Evidently none of you were worried that I had been kidnapped by right-wing guerrillas. And I am sorry for not writing sooner, but Chile is experiencing a severe shortage of knotted strings to write messages on. Plus, the llamas are on strike, so I had to trek all the way over the Andes on foot to relay my message in Mendoza. There are no rest stops on the glaciers and I had nothing to sustain me but mate, alpaca milk, and jerky made from the skin of Inca mummies high on Aconcagua.
The reality is a little different. As best I understand it, the story goes something like this: Pinochet, in the twilight of his dictatorship, promulgated a law which reduced funding for public education and increased subsidies for private schools both K12 and collegiate.
This destroyed what had previously been a pristine public education system, if you are to believe the protestors. So in , students decided to express their support for an updated law by doing exactly what they had been taught to do in civics class: they went on strike. The immediate cause was an increase in the college entrance exam fee, and soon enough, high school and college students across Chile were striking, protesting, and occupying buildings.
At the height of the protests, something like , students were marching against the educational system. And they succeeded, sort of, since eventually the government of President Michelle Bachelet a single mother running a male-centered country, note consented to drafting a new education law. Two years later, the new education law is finally up for a vote, and the students, unhappy that the new law is not a carbon copy of their Port Huron Statement, are striking again.
No one else was around, except for professors and some grad studentsβand apparently they had been locked out of their offices until shortly before we arrived and unable to work. Santiago is, generally speaking, a colorful city; USACH does not acknowledge this aspect of its host. The buildings are white with blue trim; between the brown grass and gray sky, the blue is the only hint of color anywhere on campus. Instead of providing a much-needed burst of hue, the blue trim mocks the lack of color, as if to suggest a tantalizing escape from the black-and-white world and end up being only a tease.
