14 - 15 May - The Truth and the Blame Game

"Cuanto cuesta la escuele en tú país?", (how much does it cost to go to school in your country?)  Liya, our teacher asks us.

Ostensibly we are practising numbers and general conversation but Liya (pseudonym) is nothing if not lively and nothing if not topical. At the end of the road the school is on there are two students sitting high up on top of a bridge, banging a drum. The Carabineros gather at the bottom, hauling out large mattress like structures in case they fall. More students are arriving on the street corner throughout the day, we watch them through the first floor window in our break. They carry signs, which are mostly confiscated by the police for the inclusion of wooden sticks. Often their bags are searched before they are waved on. The interactions are polite and peaceful. The protests are not about the police, who, post military government, enjoy a slightly better reputation in Chile. The protests are for free education.

"At first," Liya tells me, in carefully simple Spanish, in our individual class that afternoon, "we were told that our education was expensive because we were a poor country, and could not have free schooling like England. But then we realised that other countries much poorer than us, in South America, did have free education. And so people have been protesting ever since. We have a new government now and we are hoping that our president will change things. She has been talking about it, but it kept getting blocked." 

As I read in my halting Spanish in a Spanish newspaper in an earlier class, the Chilean president has, in what I took to be an unprecedented move, sacked all her advisors and brought in a new cabinet. She seems, though my Spanish is not yet good enough to capture all the meaning, to be making, or preparing to make, a lot of changes. 

I am interested in the protest, but have been warned somewhat direly not to get involved in any protest by the UK gov travel website. Though to be honest I don't know why I would 'get involved' anyway. I don't understand the politics and if something horrific was happening, would probably do more good appealing to the press in my own country and garnering international pressure than shouting something at a government I am not a subject of in a language I don't understand. Because the press, you understand, can be a force for great good. They aren't, often. They seem to chose to be a great force for spreading bile. But they can be. It is possible. Some already are. Maybe, in a utopia, these could be the majority.

Dirk is all for it,

"Let's go and join the protest!" He says, "there might be a fight!" 

He has, I hope, his tongue firmly in his cheek, though there is some collective amusement when someone suggests we go and join them, and protest that the Spanish school we are attending is too expensive. (It isn't).

The idea that all protests in Chile are dangerous and violent is a little reductionist, and is partly what leads me to believe that the reason the united nations was not quicker to step in during Pinochet's rule, was a sense if writing off all protests as simply part of a 'hot blooded Latin American' fantasy. In fact, Liya tells us, with a hint of scorn, that this is a small protest and that in Chile there is a protest every day.

I talk to her later about thus idea that protests in Chile are violent and her face clouds over.

"The problem," she says, "is that we think in Chile that it was protests that gave us back our freedom, and the years under Pinochet were so extreme. We protest a lot now. It is our way. We are proud of it. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't."

What happens, against anybody's expectations, is not revealed until the following day, and is the reason for this blog being an amalgamation of two days. 

Two students, in the act of painting a sign for the protest in a public place, were shot dead by a man who rushed out of his nearby house with a gun. And simply shot them.

Liya, her usually vivacious face deeply sombre, tells us,

"Everybody is very shocked. Because nothing like this has happened in Chile."

Chile has a violent history. It has a history of student protesters being shot by military police during peaceful demonstrations, of student communist sympathisers being burned alive walking down the street under order of the government. But it doesn't, at least from Liya's point of view, have a history of violence, one Chilean against another. 

This protest turned bloody, not because of clashes with the Carabineros, or governmental suppression. But because one unhinged individual managed to get his hands on a gun. 

Chile's gun rules are strict and the carabineros, thought not considered military hired murderers any more, are nevertheless not to be messed with. This is a one off event of the kind that happens, every so often in London. It's a one off. It is not repeated for some time. But it is horribly tragic for those who happened, through no fault in their planning, to be passing through the wrong place at just the wrong time.

That the students were protesting is probably not part of it. It may be that the gunman was against free education. It is more likely he was just not in his right mind.

The media, that great potential force for good, decides, characteristically, not to be. 

"I read a newspaper article in Spanish yesterday" says Dirk, seriously over pisco sours, "and it absolutely gave the impression that the police killed those students. The headline said something like, 'student protesters shot - police' and the whole first two paragraphs were written so that it sounded as though the police had shot them. It only got round to admitting it was a crazed individual in the last paragraph. If you only skim read it, you would think that what happened is that the police shot them for protesting."

And for my sins, when we first hear about it from Liya, my poor Spanish allowing me only a darkly reflection insight into what she is saying, it is my first assumption too.

Is it on these sorts of things that a country is destabilised, on rumours and heresay, Chinese whispers and suspicion?

Perhaps the truth is simply much harder to accept. That they died for no reason in an accident of circumstance. Maybe, like the British papers which insist that the recession is purely due to immigrants stealing our jobs from under us, you just need something simple to blame. Every story needs an enemy. Perhaps, as I have often found myself rather mournfully thinking, George Orwell was right

Maybe we should make up a fictional enemy and unite the whole world against that. 

Candles burn this evening at the gates of the university, and we pause with the other, silent onlookers, and pay our respects, for what they are worth. Flowers are strewn on the pavement. When one candle blows out, a young man quietly steps forward and relights it.

A few days later Liya tells me that the government has made a commitment to phase in a free educator system. From what we know of this president, she means what she says. Liya's only concern is where the government will get the money from. 

Either way, perhaps in some way, though they didn't die for their cause but for happenstance, the death of those two students accomplished something. Or at least, was not in vain. The gunman is in jail and Chile is at peace with its government. At least as far as I see it.

Let's just hope the media reports it truthfully.