemons, which help to counter the effects of the tear gas. Never mind that the vast majority of his customers were undoubtedly innocent people just passing by who had been caught in the crossfire.
Dogs + Guanacos = Love 4 Ever
Apparently the events we saw that day weren’t very atypical and I find the whole situation with these protests lamentable. The people actually protesting typically do so for good reasons and with good intentions. Unfortunately, this typically brings out youth who may or may not be politically “turned on” who destroy public property (inexplicably, much more public than private property) and provoke the police. Almost invariably they are labeled as anarchists by the media and the government even though it’s doubtful that more than a handful of the people the police arrest know anything about anarchist philosophy or history. The police use this as an excuse to crack down on legitimate protesters, the government uses it to ignore their demands, and the predominantly ultraconservative media uses it to villainize them and sensationalize the entire situation and to make a profit.
Even the cops have gotta chill after all that running around.
The one amusing aspect of the whole business is that the street dogs absolutely love these demonstrations. They get caught up and wound up by the chases between the police and the delinquents. For them the guanacos are the greatest toy that could ever exist. It’s normal to see the dogs running towards the jets of water being shot out just as the people are fleeing them. The pepper spray doesn’t seem to put them off either, and having seen the dogs drink the trickle coming from an idle cannon I wonder if they even like it.
This is the kid who was throwing rocks at the police vehicles that prompted their attack against us. I caught up with him later and he let me photograph him after covering his face.
It wasn’t until we starting walking home that Tyra and I realized we were tired. He had expended more energy than we realized through the whole ordeal. When we got to my apartment I gave Tyra some dry clothes and we put hers in front of the heater to dry, went to a cheap restaurant to get a good dinner and checked out our photos.
El Valle Colorado
The next morning I awoke to get ready for work as any other day. The dried pepper spray burned on my face as I turned on the shower and the water gave it new life, but it eased quickly as it rinsed away. There was only one day of classes between me and my second time skiing the Andean slopes and this time we were going to a ski resort just adjacent to la Parva. By that time it was much later into the season and the snow was just beginning to turn slushy in some parts. The day of the trip was perfectly clear and sunny, which is good weather to be in but caused the snow to become icy after the sun reached a high enough point. Clearly visible below us was a thick blanket of brown smog covering Santiago and the surrounding valley. It was some of the worst smog the city had seen in a long time and I simultaneously felt repulsion and happiness that I was above it. These complaints aside, the skiing remained descent and there were some challenging runs. Furthermore the company was good. I managed to enjoy it so much that I even talked to Ed about arranging the next ski trip myself, but in the end I put aside the idea since the season was already nearing its end and the thought of skiing over a film of water sitting on a layer of ice made the effort suddenly not seem worthwhile.
