Student Mobilizations Produce Chile’s Largest Protests Since the Fall of Pinochet:

While President Bachelet Cracks Down on Demonstrators, Chilean People Reject Neoliberal Education Policies Created By U.S.-Backed Dictatorship

We are here in support of students and their parents and friends in Chile who are in struggle against capitalist attacks on their rights to free education. They sent an urgent request for solidarity actions and demonstrations to take place around the world due to the repression (state attacks) they are recieving. They have been repeatedly attacked by Police and Fascist groups. We stand together around the world in struggle and solidarity to fight the many different kinds of attacks on very different peoples everywhere that are all caused by the same capitalist system of putting power and profit over people and planet. Please see below for full information on the situation on Chile and for weblinks for further coverage:

VALPARAÍSO, CHILE: 800,000 high school and college students persist in a fourth week of strikes throughout Chile while student leaders attempt to reach an agreement with the Ministry of Education over their complex set of demands. What began in May as set of requests for free id cards, public transportation and more accessible prices for Chile’s college entrance exam has since grown into the largest mobilization the country has seen since the protests that ended military rule in the late eighties. Secondary school students on strike were joined by university students last week as both an act of solidarity and a way to push their own demands. While university student are participating in strikes and marches the face of the movement and the force behind it are los secudarios - secondary school students, age 13-18. A poll taken following Monday’s general nation-wide strike shows that the secondary school movement enjoys an 87 percent approval rating from their compatriots, while only 16 percent of Chileans support the presidency’s response to the mobilization. With this political leverage in hand, the generation that was born into a democratic, post-Pinochet Chile is demanding a reform of education policies created by the dictatorship that remain in place today. This year the price of copper hit record levels, producing a large trade and budget surplus for the government. This raised Chileans’ expectations for what the newly elected executive government can and should provide in response to their demands. Workers in the health field also went on strike last week, inquiring about resources owed to them by government. In Valparaíso, employees of LIDER, Chile’s largest department store, marched alongside students during Monday’s general strike. Also present were several indigenous Mapuches bearing their nation’s flag, who were thanked for their presence and offered solidarity with their political prisoners in a speech by student leaders.

Students have occupied 46.7 percent of secondary schools throughout the country in the last two weeks. Although inside their schools student have received more petty threats from neo-nazi groups than they have from police, on the streets of Santiago the “special armed forces,” or riot cops, have reacted harshly to student protests. Over 1,000 students have been arrested in Santiago in the past two weeks and police have used their traditional tactics of tear gas and tanks equipped with contaminated water to force protestors away from a march or action. Despite president Michelle Bachelet’s dismissal of the chief of police responsible for ordering acts of police brutality that occurred on May 30th, violence has persisted in the capital. While student leaders in Santiago requested that students remain in their schools for the Monday’s national strike in order to avoid potential police conflicts, 20,000 took to the streets downtown. Behind the locked the gates of their schools, students have been organizing both the practical aspects of living on campus and caring for each others’ needs, as well as the future of their movement. They take turns shopping, cooking, sleeping in the schools and soliciting donations for food. A vast majority of the youths’ time is spent in discussion of the movement’s course and in the basic maintenance of cleaning and caring for their school.

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