Thursday March 29 was a day of fury. The (Chilean) young, educated in failed schools, attacked distinctive symbols of power, wealth and consumerism. In an anarchic manner, and without political coordination, they attacked shops, burnt vehicles, assaulted Carabineros (Chile’s heavy-handed police force) and Judge Ana Chevesich, as they had done before with ex-Minister Eyzaguirre. To understand what happened, and not just to repress and imprison them, it is necessary to recognise that we are constructing a wretched society, with unbearable inequalities, that Transantiago (a new public transportation system introduced in Santiago, which was marked by inefficiencies and hardship for the poor, especially the students, provoking the disturbances) has only made more evident.

 

Chile has become a supermarket and the products crush us. This is the nature of capitalism, but now, in the 21^st century, they have acquired a life of their own. The prevailing system has given rise to two types of Chileans. Some who participate fully in power and wealth and accelerating their buying and selling of things and people. Others, without power or wealth, living in the system, but excluded. Neither the one nor the other is autonomous. Both are pestered by advertising and by the whirlwind of buying. The difference lies in that among the excluded the fetish for goods generates aspirations impossible to meet.

 

Politics, sports, everyday life and news appear to blend with products, promoted live and direct by those who fashion public opinion. Brands and people, business houses and families, mobiles and credit cards, appear entwined. The television and the communicators are seen and heard in La Dehesa and in Puente Alto, in Las Condes and Pudahuel. But in the rich neighbourhoods, the desires manipulated by the brands find release in the mall and in the supermarket. It is not the same for those inhabitants, especially the young, who live the poor ghettos on the fringes of Santiago. They are objects of the same communication system but are fully excluded from the others. Their wishes, also manipulated, are frustrated every day by not having the power to fulfil their aspirations to consume.

 

The excluded live, hemmed in small houses, far from schools and hospitals. They have to travel several kilometres to go to work in the rich neighbourhoods as domestic help or as construction workers. Their children, without educational centres or adequate sports facilities, are exposed from an early age to a highly risky environment, a street life where trafficking and crime prevails. The excluded are marked by hopelessness, the best friend of crime and violence.

 

Businessmen, politicians and the media react to the violence of the excluded demanding repression and prison. They do not listen to the proposals for effectively integrating the excluded. Nobody speaks of schools, health centres and integrated sports. Even less about neighbourhood without social segregation. They carry on without understanding that the fury and the accumulated resentment explain in large measure the increase in crime and also the violent episodes on the streets of Santiago on March 29.

 

The barriers have to be pulled down. The children of the rich and the poor have to go to the same schools. Good hospitals have to attend to women of modest means and to the rich. Territorial distribution should end the characteristic social segregation. Violence can be eradicated with social and territorial integration, constructing an egalitarian society, where relations among people are valued in place of relation among people and goods.

 

 

Translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee

 

The article was published in El Clarín, Chile, on April 5, 2007

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