Chile’s students strike for free education

Chile’s mass student organizations, with support from the organized working class, held a two-day general strike and demonstration demanding free university education on Oct. 18-19. Tens of thousands of students and workers participated, with the main demand being for free and universal higher education.

Last August the labor confederation CUT [Central Unitaria de Trabajadores] called and carried out a general strike. This time the unions backed the students’ actions and joined the demonstrations, but didn’t call a strike.

The students have been holding actions for their demands since last May 12. This was the 40th time they have come out into the streets since then. These demonstrations have been the broadest and largest in Chile since the time before a Sept. 11, 1973, U.S.-backed military coup ended the democratically elected Popular Unity government headed by Salvador Allende.

As part of the privatization and neoliberalism imposed on Chile under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, university education was privatized. Today many students finish university studies owing tens of thousands of dollars in tuition. Years of frustration under this system finally broke out into struggle last May.

On the second day of this latest strike, the morning of Oct. 19 at precisely 10 a.m., the student and teacher organizations and unions held actions “from the city of Antofagasta in the north down to Temuco in the south.” More than 300,000 took part, according to the organizers, “all united around one message: Education shall be free for all.” (Junge Welt, Oct. 21)

During that day, Chilean police arrested 234 participants in the demonstration. There were a number of attacks by hooded figures against a city bus and some buildings, and police used these events as an excuse to attack parts of the student march. Student organizers suspect police provocateurs initiated the attacks.

Student leaders Camila Villejo and Giorgio Jackson, who had just returned from a European political tour and had put the Chilean students’ demands before international bodies, told the demonstrators they were more determined than ever to continue the struggle. (Junge Welt)

In an interview with BBC Mundo on the eve of the strike, the 23-year-old Villejo, who is a member of the Communist Party of Chile, was asked to compare the Chilean movement with the Occupy Wall Street movements: “We sympathize and understand the struggle of the outraged ones,” said Vallejo, “but in Chile we have gone beyond the stage of discontent. Now, we must look ahead and build an alternative for the country.”

The different movements — Chile, Colombia, Brazil, France, Spain — have their own special conditions, said Vallejo, “but viewed as a whole, it is the struggle of those who have awakened to build a different model of society nationally and internationally.” The movements are similar in that each resists privatization or takes steps that bring them closer to winning that demand.