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Camila Vallejo, the World’s Most Glamorous Revolutionary →

Camila Vallejo, the 23-year-old president of the University of Chile student federation (FECH), a Botticelli beauty who wears a silver nose ring and studies geography, was the most prominent leader of a student protest movement that had paralyzed the country and shattered Chile’s image as Latin America’s greatest political and economic success story. The march that Thursday afternoon in November would be the 42nd since June

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Sebastián Piñera’s right-wing government was plunged into perpetual crisis. The Harvard-educated Piñera, founder of Chile’s major credit card, Bancard, and Chile’s first president since Pinochet to come from the right, promised to govern Chile and its economy in a new way — as a businessman whose billions didn’t come from mining or manufacturing but from investments. The student movement exposed the Piñera Way as business as usual — if public education was virtually abolished under Pinochet in the ’80s, his successors had done nothing to bring it back.

Just 40 percent of Chilean children receive a free secondary-school education, in underfinanced public schools; the rest attend partly subsidized charter or private schools. To finance their university educations, most students take out bank loans, which saddle them and their families with years of debt. Piñera defended Chile’s educational system by calling education “a consumer good.” Vallejo countered, saying that education was a fundamental right and that “for more than 30 years,” entrepreneurs had “speculated and grown wealthy off the dreams and expectations of thousands of young people and Chilean families.” By September, Piñera’s popularity ratings, so robust after the rescue of the Chilean miners in October 2010, had sunk to 22 percent, the lowest of any Chilean president in modern history, while the student movement’s national approval rating stood at 72 percent.

Manual de seducción según Adanowsky

futurejournalismproject:

Last week, photojournalist Jason Suder was arrested for taking photos of police brutality during a demonstration in Santiago, Chile. He tells the story in gripping detail here.

Whether it’s for education reform or ending police brutality, Chileans love to demonstrate. No matter how peaceful a protest begins, the special forces arrive in their armored cars and Ninja Turtle suits, stirring a violent response from the encapuchados, or masked vandals. As the hooded youths throw rocks, the police launch tear gas and target journalists with water cannons, showering them with chemicals. At the end of these weekly showdowns, tattered and beaten teenagers are locked up and a public space is destroyed in the clash between the Carabineros, the impenetrable force of military-trained police left over from the Pinochet era, and their masked opponents.

Photographing the events isn’t illegal in Chile, but evidence of police brutality is still undesirable and action is taken accordingly. Suder managed to save his photographs, one pictured above, by hiding his memory cards in his socks. He concludes:

In a country trying to improve its press freedoms, I had obeyed the law. I had done nothing wrong. I had done nothing illegal. In Chile, you are allowed to take pictures freely in a public space.

I was just being a moral person and a conscientious journalist. If documenting police brutality is enough cause to detain a person, then perhaps the country has not come as far from the dictatorship years as it might have hoped.

Suder also notes that Chile fell 47 spots in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index 2011-2012, an international ranking that measures countries by their treatment of the media. 

H/T: The Chilean Student Movement

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

At least twice a week. -____-

(Source: mexicankidproblems)

guardian:

Chilean protester Camila Vallejo: ‘You need collective organisation and action’

Vice-president of the University of Chile Student Federation, 23-year-old Camila Vallejo has led a campaign for better access to education that began in April 2011. The student movement in Chile opposes neoliberalism and shook the country’s elitist democracy. She was voted person of the year in a poll of guardian.co.uk readers

(Source: )

selucha:

arevolutionbetweenthelines:

-Salvador Allende interview

There’s a reason this man continues to inspire so many people almost 40 years after his death. Compare his passion, his concern, and his eloquence with the evasive and heartless politicians of this country and you will see that, for all his flaws, Salvador Allende was a great man with an unparalleled love for humanity.

Interviewed by Saul Landau!

Names to know in 2012: Who will matter when it comes to Latin American affairs?

univisionnews:

Henrique Capriles Radonski rises as the biggest challenger to president Hugo Chávez in the Venezuelan October 2012 Presidential Elections. (MCadenas45)

By SANDRO MAIRATA
Channel: Latin American Affairs

This is not a list of preferences, recognition of excellence, or our idea of disapproval. We simply compiled this list of Latin Americans to watch in 2012 based on their previous record and the impact their defeats or victories will have on their countries.

So, without further ado, here they are:

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Camila Vallejo, Chilean student leader, named Person of the Year by ‘The Guardian’ readers

univisionnews:

Camila Vallejo has been hailed as a Chilean icon for the student movement and for local politics by both critics and supporters. (Manuel Venegas/Alejandro Bonilla) 

By SANDRO MAIRATA 
Channel: Latin American Affairs

Time magazine struck a cord a week ago by naming “The Protester” – an anonymous, undistinguishable, yet familiar character embodying an assorted mix of demonstrators from the ranks of the Occupy (You Name It) movement against corporate greed, while also encompassing the freedom fighters of the Arab world, and marchers from India, Spain, Greece, and Russia – as its Person of the Year 2011.

The prestige of being selected for this honor is impressively enduring, with tons of buzz surrounding the election of Marc Zuckenberg in 2010, or the conspicuous absence of the late Steve Jobs.

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