I know that’s my gringo perspective, that cops are always the most available agents of the state to attack, and that there is still a palpable history here-they buried Pinochet just 14 years ago. From what I’ve seen over the last 15 years or so, during Santiago’s economic boom, the police have been fair and honest. “ACAB,” an acronym for “all cops are bastards,” appeared everywhere. The study found that after President Piñera, most of the hatred and resentment behind the graffiti was directed at the police. There were, in addition, hardly any religious references, and no xenophobic or anti-immigrant discourse, though in just the last year this still-very-Catholic country has taken in over a million people from countries like Venezuela, Peru, and Haiti. In other words, as I see it, to not give up hope-to keep putting brand new sneakers on the feet of dying people in wheelchairs, for instance, because it does make a difference. But from another perspective, the team found that forty percent of the messages were self-referential, that is, the street was talking to itself, telling itself to mobilize and be strong. The lowest percentage, at four-point-five, was “hope.” That’s not a healthy balance, and probably not unique to Chile. In looking at the intent behind these messages, the team grouped them into seven categories, such as “denouncement” and “victimization.” Forty-four percent of all the messages involved “resentment” and “threats” (23.7% and 20.3%, respectively). They wanted to see what the street was trying to say. President Piñera has said the country is at war, but one could reasonably ask: who are the good guys exactly, what’s their objective, and how will we know when they’ve won?Ī month or so after the protests began-they’re often called 18-O for the initial explosion on October 18th-a team from la Universidad de Desarrollo examined 1000 phrases and signs that were scribbled all over downtown Santiago. As I write this near the end of March, 2020, the only thing that’s brought peace and quiet is Covid-19, though even that couldn’t hold for long (on March 29th, Young Combatant’s Day, fires and violence took over some of the streets again). Except that three months later, just after The Joker with Joaquin Phoenix hit the cinemas, streets all over Chile blew up a lot like they did at the end of that movie, with some of the same masks, signs, fires, and awful violence. The stores reopened, and we shopped again at the one closest to my in-laws’ house.
Five percent of next to nothing is hard to jump up and down about, but every little bit helps. But the union and the workers persisted they won a five-point-one percent raise as well as a few other concessions. That extra one percent was at first, apparently, untenable. A sticking point was that the union wanted a four per-cent raise in salary, but Wal-Mart Chile stood at three. The store I happened to walk by off the Los Leones metro station had maybe a dozen people milling around out front, a few of them holding signs: “They Make Millions, We Get Crumbs,” “Fight for Dignified Salaries,” “No More Abuse,” and “The Union is in the Street Demanding Dignity.” As I learned later, it was the biggest private sector strike in the country’s history. They wanted better wages, better working conditions, and some retention measures as the supermarket chain enhanced automation. On July 10th, a deal between the workers’ union and the owners had still not been reached, so over 17,000 workers walked out. That didn’t make as much news, but it’s something that has stuck with me ever since. I was also in Santiago in July of 2019, when workers at the Líder supermarket-now owned by Wal-Mart-went on strike and walked out. I’ve come to realize that I have been there for a few noteworthy events-I was there in 2006 when General Pinochet died and the country elected its first female president, Michelle Bachelet there in 2010 trembling through an ugly earthquake there for our daughter Isabel’s birth in 2011 (for me a bit more than noteworthy) and here now in 2020 for the protests, an ominous drought thanks to climate change, and everybody’s coronavirus. So we’ve managed a way to live between my work by Lake Erie and the capital of Chile. Her family, her friends, the language (Chileans speak their own sort of Spanish), the 9:00 news every evening. She’s Chilean, and she needs Santiago: the inclination of the Andes, an easy drive to the sea, the world’s driest desert up north, the fiords and glaciers (or what’s left of them) down south. She said it was the weather, but it was more than that. Roberto Bolaño My wife, Sonia, could never get used to living in Ohio. Its flickering shadow… rising as if it were climbing a hill on a fossil planet. A dead body rising from the bottom of the sea or from the bottom of a gully. And little by little the truth begins to rise like a dead body.