CHILE: THE VOICE AS A WEAPON

Collective creation x Buñuelos Creative Community.

Texts: Iliana Pichardo, Lucía Malvido, Facundo Torrieri.
Illustrations and Video editing: Enzo Rodríguez Suárez.
Image Capture: Fernando González Panzi, Facundo Torrieri.

Lucia: The day the protests broke out in Chile I saw was a video filmed with a cell phone from inside the Santa Lucia metro station. The access doors are chained close but an angry mob hits, kicks, and forcibly manages to knock down the barrier. The people who make up that crowd run into the station and jump the turnstiles. Only then are their identities revealed. They are dozens of high school girls. They cover their faces with sweaters and scarves, school skirts above their knees, heavy backpacks carried on their shoulders.

Facundo: All social contracts are, from this point of view, also montage. Privileges are a montage: a lie. The raw material of this collective representation of submission to the powerful is extreme violence.

Our heart knows. Our heart knows happiness. Our heart can’t perceive the gross representations of terror. We have to meet. We have to give ourselves that enormous embrace.

Lucia: We had to choose to stop watching, because the overwhelming number violent videos became too much to bear. I saw with my own eyes how the police set a bank on fire. I saw how the military dragged corpses and wounded people and formed a wall of bodies in the corner of an empty street. In the media the figures are always underestimated. On October 22, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights counted 42 dead, 12 women raped, 121 missing and thousands injured and tortured. Five days have passed since then. Today all of the numbers have grown.

On Friday a video appears on Twitter. A group of young people work on the terrace of a building in downtown Santiago, Chile. They have a good film crew, enough tripods to see in every direction. Perhaps about two million people huddle under the motto Renounce Piñera. A few hours later the Chilean  president publishes a tweet:

“The massive, happy and peaceful march today, where Chileans asked for a more just and supportive Chile, opens great paths for the future and hope. We have all heard the message. We have all changed. With unity and help from God, we will walk the road to that Chile better for all. ”

Facundo: Santiago de Chile is our shining heart! The power in the world has to give up. The effort to gain and maintain each privilege has to give up. The audacity and pathos with which we celebrate hierarchies, dominance and the destruction of nature. They have to give up. This planet is not in a position to negotiate with privileges of any kind. We will be complete or we will be nothing.

Lucia: Unbelievers, millions of us - not two million, but maybe 200 million, maybe 2000 million people around the world - confirm that these people have robbed us of not only work, not only the future, not just hope, Not only freedom but also words. They have robbed us of the legitimacy of communicating our needs. They lie when they tell the truth. With their evil and their greed they have kidnapped something that we thought belonged to no one, that it was impossible to conquer, the unique signifier of things, what they really are before we can name them.

Before it was Haiti, Peru, Ecuador. Meanwhile, Iraq, Lebanon, Hungary. England, Spain Congress closure, fire, repression. The Hungarians burned the fields sown with transgenic seeds to protect their own crops. In Bolivia a tide of bourgeoisie with imported jackets marches against the election results. The Argentines, after a week-long camp, managed to get the Congress to pass a Food Emergency Law that still hasn’t been implemented.

Last night I talked to Enzo. He told me that he felt sadness, anguish over what’s happening in Chile. But also a deep sense of fraternity, of community.

Iliana:

It's autumn, you have to go for a walk,

to break the desperate atmosphere that silences us.

You have to go for a walk

to go through the winter,

the night,

The madness.

You have to go for a walk

because to remember them

is not to forget life,

the beauty,

What makes us human.

Chile sings,

sings loudly.

The voice is a weapon

So that the sounds cross the silence.

Lucia: In 2017 we lived in Argentina. We wanted to stay, but we had to go. Now we are in Mexico. AMLO won the elections and nothing has changed at all, except one very important thing, we are not ashamed of the president we have. Democracy is a utopia people still believe in. The assembled people, anywhere in the world, have been deprived of the institutional tools to truly exercise that supposed right. As Piñera confirms in that diabolical communication, they don't care how much we shout, they don't care about the living or the dead. But as long as they are the ones who impose their order, the whole world already sang that we are not going to be silent, we are not going to continue enduring the abuses or the looting, the emptying of our resources, of our conquests, of the minimum quota of dignity that our ancestors knew how to obtain. We want more. We want them to take off and let us live in freedom. We want to see them lying on their bellies with their faces in the mud. We still stand. We have survived this terrible world that they invented. We will continue to do so until we meet again, until we have a safe roof over our heads, until the claims of our brothers from the original villages are addressed, until it is understood that the world belongs to the majority and not to the elite bank robbers . There is no auction. 

Get up and look at the mountain, where the wind, sun and water come from.

You, who run the course of the rivers, you, who enabled the flight of your soul.

Get up and look at your hands, to grow hold your brother, together we will be united by blood. Today is the time that can be tomorrow.

                                                                                               Victor Jara

English translation: Travis Wilkerson