August 18: Youth in Revolt

Word of the Day
Parra- student strikes

Santiago was pretty shaken up today, or at least the student age population was.
Chile has a very active student movement which was engaged in strikes in a lot of the campuses. Basically, the student movement is against the policies of current education minister Joaquin Lavín who is attempting to privatize the higher education sistem. While a lot of students are only involved in striking as a way to miss class, in a lot of ways I admire the student movement. While the majority of middle class American students have passively accepted the fact that ours is a higher education system where access to the best schools often means taking on seemingly absurb levels of debt, Chilean students aren't willing to just let educational assistance go without a fight. I've been blessed with a situation that will enable me to leave school with a reasonable amount of debt, but I have tons of friends for whom debt is a constant threat and preoccupation.
Student strikes are pretty normal in Chile though. A couple dozen people got arrested, some of the facultades had classes canceled, including the Public Affairs school. Meaning that I didn't have my econ class! Instead, I got to wander the city aimlessly for a few hours. I'd recently decided to try my hand at making a few photoessays on various themes, since I'm here for so long, and this led to an amusing/slightly scary incident. I was just photographing some buildings and graffiti when I was stopped by a police woman who asked what I was doing. I think what happened is that she thought I was photographing her motorcycle when I had taken an earlier shot. I pretended to be in a photo class that my friends are taking that attempts to explore the city through photography and eventually, this seemed to be acceptable for her. In retrospect, I probably just should have pretended to not understand Spanish. This has been a reasonably good strategy for dealing with people trying to sell me things on the street...
After a few hours, I finally went to my first class of "Copper, Globalization and the New Chilean Economy." It was a little different than I had expected. The professor followed the neoliberal line without deviation and spent a lot of the time bashing Latin America for the way it has managed its economies, which just felt sort of awkward. As someone who's only been involved in international development from the idea of "sustainable development," it was interesting to hear development defined without any people explicitly referred to in the definition: "reaching a organized, efficient and competitive society."
My problem with economics is exactly this: it proposes models are "correct", if you take out most of the real world factors and discount the people you will negatively effect with your policies. Despite the business and econonomics orientation of the class challenging some of my personal beliefs, I'm definitely sticking with the class because I am admittedly weak in my understanding of these areas as demonstrated by my failure to know the difference between Kondratiev, Kitchin, Kaplinsky, Juglar and Kutzenes curves and the economic thoughts of Wagemann, Ortega and Spengler (oy). At least I was ok on Schumpeter and "creative destruction." I was also really intrigued by what I'm pretty sure the professor introduced as the main "thesis" of the class: Asia has "gotten development right," leading to a tremendous need for raw primary materials which, if Latin America plays correctly, can lead it out of poverty. It's an interesting idea, although I'm not entirely sure I wholly agree with it because it disregards environmental impacts. Furthermore, while such a system would undoubtedly raise per capita incomes, without specific policies to address tremendous income inequalities, I don't know how economic stability would be attained in the long term.
I think it will be a good challenge to have a professor who I don't really agree with. Who knows, maybe I'll come out of class spewing the neoliberal gospel :P

On the way home, I ran into another protest, this one for the freedom of Mapuche (Chile's main indigenous group) political prisoners in Plaza Nuñoa, the "town square" of my comuna. I'm not totally sure of the number (around 50?) prisoners who the Mapuche argue are being held on political grounds, have been detained under Law No.18.314, an anti-terror law enacted under Pinochet. 30 Mapuche prisoners have been on a hunger strike since mid-July and the protest was organized to push for their release.This protest stayed peaceful, featuring speeches, traditional dances and a "war yell" as the police watched from a small distance.

This year is such a fascinating time to be in Chile. Between the bi-centennial, the student movement, Mapuche activism, earthquake recovery and struggles surrounding the election of the first right wing president since the dictatorship, the dynanism and conflict of Chilean society is constantly apparent.