Student uprising leader brings charisma to a Chilean winter

[rabs]

Source: Guardian UK



Not since the days of Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos has Latin America been so charmed by a rebel leader. This time, there is no ski mask, no pipe and no gun, just a silver nose ring.

Meet Commander Camila, a student leader in Chile who has become the face of a populist uprising that some analysts are calling the Chilean winter. Her press conferences can lead to the sacking of a minister. The street marches she leads shut down sections of the Chilean capital. She has the government on the run, and now even has police protection after receiving death threats.

Yet six months ago, no one had heard of Camila Vallejo, the 23-year-old spearheading an uprising that has shaken not only the presidency of the billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera, but the entire Chilean political class. Opinion polls show that 26% of the public support Piñera and only 16% back his recently ousted Concertación coalition.

Wednesday saw the start of a two-day nationwide shutdown, as transport workers and other public-sector employees joined the burgeoning student movement in protest.



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/chile-student-leader-camila-vallejo

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Today was the first of a two-day nationwide strike (including the massive student movement) that his paralyzed sectors of daily life the length of Chile. There have been the usual clashes with hooded thugs (suspected to be police and pinochetista infiltrators to mar the strike with violence), tear gas, water cannon and police clubs.

The strike continues tomorrow when the CUT, the country's umbrella workers' union, will have its members out marching to the center of Santiago from three (or four) directions.

This is the right-winger President Pinera's most serious political crisis since he assumed power 17 months ago.

Things might get mighty dicey tomorrow.

[Amonester]

1. Solidaridad

Con Camila!



K & R

[rabs]

2. Camila

Her brains and charisma have put right-winger President Pinera in a real bind. She acknowledges her looks, but stresses that her message is much more paramount. Death threats against her have been appearing on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and she and her family are now under Carabinero police protection by order of the Supreme Court.

She has become well-known in Latin American and European student circles.

[Amonester]

3. Thank you so much for posting her story.

"We do not want to improve the actual system; we want a profound change – to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee.

"Why do we need education? To make profits? To make a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development? Those are the issues in dispute."


(I'm assume there must be a typo in that last paragraph at the Gdn link, and I took the freedom to correct it here.)

[rabs]

6. You're very welcome and good catch

It was bad punctuation on the part of the Guardian.

Translating that last graf back into Spanish, she was posing rhetorical questions -- to make profits? to start a business?

Fyi, some of Chilean students already are comparing Camila to La Pasionaria of Spanish Civil War fame. Romantic, but way too early.

This young woman has been indoctrinated in Communist dogma since childhood. Her parents are Communists who somehow survived the dangerous, 19-year Pinochet period.

[Judi Lynn]

4. This is a good time for people like Camila to help Chileans remember what they have suffered

at the hands of the U.S. planted and supported, unelected puppet, butcher dictator Augusto Pinochet, some of whose adherents populate the current Pinera administration.

Even though the last right-wing President before Pinera was elected over 50 years ago in Chile, they need to remember what the can happen in Chile when the right gets the upper hand.

Wonderful time for a leftist leader to arise again. Hope it works out better this time than the last.

Buena suerte, Camila.

[marasinghe]

7. you said it. past time for the youth to step up & bear up Bolivar's, Marti's & Che's standard. n/t

[stevedeshazer]

5. +1