ISR Issue 49, September–October 2006

Eyewitness report of the Chilean struggle

“I've never seen such a massive radicalization”

The following is an eyewitness report from FEDERICO MORENO, a member of the International Socialist Organization living in Argentina, who traveled to Chile in solidarity with the student movement.

I WAS there for the climactic mobilization on June 5, before the whole thing started calming down. It was pretty crazy because Chile is still heavily militarized, and the repression is outright and brutal. That Monday [June 5] there were clashes all day. In the morning there were barricades. Street battles literally [took place] all day. Towards the evening, people tried to gather on the Alameda [the main thoroughfare] and it was a constant coming and going.

We would gather, the police would shoot their water cannon and we would run. Some would run into lines of carabineros [military police], get beaten up, and thrown into a police wagon. We would gather again (there would be more people), they would repress and disperse us again...we would gather again....

More than the protests, what was most exciting were the occupations. Literally, on every other block you would see a wall that looked like a medieval fortress. At the high schools, the kids had taken out the tables and chairs and propped them against the fences with the legs sticking out. Some had even sharpened the legs. At every school there were 40-100 kids permanently there. They had gotten used to routine attacks by cops or Nazis, and had a twenty-four-hour rotating watch. Kids on the roof and behind the gates, with boxes of prepared Molotovs, rocks, and clubs. I even saw a kid with a paintball gun at one school. We're talking 15 or 16-year-old kids.

At one school, there was an elementary school kid, eleven years old...at the assembly (at every school we stopped at in our long tours that went on into the night, they would call an immediate assembly to hear us out and discuss things with us) talking down the LOCE, neoliberalism, with incredible clarity. Eleven years old! The level of politicization and radicalization was incredible, and without the baggage of left jargon... it was clear that these kids weren't taking theory to practice...but arriving at a Marxist analysis from their experience.

I realized this at one occupation, where the kids had been there with little to eat and no heating for a month, weariness and low spirits were visible. At one point in the assembly, someone asked if the whole of what they were fighting for was even possible, because Bachelet had said there wasn't enough money. We began to explain that the price of one of the jets the government had just bought, or 2 percent of the extra money given to the armed forces last year, or .02 percent of the copper royalties were each enough to pay for the entire list of demands. [We argued that] the money is there, but that the government serves the interests of another class, and so winning is possible but only by fighting to tear the money away from them, as we had already seen in the recent retreats from “there's no money for anything” to “PSU and passes for free for 4/5 of students.” The kids said “Yeah.” They saw it, they understood immediately and you could see how their spirits were lifted significantly by the time we left.

In Valparaiso, we stayed a couple of days at the occupied university. The stories they told of the fights with cops and Nazis were serious street battle images. At one point, a cop tank smashed a student into a gate, shattering his pelvis, yet the rain of Molotovs and bricks from the roof meant the cops have always had to retreat. Here, too, there were twenty-four-hour watches at the gates of each faculty, escorts of four students with clubs for anyone wanting to go from one faculty to another. We chased off a car of Nazis one night.

It really is a massive movement. I've never seen anything with this level of massive radicalization. Imagine this... at one point a small group of socialists got a call in their office from a student from a Catholic high school. The students got their number from a little flier the socialists had distributed. The student asked for help to occupy his school. Six of them came to the office and ended up asking if they could organize the occupation there at the office. So the next day, 100 students showed up at the office and, by the end of the week, they had occupied their school.