Friday, 25th of October, more than 1 million Chileans went out on the streets of Santiago,
in a country of around 17 million people. You had hundreds of thousands of people
out across other cities. This is nearly 10% of the population protesting.
People are getting shot, tortured. Three women, peacefully protesting in a square,
two police vans came up and they were threatened with being gang-raped.
We have up to now five confirmed murders by the state security services of protesters.
Two people have died in custody, there have been another 17 deaths or so.
There've been over 1,400 people injured.
Over a 140 people people that seem to have been blinded by these pellet bullets
the police seem to be shooting at people's faces and at people's bodies.
Well there's various slogans being used in the protest.
There's one that's used a lot which is 'Chile despertó.' Which means chile has woken up.
A culmination of grievances of debt, of poverty, of inequality, of poor public services,
of people dying in hospitals because there's a lack of medicine.
It's not 30 pesos, this was just a trigger, it's 30 years of neoliberal tyranny that they've been living through.
Really, it's more than 30 years, it's more than 46 years because the model began
through the butchery of Chilean democracy under the Pinochet dictatorship.
The dictatorship was so vicious in its repression that people were rightly scared.
I think what's really interesting is that young people are at the forefront of today's protests in Chile
because a lot of them don't have direct knowledge of the levels of repression
that were used under Pinochet.
Their parents or their family members might but they don't have that same fear
that meant that lots of Chileans went along with this pacted democracy that
was created in 1990 out of fear that a return to fascism would take place.
A common slogan being used in Chile today is that:
'neoliberalism was born in Chile and it will die in Chile.'
Neoliberalism, this extreme form of capitalism that was created by a guy called Milton Friedman
and those around him at the University of Chicago.
The interesting thing about Chile was that
Chilean students were sent to the University of Chicago to study with Milton Friedman.
They became disciples of his. When the coup took place
these 'Chicago Boys' as they were known, were the ones at the forefront
of advising and implementing the neoliberal shock therapy that was put in place in Chile
that went along with the murder, the assassination, the concentration camps, the torture.
They were both key elements to the model that was put in place under Pinochet to repress those
that were against this. My parents were young medical students at the time of the coup,
they were supporters of the Salvador Allende government.
My dad was 19 when he was arrested shortly after the coup and he spent nearly a year in
concentration camps and torture centres. My mum was 22 and she spent over a year
in some of the most brutal torture centres and concentration camps in Chile.
It's really important to remember the levels of violence and repression that
accompanied this bloody birth of neoliberalism which was then used as a
model in places like the UK under Thatcher, in the US under Reagan.
I think people uprising against injustice is not something that is isolated to Chile.
As we see today across Latin America people are rising up
against austerity, against social injustice, against poverty, against inequality.
We see the same in Britain today. We see it in the US as well.
So, there is a connection between what's happening in Santiago to what's happening in Salford
to what's happening in Sacramento. It's a uprising that we're in different forms
by people who have had enough of this tyrannical, fanatical ideology;
created by the few, for the few.
Even though the scenes of repression, the accounts of torture are distressing
and have echoes of that dark past of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chile has awoken.
Neoliberalism was born in Chile and it should die in Chile.
We owe it to the Chileans to help them in their struggle to create a fairer society
and to put that past of a dictatorship that lives on
in the Constitution and that lives on in the economic model that terrorises Chileans.
We should support Chileans looking for a fairer Chile
Mainstream media are not properly reporting what's going on in Latin America.
It's essential that people look for information elsewhere.
That's why media outlets like Double Down News are essential
for people today wanting to know what's really going on in places like Chile.
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