Chile's explosion of protest

2011-10-26 · first published in ESSF · 127 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to europe-solidaire.org”

Only a fragment of this survives. It may have been a short link-and-comment post, which marxsite ran many of, or the opening of a longer piece cut off by the capture — from what remains there is no way to tell which. The original is still readable at ESSF: read it in full.

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Jimmy Langman ESSF Santiago Dubbed by some “Chile’s Winter,” fierce demonstrations in recent months have transformed one of Latin America’s most stable countries into an epicenter of protest. Marches involving tens of thousands over education cutbacks and a Patagonia dam project have become regular events since May, shaking this country’s long-held image abroad as an island of good governance. The first protests were against plans to build a series of five large-scale hydroelectric dams in the country’s Patagonia region. When a Patagonia environmental commission voted nearly unanimously on May 9 to approve a scheme to dam two of the country’s most treasured rivers, Chileans reacted with a fervor against their government on a scale not seen here since a 1988 plebiscite to unseat former dictator Augusto Pinochet.