Remember what I just told you about graffiti as political statements?
To be honest, Chile isn't that different than the US. Of course, they speak Spanish (sort of) and think mullets are cool but young people party, old people knit, and they have Wal-Mart (it's just called Líder). But these past two weeks or so I have seen some things down here that just do not happen at home. Young people are taking to the streets and protesting injustices in the government. I know this happened in the 70's (parents, your generation is the best at everything) but nowadays it's much more likely to see people 'protesting' by complaining on the twitter or joining some angrily named group on facebook, not much of a protest at all. But right now in Chile, the whole country is in an uproar over recent plans to build dams in Patagonia. The project is called Hidroaysen and no one is happy about it. Read about it here and here. Yesterday during the President's State of the Union-type speech, 40,000 people were in the streets of Santiago, protesting the dams, getting teargassed, arrested and water cannoned. FORTY THOUSAND! Do that many Americans even watch the State of the Union? My school has a lot of students from Patagonia, so we've had marches and concerts and outrage in my city too. School was effectively canceled twice last week because so many students were protesting. So while I'm definitely not in favor of throwing rocks and bottles at police, I am pretty inspired by what is going on. I sincerely hope that the project doesn't go through and many Chileans are optimistic that it won't but in the meantime, I've been walking around with a scarf in my bag just in case I have to walk through a rowdy group of college students getting teargassed.
Family, I am being very careful and not protesting (visa at stake, signed some papers with study abroad people saying I wouldn't) but if you're on campus when it happens, you might just get a mouthful of teargas, and it sucks.
Get mad about the project here.
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