Santiago de Chile, November 2019

It has been a crazy few days in Santiago. November 2019 was the month when the events of the film Blade Runner occurred. This city is doing its best to live up to Ridley Scott’s distopian vision. Helicopters circle overhead constantly, sirens wail at all hours and hundreds of traffic lights have been smashed. The remnants of tear gas waft throughout the city, tickling the bag of your throat and drying out your eyeballs.
Although the madness has been good for my Instagram story metrics it hasn’t been much good for anything else. It has been over two weeks since the original explosion when the now infamous subway fare rise incited a social uprising that absolutely nobody saw coming. Although the military enforced curfew has ended and the soldiers themselves are off the streets, things don’t seem to be calming down. Over the last 48 hours we have had a 6.2 earthquake tremor and I have witnessed violent clashes between protestors and police from my apartment balcony. Today, the hill is on fire. I am a big fan of the San Cristobal Hill. I usually spend my Sundays there on quad wrenching cycles. Seeing it on fire is tough. The official cause has not been revealed but it would be an awful coincidence for it to have spontaneously combusted given the current situation. Luckily the forest fire fighting pilots have been doing an incredible job. Planes and helicopters have been swooping in and around Santiago’s high rise buildings to douse the flames.

All this chaos is tough on one’s mental state. You are worried about what is going to happen next. What will be burned? Who will be shot? Will the country swing hard left or hard right? It also has led me to reflect on how I view the protesters and their demands. A part of me wants to disagree with them. It abhors their violence and destruction and just wants everything to get back to normal. I work in advertising. People don’t tend to purchase ads when their local supermarket is burnt to a crisp and they have seen their neighbour looting an industrial size pack of hot dog sausages.
On the other hand, I realize that I myself am the product of a relatively healthy welfare state. Due to my relatively affordable education I have been transplanted into a higher strata of Chilean society where every door is open for me. Both of my parents are teachers, public sector teachers who come from long lines of civil servants. Parents like them in Chile could never dream of providing their children with the same opportunities they gave me. The protesters are on to something in this sense.
But, I am finding it tough reach a definitive opinion. There is an anarchist element to the movement where anything and everything is a target. Last night they managed to turn my street into Baghdad in a matter of minutes. Benches burnt, windows smashed and shops looted. Santiago is their playground as these vandals engage in a running battle with the police. They swiftly erect flaming barricades and move on to the next street. Another traffic light to smash, another bin bag to sacrifice to the flames. Many have been doing this for years, battle hardened from the student protests from several years ago. For others it was a dream come true to throw stones at the military. All their life they have heard stories of the horror of the military dictatorship and now they had their chance to get revenge.
Yesterday two policewomen were injured as a Molotov cocktail smashed into them. The peaceful protesters seem powerless to stop the violence yet it is getting harder to justify their failure to intervene, or at least their failure to try. As such, they become complicit to the wanton destruction that plagues the city.
The police do not help matters either. They are insanely heavy handed. I mean, these guys are nuts. It really does beggar belief especially now the eyes of the world are on events taking place here. A lot of them seem to believe they are John Rambo types. Just as the city is a playground for the vandals it is a setting for these cops to try their hand at urban warfare. I saw up close how they used their shotguns last night. What should be used as a last resort is used as a crowd dispersion tactic. The steel pellets have caused hundreds of eye injuries. Life changing injuries that will surely be highlighted by NGOs for months to come. There are also some worrying reports about police abuse of detainees but given the sheer scale of detentions, this was always likely.
Luckily, there haven’t been more deaths. In fact it is almost miraculous. We had a few days of absolute chaos with hundreds of (untrained for the job) soldiers on the streets. The death count of those killed by state forces stands at 5. For reference US police have shot and killed 768 people this year. It could have been a lot worse.
This brings me to how Chilean people see the situation. Words like dictatorship and torture are being thrown around very lightly by many of the protesters. Buildings are daubed with graffiti comparing the the president to the dictator Augusto Pinochet. This is something I find surprising considering the country suffered these evils not so long ago. Alternatively, this may make the population even more susceptible to such fears. Yet many chants call for Piñera’s resignation, something that would threaten the validity of the country’s institutions. The origin of Chile’s unequal society can be found in the dictatorship period but the problems have been solidified by subsequent left and right wing governments in the 30 years since. Piñera may have shown himself to be somewhat of an idiot, but he is Chile’s democratically elected idiot. He is not the only cause of the problem and replacing him is unlikely to solve it.

Fake news has played a huge part in this toxic environment as well. It is the first time I have seen it up close and how it can wreak havoc. People re-tweet and share anything and everything, especially when it has to do with police violence. I have seen so called “digital natives” be duped by the simplest of fakes. Their analytical capabilities voided by their anger at the purported abuses. Many of the fires and acts of violence are branded as “montajes”: works of destruction permitted or orchestrated by the state to damage the movement. These theories go viral quickly, incentivizing hate and driving people out onto the streets. It is almost like there is a subconscious desire for it all to be true, for the torture to exist and for this particular government to be acting like a dictatorship. This would be the ultimate justification for the violence, the destruction of infrastructure and the suffering caused for many. Strange I know, but I can’t quite get my head around it. Probably because I am not Chilean.
In politics things are moving very slowly with regards to fixing the situation. Both right and left wing politicians seem to be engaged in a competition to see who produce the stupidest and most inflammatory statements. Everyone seems to be looking to produce sound bites that will do well on social media but that have no real substance. This, instead of actually getting to work and coming up with bipartisan measures that could help to calm things down. It is exasperating. Give me Fine Gael and Fianna Fail any day of the week!
