Cancelled Classes

There´s a theme emerging here - classes being cancelled due to riots and sit-in demonstrations by very politically-minded students.

It started back in the week leading up to September 11. Here, the date September 11 has been burned into the collective conscious as an important and traumatic one since 1973. It was the day that Pinochet, with the help of the US government, overthrew the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende. The socialist president supposedly committed suicide in the presidential palace as the military coup got underway, but it´s pretty widely accepted now that he was murdered as part of that coup. Under Pinochet, there were decades of repression in which people were abducted, tortured, raped, murdered and disappeared because of their ideology or their affiliations.

Around that date every year, protests and riots happen. These usually involve students throwing malatav cocktails at the police and the police throwing tear gas at the students. The protesters maintain that they are fighting for landrights for the indigenous Mapuche people, anti-repression, and tuition price freezes. When these "desórdenes" occur, classes often get cancelled because it´s hard to get through the chaos to arrive at class. Plus, the professors want to get their cars off campus because sometimes they sustain damages amidst the activity. At the Universidad de Concepción there were a lot of "desórdenes" that week, so one of my classes ended up being cancelled and for another I had to enter the building through a side door because the main door was padlocked to keep the chaos outside.

One week after September 11 is September 18, which is Chile´s independence day. An entire week to two weeks leading up to the 18th is full of celebration. Most schools close down for the week before the 18th.

Classes resumed as normal the week after the 18th, but my Thursday professor told us that there were rumors that the students were going "to take" the building the following week. She said we would meet somewhere else if that happened. It did, in fact, happen. The entrance of the building was covered with a big banner describing the solidarity and consciousness that led the students of Arts & Humanities to take the building in protest. Several buildings had been taken in this way. On the roof of the A&H building where I take my classes, there were two guys with their faces covered hanging a big banner that decried the fact that education should not be a marketplace. These take-overs of the campus buildings were a coordinated effort by the pregrad students to demand a freeze on tuition prices.

The statue in the picture above is outside the A&H building. During one of the desórdenes a couple weeks ago, somebody painted the X on his hand. Yesterday, he was donning a black anarchist mask and was holding a black flag.

Everything else on campus was normal besides the shut-down buildings. There were still people sitting on the lawns, playing music and visiting with friends. I´m not clear as to whether these efforts ever result in having the students´ demands met,