The Globalist, Fall 2012 -- Chile

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GLIMPSE

GLOBALISTThe Yale

Fall 2012 / Vol. 13, Issue 1

CHILEUna tierra en marcha


3FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

My first time in Chile, I arrived alone in Santiago with a walking boot and a backpack. I put down the backpack and limped over the cobblestone streets of Bellavista to visit La Chascona, the San-tiago house of Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I began translating, with immediacy and fervor in the lobby of hostels I stayed at, on the side of highways I hitchhiked, under the vestibule of the tent I slept in, Veinte Poemas de Amor, y Una Cancion Desperada (Twenty Love Poems, and One Song of Despair). I picked up new phrases, blancas colinas (white hills), las viejas hélices del crepúsculo (the old propellers of dawn). I hoped that by learning his poems, I might learn to speak Spanish like a poet. Or at least, learn about this southern country from a man who claimed, as he traveled away from it, that his bones lived in Chile.

Days later, I took a bus to Valparaiso, with lines of grapevines blurring out my window below the contoured ridges of the Andes. I went to visit his Valparaiso home, La Sebastiana. I wandered around the large tables where he hosted artists and politicians, looking through multicolored glass bottles on windowsills to the sea behind the glass. Neruda was a communist. La Sebastiana house was looted after the military coup in 1973 overthrew the socialist regime, shortly after Neruda’s death.

I moved south with his poems. I curled up by the window in itchy wool blankets in homes of farmers near Temuco; I babysat sheep and small children on the island of Chiloe; I rafted down the white froth of the rapids in Rio Futaleufu. I looked for the country in the small places, where women trade seeds, where fields are tilled with hand tools, where ranchers make homemade alcoholic cider (chicha) and brand their cows with a big party (a terrifying event to witness while inside of the ring). Like Neruda writes, I had “no task but to live;” I had “no family but the road.”

My second time in Chile, I came with a specific task (report, write) and a family of sorts (a gaggle of 17 student journalists). The landscape was shifting, as it had in Neruda’s lifetime, with clouds of tear gas hiding protester’s faces in the streets of Valparaiso, not far from the orange and blue walls of La Sebastiana. A new generation of activists lamented with posters, not poems, the centralization, privati-zation, the injustices of this southern country.

I bought a used, coverless copy of Cien Sonetos (100 Sonnets) and Veinte Poemas de Amor, y Una Cancion Desperada on the street on my way home from one of our long table dinners in Santiago, and kept it at the bottom of my backpack when I headed south again. I translated words when I needed to. He seemed so sad, sometimes–maybe because of his wife or lover, maybe because of his lost childhood in southern Chile, maybe because the country he so loved exiled him, maybe because, at the end of his life, he knew his country would soon swing back towards a military dictatorship.

When I came north from the forests, the day before I switched hemispheres, I made my last pil-grimage to his third house, Isla Negra, on the cliffs above the “wild coast” with its “tumultuous oceanic movement.” Over a late lunch on a porch suspended over the rocky coast, I translated more of his son-nets, flipping through my red Larousse dictionary, finger pointing to a word in the yellowing, coverless copy of his poems. My eyes glazed over the ceviche and pisco sour, drifting towards the sea. I realized that no matter how many poems I obsessed over, I could never know his Chile. His poems were a trans-lation of his world, and my translation of his language a collection of fragmented phrases that sounded nice (unquiet stones; feathery telegraph.). But I did learn a few things––from his poems, my months in Chile, my interviews with Chileans, and my adventures with the gaggle of Globalistas, all clad in their brightly colored scarves, scribbling in their leather moleskin notebooks.

I learned about nalka, a wild rhubarb plant in the Valdivian forest, and calafate, the yellow berry plant rumored to bewitch any consumer to return to Patagonia. I learned about asados, the slow, all-day barbecues, and maté, the hot herbal drink sipped through straws. I learned about how to kiss only one cheek (right on right), and how to add “po” to the end of any word to Chileanize my Spanish. And I think we all–our traveling family of student journalists–learned about the movement in Chile, about this country so full of protests and change as we briefly drifted through una tierra en marcha.

Happy translations,

Diana SaverinEditor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

READERS,DE

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ON THE COVER:The view of Valparaíso from a cable car, May

2012.(Tolgay/TYG)

JOuRNALISM ADVISORY BOARD

Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English

Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications,

MacMillan Center

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs

Jef McAllister, Time Magazine

Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review

Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English

ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD

Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson

College

Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies

Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence

Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center

Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

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GLOBALISTAn Undergraduate Magazine of

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This magazine is published by students of Yale College. Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to [email protected].

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

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Editor-in-ChiefDiana Saverin

Managing Editors

Sophie Broach, Daniel Gordon, Anisha Suterwala, Emily Ullmann

Associate EditorsRachel Brown, Ashley Dalton, Aaron Gertler,

Seth Kolker, Ashley Wu

Copy EditorTaoTao Holmes

Production & Design EditorsSera Tolgay & Kelly Schumann

Chief Online EditorJohn D’Amico

Online AssociatesJanine Chow, Danielle Ellison, Charley Locke, Isabel Ortiz

Executive DirectorJason Toups

Publisher

Lauren Hoffman

Director of Outreach Margaret Zhang

Events Coordinator

Deena Rahman

Editors-at-LargeRaisa Bruner, Jeffrey Dastin, Marissa Dearing, Cathy Huang, Charlotte Parker, Sanjena Sathian, Jessica Shor

Map of Contents

ChileChinaIndiaMoroccoVietnam

The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.


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TABLE of CONTENTS

CHILE una tierra en marcha

44 | Miracle or Mirage? An inside view of education in China. By Ashley Feng

6 | Crusade, with Complications A grassroots NGO fights sex trafficking in India. By TaoTao Holmes

11 | 2020: India’s Imperfect Vision By Daniel Gordon

8 | Meandering along the Mekong Delta An illustrative travel journal. By Joy Chen

45 | Inside the Moroccan Kitchen Tastes of couscous, culture. By Charley Locke

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16 | Aqua Dulce A fight for the forgotten region of Chile. By Diana Saverin 21 | A Conversation w/ Rolf Lüders Schwarzenberg A Question and Answer Session. By Diana Saverin

22 | The Sillicon Valley of South America? By Rachel Brown

24 | Las Nanas Domestic workers: a peculiar institution or just another job? By Diego Salvatierra

27 | Forgetting the Esmerelda A student journalist chases a story that wasn’t. By Anisha Suterwala

28 | The Warriors of Araucanía The Mapuche change battlegrounds to keep ancestral lands. By Sera Tolgay

30 | The Lover and the Fight For Chilean students, protest styles diverge.

By Sally Helm

33 | The Future of Funiculars? Cable cars in Valparaíso. By Emily Ullmann

34 | Chile’s 66 Eyes to the Night Sky By Ashley Wu

36 | Mining and Its Discontents Inside world’s largest pit mine. By Sanjena Sathian

41 | Chilean Murals A photo essay. By multiple contributors

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t’s like poking a bear,” Kristin Brad-dock said. “You start doing good work in a community and this is what happens. You poke the bear,

you wake it up.” And after a while, Braddock discovered, the bear bites back.

Braddock, who is spearheading an income-generation program in Delhi, has been a social worker in India for three years. At this point, little surprises her—she has participated in brothel raids, seen staff members stabbed, and was herself beaten once. However, Braddock found herself stunned by the sudden arrest of one of her coworkers, Mohammad Kalam, an anti-sex trafficking activist.

On the morning of June 1, 2012, Forbesganj police accused Kalam, a legal officer for the Indian NGO Apne Aap Women Worldwide, of marrying and selling a girl, Sony, into prosti-tution in Delhi. They were charging an anti-trafficker with sex trafficking. Not only that, but the complainant, Sony, was a girl he had helped rescue just months before in February of 2012. In fact, it was Kalam who wrote the complaint that freed Sony.

Forbesganj, where Kalam works, is a re-mote town less than two kilometers in diam-eter. It is tucked in the forgotten farmlands of Bihar, India’s poorest state, in the north-east of the country. In Forbesganj, money is everything. The police tolerate the pressure from NGOs and accept bribes from traffickers. Since many traffickers can pay good money, alliances sway and loyalties blur.

Who instigated Kalam’s arrest is unclear,

but Apne Aap suspects it to be one or more of the traffickers negatively impacted by Kalam’s interference in their work. “It is not possible that a person with eight years of experience in anti-trafficking will file a complaint against himself,” Apne Aap President and Founder Ruchira Gupta wrote in letters to the Bihar State Commission for Child Rights, the Na-tional Human Rights Commission, and several other organizations, none of which took any action.

pne Aap Women Worldwide is trying to bring an end to the exploitation and

abuse that have become a part of the everyday business of prostitution and sex trafficking across India. Over the past ten years, the NGO has developed a network of self-empowerment groups, community learning centers, and legal rights sessions to encourage at-risk women to learn skills that could free them from the sex trade.

Since Apne Aap’s arrival less than a de-cade ago, Forbesganj’s red-light area, a dirt road lined with wood and cement shacks, has shrunk to half its original size, and over the last three years, the police have arrested a re-ported 53 traffickers.

However, on the day of Kalam’s arrest, the local police were on the traffickers’ side. They didn’t care that there was no proper investi-gation or evidence, nor did they offer Kalam any legal assistance. It all occurred under an unbending judicial magistrate’s directive. “I asked the officer to investigate [the case] first

so that then he would know that what the girl had said was not true,” said Kalam. “Because I was the one who gave information to my or-ganization about the girl being trafficked and that’s how the girl was rescued.”

under proper circumstances in India, citi-zens have a right to be arraigned without un-necessary delay, usually for a maximum of two days. Kalam spent five days as one of 150-plus inhabitants of a jail meant for 35 to 40. On June 6, a cell phone in the Delhi head office of Apne Aap rang. upasana Chakma, head monitoring and documentation officer, answered the call. “Kalam got bail!” she squealed.

When Kalam was finally taken to court, he was handcuffed and roped by police, and paraded before the media and public as a traf-ficker. “It was a very miserable feeling to stand in front of the judge where many times I have stood as an advocate for girls and women, where I had given statements that led to the conviction of many traffickers,” he said later.

hat complicate the matter are Ka-lam’s roots in the Nat community, a

group in the Indian caste system that engages in intergenerational prostitution. In such com-munities, prostitution of the women is the pri-mary—and in certain areas like Forbesganj, only—form of income. Men live off the earn-ings of the women and the practice is passed down from each generation to the next. Hus-band, in such communities, is synonymous with pimp.

Kalam’s mother and sister were both taken

Crusade, with Complications By TaoTao Holmes

(Holmes/TYG)

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into prostitution as minors, and they serve as constant motivators for Kalam’s job. “The traf-fickers are my relatives,” said Kalam, sitting under the whirr of the fans in Apne Aap’s ru-dimentary office in Forbesganj. “I am the one being from the Nat community, not indulging in trafficking,” he said. “And moreover, fight-ing against it.”

Indeed, Kalam has been with Apne Aap for eight years, and has been instrumental in putting traffickers in jail, rescuing girls in lo-cal brothels, and working to inform women of their legal rights. India’s The Week magazine named him “Activist of the Year” in 2004 and his story inspired a recently released book by Norwegian author Anne Ostby, “Town of Love.”

alam’s arrest isn’t the first instance of backlash from the community. “Our

own colleagues have been harassed, stabbed, charged, put into jail,” said Tinku Khanna, a staff member in Bihar. “We try to stop girls from being trafficked, even if that means get-ting their parents arrested,” she explained.

Despite its foundation only a decade ago, the grassroots organization now has offices in Forbesganj, Kolkata, and Delhi. Its success has garnered an impressive amount of media cov-erage. President and Founder Ruchira Gupta has received numerous accolades, including major Indian network Times TV’s “Amazing Indian” Award and the Clinton Global Citizen Award. In May, u.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with members of Apne Aap’s of-

fice in Kolkata and watched a karate perfor-mance by a girl taking classes in Bihar.

Apne Aap also found itself in the spotlight after the publication of Nicholas Kristof’s and Sheryl WuDunn’s bestseller “Half the Sky.” The book details the worldwide oppression of women and mentions Apne Aap among a number of small organizations making a big difference.

Limelight for grassroots work in off-the-grid places like Forbesganj doesn’t make the work much easier. As Apne Aap’s work grows more effective, traffickers are feeling increas-ingly threatened, as Kalam’s case shows. Inter-national clout hasn’t alleviated the day-to-day community challenges that Kalam, Khanna, and other workers face; police and traffickers pay no attention to awards and accolades. un-less Apne Aap’s staff in Bihar establishes firm relationships with the police—or offer them better bribes than the traffickers—they will remain at a disadvantage.

Still, Kalam’s arrest provides reason for optimism. “His arrest shows that we made an impact. It was awful, yes, but at the same time it means we’re doing good work,” said Brad-

dock. As Kalam’s ongoing case receives more attention, and as Apne Aap grows more suc-cessful, the communities dependent on prosti-tution will become more desperate. And such desperation may put Apne Aap’s work in even greater danger. Each day brings near-invis-ible progress, and the relationships between police, traffickers, and above all, money, re-main frustratingly murky.

The work of small organizations like Apne Aap seems agonizingly slow and ineffective. But serious change in places like Forbesganj, where a meeting never occurs on time and hundreds of people don’t even own watches, does not take place overnight. It is a gradual matter of changing mindsets, shifting options, and never giving up, no matter how slow or frustrating the situation becomes.

Bears can’t bite back forever—even the toughest grizzly will tire. All that Apne Aap needs is dogged persistence. Visit the office of Apne Aap in Forbesganj and you will see Ka-lam there, preparing materials for community visits. He, unlike the traffickers, is not about to walk away. “I console myself and convince myself that justice will be done at the end; the actual traffickers will be punished and I will prove myself.”

TAOTAO HOLMES ’14 is a Global Affairs ma-jor in Branford College. Contact her [email protected].

For a grassroots NGO fighting sex traffickers, success may be the greatest liability.

“Our own colleagues have been

harassed, stabbed, charged, put

into jail.”

—Tinku Khanna, staff member

(Holmes/TYG) (Holmes/TYG)

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2020: India’s Imperfect VisionBy Dan Gordon

A country dreams of becoming slum free.

(Gordon/TYG)

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he thermometer was edging past 100 when Girija Dhaigavi met me at a Hindu temple in Janatavasa-hat, an Indian slum in Pune. One

would not pin Mrs. Dhaigavi, a housewife and mother, as a fighter. In India, though, what you see is rarely what you get.

A politically active woman with a master’s degree, she successfully petitioned the gov-ernment to bring a hospital and market area to Janatavasahat. But her role in the slum ex-tends beyond her social work. By necessity of her poverty, she also lives there.

According to official goals, India should be slum-free by 2020. To achieve that goal, the central legislature has begun investing 20 bil-lion dollars in the Jawaharlal Nehru National urban Renewal Mission (JNNuRM). Other government programs abound. Nongovern-mental support is not lacking either: in Pune alone, over 400 grassroots organizations exist to help the poor.

By all appearances, active development should be everywhere. Hundreds of thou-sands of Indians have escaped poverty, true, but millions more remain. In Pune, for exam-ple, over one million people, one third of the city’s population, still live in slums. In other cities, the fraction is higher—and rising. Ac-cording to the World Bank, more than 90 mil-lion Indians live in slums out of the country’s 1.2 billion people. In contrast to India’s goals, the Bank estimates that in two decades, long after 2020 has passed, nearly 200 million Indi-ans could be living in slums.

So where will Mrs. Dhaigavi be living in 2020? If development continues at a crawl, perhaps it will still be a slum—and then who

is to blame? For all of the external obstacles to slum development, and they are legion, the greatest hurdle might be the slum communi-ties themselves.

Take politicians who represent slum dis-tricts. Ankush Kakade, the current spokes-man for the National Congress Party in Pune, explained: “there will be political obstacles in all cases, because all parties want to cap-ture slums for our voting system.” Wooing slum voters with better, if still sub-par, infra-structure easily wins votes. Losing the slum’s votes might mean losing the district, so poli-ticians keep these easily-mobilized voting blocs around.

Answering whether or not India would be slum free by 2020, ujwal Keskar, a local Pune representative, described how most other politicians would answer the question: “No—because that is my vote bank. I cannot dis-turb my vote bank.” Since most residents are unaware that politicians have access to slum rehabilitation funds, they only expect token development projects—a paved road, better sewers—from their representatives. So many politicians skate by without significantly im-proving the slums.

There is also a financial incentive for poli-ticians to maintain the status quo. Some lo-cal representatives collude with builders to skim money off the development grants. If word leaks out, as often happens, slum dwell-ers halt the project. Other politicians collect rent on houses they own in the slums, leasing them on a semi-permanent basis. Rehabilita-tion would mean the end of their schemes. Jayashree Nashte, who lives in a one room house with her husband and three children,

summed up her neighborhood’s problem: “Those who have a vested interest in the [de-velopment] project being unsuccessful are politically powerful.”

Finally, politicians have logistical reasons to keep the slums in poor conditions. Poorer slums, the thinking goes, make cities less at-tractive to migrants. Whether the claim is true or false is difficult to say, but many politi-cians believe it. Vikas Mathkari, for instance, the Pune president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, divulged that his mentor cynically in-structed him not to transform the slums into three-star hotels, lest they attract more mi-grants (and more headaches for politicians and city planners).

Politicians aside, slum dwellers them-selves often prefer not to incur the financial and social costs of rehabilitation.

Even though slum dwellers want better living conditions, development can seem like an expensive burden. Siddhartha Dhende, a local politician who developed the slum he grew up in, argued, “the mentality of house-hold slum dwellers is that they want every-thing free.”

under some programs, slum dwellers must contribute ten percent of the overall building cost of the new house, if they elect to participate. Beneficiaries also have to start paying for utilities. In contrast, slum resi-dents squat on the land for free, evade taxa-tion, and either steal utilities from the grid or accept them from politicians interested in keeping their vote bank happy.

Development can also disrupt the com-munity’s economy, since some projects relo-cate lives but not livelihoods. In Dharavi, a

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Mumbai slum of a million people, where liv-ing and workspaces overlap, one potter keeps his workshop above his house. His storeroom doubles as a sleeping space and storefront. A kiln stands outside in a narrow lane. If the Slum Rehabilitation Authority developed Dharavi according to its plans and moved the inhabitants into high-rise tenements, like those on Mumbai’s outskirts, he would lose everything but a place to sleep.

Transferring slum dwellers into apart-ment towers also unravels the social fabric of a community. Since they might not live next to their former neighbors in the towers, due to the logistical difficulty of the transfer pro-cess, social bonds created over decades can vanish overnight.

Other development options do exist. In-situ rehabilitation programs replace tem-porary slum houses with permanent ones, preserving the slum’s physical profile and its social and economic networks. ujwal Keskar remarked that slum dwellers, “do not want to go into towers”—but most cities do not have enough space for in-situ rehabilitation. In land-crunched metropolises like Mumbai, politicians prefer to build towers. Since the slum dwellers are squatting on government property, they can sell the vacated land to hungry builders.

Other problems hinder slum development besides residents and politicians who favor the status quo. Even NGOs can complicate the rehabilitation process. Sharad Mahajan, the executive director of Pune housing-assis-tance group MASHAL, observed: “In this ball-game you cannot just blame the politicians.” He admitted that some NGOs pay politicians

to receive development projects from them, contributing to the corrupt climate.

The lack of education among slum dwell-ers about development projects also prevents them from booting out politicians who refuse to improve their districts. Corruption at state and national levels of government, a lack of political will, and competing development priorities—should the government re-pave the roads or allocate money for tenement housing?—further slow efforts.

If India is to become slum-free by 2020, the benefits for stakeholders must outweigh the costs.

The most far-sighted politicians, ujwal Keskar noted, have already recognized that developing the slums in accord with constitu-ents’ wishes can only help their re-election prospects. It is difficult, however, to distin-guish the good politicians from the bad. Thanks to India’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, complex political coalitions, and opaque bud-geting practices, representatives can easily blame others for their shortcomings. Corrupt politicians present a thornier problem, but citizens have the power to boot them out.

As for the migration issue, rural work-ers in dire conditions will move to the city whether or not the slums improve. Cities—with their job opportunities, higher wages, and access to schools and hospitals—prom-ise greater profits than the countryside, es-pecially during droughts.

NGOs can change the attitudes of slum residents by educating them about the long-term benefits of rehabilitation. Slum repair might be more expensive in the short term, but new infrastructure eventually pays for

itself through convenience and efficiency. When the community begins paying taxes, the municipal government will begin to inte-grate the society into its long-term develop-ment plans, resulting in better infrastructure for the slums.

India will not be slum-free by 2020. Poli-ticians know that they can win elections without developing slums. New Delhi will re-main apathetic about eliminating corruption. Droughts will continue to ravage rural areas and migration will continue apace. Convinc-ing slum dwellers to plan for the long run will take time; convincing them to pay more taxes, even longer.

To become slum-free, India needs another champion of the poor. ujwal Keskar reflected optimistically, “If there is a single leader, he can eradicate, he can rehabilitate, all slums in Pune city—all 543.” The leader Mr. Keskar is looking for might actually be a she. Selja Kumari, the Housing and urban Poverty Alle-viation Minister, seems to be a hardworking, sincere, and effective leader. If she wisely directs the resources available to JNNuRM and focuses her efforts on engaging prob-lems at the most local levels of government, she could galvanize the work already begun. Mrs. Dhaigavi, ten years on, might just have a house of her own.

DANIEL GORDON ‘14 is a Humanities and South East Asian Studies major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at [email protected].

Gordon/TYG

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In terms of terrain, Chile has a little bit of everything. The country’s coastline spans across 2,700 miles of the Pacific. One of the longest and narrow-est countries in the world, its geography includes superla-tive landscapes: the driest des-ert (the Atacama), the south-ernmost city (Punta Arenas), and some of the most arable land (the Central Valley). As it stretches over 35 degrees of latitude, each region contains different features. Chile has 36 active volcanoes, 80 percent of South America’s ice-fields, and one of the world’s few temper-ate rainforests. As the country twists between Argentina and the Pacific, from Arica to Punta Arenas, its border follows the Andean Cordillera with the top of this mountain range averag-ing an elevation of 16,404 feet in the north of Chile. From moun-tains and vineyards to island-speckled sea, and from salt flats and desert to thickly forested land around lakes, Chile is a land of extremes.

CHILEUna tierra en marcha

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Valparaíso

Temuco

Santiago

Antofagasta

San Pedro de Atacama

Cochrane

Coyhaique

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Agua Dulce

A fight for the forgotten region of Chile

By Diana Saverin


17CHILE

met René Muñoz when he was two hours into his commute home after visiting his children in the nearest town. He arrived in a pickup truck

with peeling red paint to a ranch where I was staying in Aysén, a region in Chilean Patagonia. He knocked on the door, kissed the cheeks of Lilli Schindele, her children, and me, and then drifted back out the door to wrangle in his horses from her pasture. I ran over to the barn a bit later in my blue Acteryx rain jacket and Nike sneakers, where he was saddling the horses. I asked if I could tag along. He scanned his dark eyes over me and my fancy outdoor gear, shrugged, and said the land wasn’t his; I could do whatever I wanted.

The trail started boggy, meandering through twisty branches and muddy ground, until it opened into a valley with low shrubs and long yellow grasses. I ran next to him as he rode in sheepskin chaps and a stiff winter coat, leading his packhorse from his saddle. We didn’t speak for fifteen minutes. until I asked about the dams.

“See all these cows?” he said, sweeping his hand across the banks of the river of the Ña-dis valley where cows wandered and grazed.

“Livestock is what we live off of. And that’s how all the ranchers live, with the seasons, taking care of the land, the cows, the sheep.”

The muddy land under the horses’ and my feet, though, may soon give way to water. HidroAysén, a coalition of energy companies, has proposed constructing five dams in Aysén. The dams would flood 14,000 acres, including the Ñadis valley, situating the long yellow grasses deep in the belly of an artificial lake. And it’s not just international energy compa-nies that envision a new and different Aysén; wealthy American philanthropists are in the process of converting dozens of ranches from grazing territory for sheep and cows to wild landscapes with trails and roads for tourists. Aysén, which many call “the forgotten region of Chile,” is no longer being ignored.

Ranchers, like René, have been watching as these powerful foreigners play tug-of-war with the land of Aysén. Land values have dou-bled as foreigners fight with their checkbooks over the best use of ranchers’ backyards. As the tug of war pushes their small log cabins and open pastures deeper into the backs of valleys, most ranchers find themselves with-out much of a grip on the rope. Their partici-pation is limited to lively commentary.

René laments the shift in the region away from the customs of the past century––wood

carried by oxen, horses as the primary means of transportation, maté (a hot herbal drink sipped through metal straws) shared around woodstoves.

“It’s difficult,” René said, looking down at his fingers loosely holding the reins of the horse. “You get used to living in this sector. It’s hard to see industry and all that. It’s not the same as living out in fresh air.”

n February, images of Chile’s forgotten re-gion cycled across television screens dur-

ing the nightly news when a regional social movement demanded better services from the government. Montages cycled images of demonstrators with posters and flags march-ing in a pack, activists with clenched fists and loudspeakers in front of a crowd, police with armored uniforms and face shields dragging protesters in headlocks. Participating resi-dents blocked the entrances into the region. They demanded recognition and change, their posters asking for better education, bet-ter health care, better support for farmers. In a letter to the government, the organizers of the movement called for a shift in regional development, saying that up until that point, development had “focused essentially on the benefit of interests that do not belong to those who live in Aysén.” Months later, paint still marked the backs of pickup trucks parked on the streets of Cochrane, Aysén: tu problema es mi problema, “Aysén: your problem is my problem.”

Residents are divided with visions for their land’s future—some want to hold onto the ranching culture, while others want progress and change. Lucretia Sanchez, an older woman with short hair and few teeth, lives and works in Co-chrane. She owns, with her seven siblings, the ranch she grew up on, a ranch that would be flooded by the dam on the Baker. Huddled in the kitchen with her two grandchildren and one great-grandchild, she said that if the dam project did not go through, she would try to sell the ranch.

“I grew up in the countryside,” she said. “I’ve seen all the changes here. In the

past we just wanted to get out of school to go to the countryside. Now, it’s different.”

Her grandson, a young man in his early teens wearing a crisp navy school uniform, looked up from his homework and chimed in.

“You guys just wanted to go to the coun-tryside? Well we just want to go work in the city. It’s no different.”

“Maybe,” Lucretia said, watching the flames in the stove flicker behind the smol-dered glass.

I asked the grandson what he wanted to do, and he said he wanted to study marketing.

“See!” Lucretia said, pointing at him, her eyebrows raised. “He’ll be working, doing marketing for these energy companies.”

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René Muñoz. (SaverinTYG)

Confluencia on the left, and Lilli’s ranch in Valle Nadis above. (Saverin/TYG)

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

18 CHILE

idroAysén and other energy com-panies have supported the regional

transition from field to office, making Aysén’s problems their problems, as well. HidroAy-sén’s slogan, “Energy for Chile, Development for Aysén,” reverberated on the local radio in Cochrane at least every hour.

When I asked about the social projects of energy companies in towns, most people ex-plained without words. In a cafe in Cochrane, a waiter pointed at the new refrigerator. On her ranch in Ñadis, Lilli pointed towards her neighbors’ properties where helicopters have dropped hay and grass during hard winters. Many in town are happy to receive the extra help, especially families on a tight budget whose children have received scholarships for school. Others resist on principle.

Maria Alicia Fernández Pizarro is a heavy-set woman with a streaked black hair. She owns a camping business on the shores of the lake that feeds the Baker. I asked if HidroAy-sén ever offered her money, and she laughed, looking out the window and shaking her head. She said they offered her the amount of mon-ey it takes to run her business on several oc-casions.

“And I said no each time,” she said. She op-poses the project, and rejected the company’s offer to fund her business. I asked how much they offered her, and she laughed again, shift-ing in her seat.

“A lot of money,” she said. Though many explain the energy compa-

nies’ social projects as “buying consensus,” consensus from Aysén bears little weight: HidroAysén only needs the government to ap-prove its environmental impact statement be-fore breaking ground. Social movements have tried to get the government to include citizen consensus as a part of its decision-making process, but the government ignores that. Power remains firmly in the hands of those outside Aysén. The water was privatized in the 1980s, and today, the company that owns a majority of Aysén’s rivers is Italian.

The regional movement cites the vision of Aysén as a “Reserva de Vida,” a “reserve of life,” as an alternative to big scale develop-ment. A citizens’ coalition coined this slogan in the 1990s, when they outlined a regional de-velopment “by the people, and for the people.” The group wants the landscape to remain full of puma and Calafate (a yellow flower with berries said to charm any consumer into re-turning to Patagonia). They also want rivers to keep running freely through the land like veins.

Maria Alicia supports preserving the region by resisting the dams in small ways: posting articles on social networks, speaking with tourists in the sum-mers; and placing a small sign, no a las represas, “no to dams” on her desk. She explained that she speaks mainly with foreigners, many of whom have taken considerable interest in the area.

“I am glad you are here,” she said, as I sat across from her in her liv-ing room. “That you’re interested. But frankly, I wish you were Chilean.”

ysen’s famous waterways cut paths through the region, bending routes

from glaciers to sea, with thin interlock-ing creeks winding out from the arm of the main current. From a foggy window on an early morning bus on my way north from Cochrane, I watched the network of streams trickle out from the river like gnarled roots winding deeper into the earth. Later that day, I walked to the water’s edge at the conflu-ence of the Neff River with the Baker, where the water bubbled up froth beneath a misty rainbow. I kneeled at the bank of the river, the water seeping into the knee of my pants. I cupped the silty water in my hands, threw it on my face, and poured it into my mouth.

HidroAysén has taken a particular inter-est in these rivers for their unique qualities, as well. Both the Baker and the Pascua are formed from the vast ice fields of Patagonia. The rivers are growing with the glacial melt, instead of drying up like some other already-dammed rivers in Chile, which no longer

generate the energy they were projected to provide.

María Irene is the communications man-ager for HidroAysén, and I met her one night in the company’s office in Coyhaique. She walked me through the tables with models of the ranches the company would build for relocated families, and a mockup of a toy tree forest with a miniature transmission line.

For her, and other supporters of the dams, the fact that Chile’s economy is growing so rapidly means that the power supply has to grow with it. Today, Chile uses mostly coal and oil.

“Chile is vulnerable,” María Irene said. “In Chile, we’re dependent on gas and oil we don’t have. That’s why we need hydroelectric, because all that Chile has is water.”

She said over and over, shaking her head, that it was “very hard to understand” why there was so much opposition to the project, explaining that an American man organized and financed the resistance, instead of locals putting together a “spontaneous” grassroots rising.

“In Argentinean Patagonia, there was a dam with a flood nine times as large as this one would be, and there hasn’t been any type of opposition or anything against it,” she said. “Fundamentally, the group has communicat-ed the idea that this project would mean the destruction of Patagonia.”

Kristine Tomkins, former CEO of the outdoor apparel company Patagonia, cre-ated Conservación Patagonica. She and her husband, Doug, the founder of the company North Face, are working to restore Patagonia to a more pristine state, replacing ranches full of grazing cows, sheep, and horses with

H

“Social movements have tried

to get the government to in-

clude citizen consensus as a

part of its decision-making

process, but the government

ignores that.”

A

A protest against the dams in Coyhaique. (Saverin/TYG)


landscapes full of puma, huemel (an endan-gered species of deer), and guanaco (a spe-cies of wild llama with course red fur). They have acquired more than one million acres of land so far.

I walked through the ranch just north of Cochrane that the Tompkins bought sev-eral years ago, Valle Chacabuco. I followed a snow-coated trail in late fall, and encountered several groups of guanaco, and one individu-al kill surrounded by large cat prints punched into the blood-stained snow crust. It was the only place in the region where I saw signs of either guanaco or puma.

“This is an economic alternative,” Dago Guzman, the manager of the park, said over coffee back in one of the log cabins. “The fam-ily on this ranch sold it to us because it wasn’t a good business. Whether ranching is a tradi-tion or not, it was not a good business in this valley.”

For Dago and his team, conservation is the best way to use, or avoid overuse of, the re-sources of Aysén. Though the park would not be flooded, the entrance would be across the highway from one of the dams, creating what he considers symbolic friction.

Despite their philanthropic efforts, many ranchers and residents of Aysén feel pushed aside by Conservación Patagonica. Rumors that Doug Tompkins is “raising puma” to kill neighboring sheep, or trying to create “a second promise land” for Jews, are com-mon. Many ask, “What do we eat?” if parks replace all of the ranches, if livestock vanish from the valleys, and if meat disappears from local markets. Others ask why other places in the world can have industry and progress, but they can’t.

I talked with two residents, José Calvo and Hortencia Ramirez, over maté around Hortencia’s woodstove in Puerto Bertrand, a town of 37 on the banks of the Baker. A visit-ing sculptor named Simon, from Valparaiso, a city in central Chile, walked in as we spoke. Since we were on the topic of the dams, José asked the sculptor if he thought they should be built. Simon immediately threw up his hands and said that he wasn’t from the re-gion––what position was he in to decide?

“I like that he doesn’t express his opin-ion,” Jose said, slapping him on the back. “He’s not from here. People from far away are the ones against this. They already have things figured out––food, kids in school. They can just look over our landscape and say ‘how beautiful’.”

he office of the Ministry of Agriculture in Coyhaique is on the side of a high-

way, across from a big box store and a gas station. I wandered through offices to Julio Cerda’s, an ecologist and veterinarian with white hair and bushy eyebrows. His book-shelf contained thick binders labeled “En-vironmental Impact Statements” from vari-ous energy companies. I asked him what he thought about the decline of ranching in the region in the face of change. Before address-ing the regional juncture of today, he backed up a few thousand years.

Different indigenous tribes had sparsely populated the land for millennia before its colonial history began. As the 20th century began, the Chilean government wanted to establish a rigid border with Argentina, and began offering incentives to Chileans who went south to cultivate what was then a wild landscape.

“So the people who came burned the for-est,” Julio said. “And naturally, the people who colonized came to feel like owners of the territory.”

Aysén is, yet again, at a turning point. It is a territory shifting between owners, mov-ing from one chapter of its history to the next. This time, the rest of the world is paying at-tention. Prolific coverage of the controversy over HidroAysén’s dams, from the New York Times, to the Huffington Post, to Reuters, to the BBC, and more, echoes language of the “raw,” “wild,” “pristine,” “virgin,” “un-touched,” and “unspoiled” land of Patagonia at stake, referred to as “one of the world’s last great wildernesses.”

Much of Aysén is still wild. Forty-nine percent of the land is currently conserved in reserves or parks, with most parks full of the islands sprinkled along the region’s coast-line, coated with thick temperate rainforest. Fjords cut lines of sea through the dense for-est of the mainland, below mountains with skinny waterfalls and patches of snow. At the bottom of valleys, rivers thread in and out of sand bars. Some of the largest ice fields in the world outside of Antarctica and Greenland cover the land. But Julio, among others, in-sists that this land is not untouched.

Though the use of the land up to this point has not been industrial in its nature, or on the scale proposed by energy companies, ranch-ing has had considerable impact on the land.

Julio sits on the government council that approves or rejects the environmental im-pact statements of hydroelectric projects in the region, and could not speak about the dams themselves. When I asked, though, he

“In Chile, we’re dependent

on gas and oil we don’t have.

That’s why we need hydroelec-

tric, because all that Chile has

is water.”

—Maria Irene, HidroAysén

A group of guanaco at the proposed national park in Valle Chacabuco. (Saverin/TYG)

T19CHILE

20

responded with two questions:“You know how many acres the dams

would flood, don’t you?”“Fourteen thousand,” I said. “And do you know how many acres of for-

est the ranchers burnt?” I was silent. “Checkmate,” he said, looking

me in the eye. “Millions,” he said.

illi washed the dishes with cold water at her sink in the valley Ñadis. She talk-

ed about the lonesome spirit of Aysén like an endangered species she was trying to save––her voice becoming insistent, her eyes tilted, expressing urgency and fear.

“Patagonia is one of the last places on this Earth without so much impact from indus-try or big cities, where it’s just nature,” she said, looking out the window at her pasture, nestled beneath the Andes, where a few hors-es huddled around her daughter, who stood stroking their noses in an oversize parka.

Lilli’s eyes drifted over the landscape out-side of her kitchen window, from the falling fence by the horses, through the tree speck-led valley, up to the mountains and the mist-feathered horizon. Her usually gruff voice grew soft.

“If we don’t stop HidroAysén,” she said, pausing, “there will be nothing left of Aysén. There will be nothing left.”

oday, most windows in Aysén face a landscape like Lilli’s. Horses walk

along the highway, and off the road, more sheep, cows, and horses graze the land than humans walk it. What comes next for Ay-sén––what the landscape outside of resi-dents’ windows will look like, and who gets to choose––remains uncertain. Most in Aysén say they just want to pick. They want their residency to give them a stronger pull in the

tug of war between saving the endangered huemel, allowing the hydroelectric projects, or preserving the pioneer ranching culture. Few think it is possible to keep all of it. Most believe their own vision distinct and unri-valed, accusing all others of leading to the de-struction of Patagonia. They grapple with the question: What is the best use of a beautiful and forgotten land?

I found myself attempting to answer this question throughout my time in Patagonia. The day I went running next to René Mu-ñoz, I left him on a trail cut out of the rock of a cliff rising up from the river. It was get-ting dark, and he told me to go back to Lil-li’s ranch downstream from René’s, where I would spend the night. He said to follow the river home. He was about to cross it; after a two hour drive and a six-hour ride, he rowed himself and his two horses across intertwin-ing braids of the Baker River in a small, wooden boat. He landed on a gravel bed on the far shore, where he reached his ranch and arrived home.

I squeezed between his horses and the rock, and ran through the yellowing grass-es of the valley. I followed the water’s path, sometimes wandering down to the banks to let my fingers linger in the current. The grey light thinned and darkened. The sheep scurried up the hill, away from the river, as I opened and closed various wiry fences par-titioning the valley, walking around the car-casses of felled trees and the water of scat-tered ponds. Darkness arrived before I could reach home. In the clear valley, residual light showed the faint trail, but below the twisty branches of the trees in the muddy forest, it melted away. I walked, bent over, with my hand on the ground, feeling for the different lengths of grass. I ran back and forth along the edge of the forest, looking for an opening

in the wood, for the trail I had lost. I heard the river, and walked towards it. I followed its winding banks until I saw a square of golden light across a couple of fields. Don Sanchez, a man with wrinkly lips and no teeth who helps on Lilli’s ranch, waited for me with a lantern, amazed that I had encountered trouble find-ing my way back. We walked together to-wards the cabin. He lit two candlesticks and sat next to the woodstove, the shadows flying up his face and onto the wall behind him as he heated up water for maté.

I left the ranch the next day. I headed back to Cochrane, and then Coyhaique, and soon enough, my own towns and cities a hemi-sphere away, where there are streetlights and roads to guide me when I am lost. Like other visitors clad in Arcteryx shells and Patagonia fleeces, I had become attached to the uncer-tainty of Aysén —the quirky bus schedules, the dirt roads, the sparse Internet. I had be-gun to love the wildness of a land other than my own, one I would leave all too soon. When I left the region, floating over it at cruising altitude, I hoped it would stay put, uncertain and wild. But I do not get to choose. I do not get to pull any piece of rope in this tug of war over the future of this beautiful and forgot-ten land. My voice should be swallowed by the river’s swells; it is the hubbub of debate among those who live in Aysén and the rush-ing slosh and splash of their rivers that are still too quiet to hear.

DIANA SAVERIN ‘13 is an English major in Berkeley College. The majority of the in-terviews for this article were conducted in Spanish. Research for this article was made possible by the Shana Alexander Journalism Fellowship and the Tristan Perlroth Prize for Summer Foreign Travel. Contact her at [email protected].

L

A view from Aysén: a horse on the banks of Lago General Carrera, the lake that feeds the Baker. (Saverin/TYG)

T

CHILE


21Q&A

Q: What happened that led to the privati-zation of the 1970s and 1980s?

A: What one has to understand is that in Chile, we developed quite well compared to the rest of the world in the 19th century, but we did very poorly in the 20th century… So when the military took over they looked around and asked what have we not done to help our development? And they looked at us here at Católica [a Chilean university]. They called us the Chicago Boys. They said, these guys are proposing a very liberal economy… everything else has failed, so we have to try this system. So they invited us Chicago Boys to come join the government to reform the economy. And what we did was to free prices, to free international trade, to free interna-tional capital flows, to privatize enterprise. And the economy has been up since then.

Q: Clearly Chile’s GDP has grown enor-mously since the ‘70s, but in Aysén, the people say it is all concentrated in San-tiago and they do not feel these effects.

A: Aysén is growing faster now. When we protected industry, industry tended to concentrate in cities where there are large labor supplies, Santiago grew, Concepción grew, Antofagasta grew. The big cities grew, and not the more rural areas like Aysén, but we changed this policy. After industry, it is the exact opposite, you tend to develop natural resources and related activities, which are in the regions, so the regions are developing today much faster than before. We are still changing from a high emphasis on industry to a high emphasis on natural resources and Aysén is benefiting, like the north’s benefits with mining and copper.

Q: In Aysén, people in the region don’t own their resources, though, or even their own water. Do you think that is the best system?

A: From a strictly economic point of view, it’s rational to use water where it’s worth the most. It’s like potatoes or cars; water is not a special thing. It’s just another good. I don’t see the problem. The only problem is if the electricity company has the rights to the wa-ter, and the private guy wants to use it, and he has to buy it. But if the value is higher making electricity than in the city, then it makes sense to keep it with the company. If the value is higher in the farms, he can buy it from Endesa (the energy company). Endesa will sell it—I’m sure. They’re not irrational.

Q: You don’t think water is a special good in any way—that we need it more than oth-ers, and should treat it differently?

If you really need it, you should be willing to pay for it. We need electricity, too. We need water, electricity, we need many other things. I actually have a farm close to San-tiago, and we have had a problem with our water and Endesa, and they have agreed to use the water to make electricity, then pump it up to our canal. And it works fine.

Q: In the case of Aysén, the argument over what to do with the water revolves around different perceptions of the value of the region—energy or industrial poten-tial, and more of an aesthetic value of it.

A: I have a lot of sympathy for the aesthetic value, personally. Many economists not, but I have a lot of it. If there is a cost to the value of aesthetics, it should be compensated, but up to the value of aesthetics, not unlimited. Because the value of the aesthetic is limited. If you destroy value in some place, you cre-ate some more in another, like make a park, for example. I think it’s stupid to say let’s not change anything. Then we couldn’t live.

Q: How do you prevent development from overtaking all of the wilderness?

A: Imagine you have all wilderness, which is Aysén. It’s all wilderness. You say how much

is wilderness worth, if I want to make this park? Not much right now, because you have a lot of wilderness. But if it’s the opposite—if you have a lot of development in a region, and only a little wilderness, that wilderness is go-ing to be worth a lot. So in the beginning, it’s going to be relatively easy, or relatively cheap, to destroy some of this wilderness to replace it with development. But eventually, it’s going to be very expensive for whoever wants to do a development project in a wilderness area. It always becomes more and more and more expensive. And if you do it well, it will work.

Q: That balance is within the boundaries of Aysén. Do you think that in terms of Chile as a country, or maybe the world, the value of Aysén’s wilderness should be higher since there aren’t as many places like Aysén left?

A: In the case of Chile, the wilderness is worth more because we have destroyed so much everywhere else. I don’t know about the world. In the case of Chile, we can handle it—we are a unified country, we don’t have states, you can handle it from Santiago. In the world, I don’t know. If the world wants us to keep that wilderness, they should pay us for it, just like I think they should pay the Brazilians for keeping the forest. If you say ‘don’t destroy that wilderness,’ great, but pay us for it. Otherwise it’s completely unfair. The rest of the world is asking Bra-zil to keep its forest, and they, correctly I think, say no, pay us for it, otherwise, no.

Q: If HidroAysén creates value with energy today, does time play into that value? For example, the dams won’t work forever, while something like wilderness has a more stable value if you protect it.

A: You don’t know that. Maybe we won’t value wilderness in the future. It has a val-ue now, we don’t know the future. The dam might have a higher value in the future—I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows.

Q & A

DIANA SAVERIN spoke to Rolf Lüders Schwarzenberg, an Economics professor at Pontifica Universidad Cá-tolica de Chile. He was the Minister of the Economy and Finance under Augusto Pinochet (1982-1983). He was a member of the “Chicago Boys,” a group of neoliberal young Chilean economists taught by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago. When Friedman saw the work of Lüders and the “Chicago Boys” during the Pino-chet dictatorship, including the privatization of water, which has given foreign companies rights to rivers such as those in Aysén, he coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.”

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

22

he rooms of Start-up Chile’s new headquarters at Centro Movistar Innova (CMI), a reno-vated former mansion, are qui-

et, but the light-filled space pulses with the creative energy of ideas being implemented. Entrepreneurs tap busily on their laptops, pausing occasionally to consult with col-leagues. Although the offices are in San-tiago, most of the entrepreneurs hail from thousands of miles away. A poster on the wall exhorts them to “embrace the change.” In fact, this group is part of the change—an effort to initiate a cultural and economic shift that will transform Chile into Latin America’s hub for innovation and entrepre-neurship.

Such a venture at first seems like an at-tempt to reproduce Silicon Valley, leading some observers to dub Santiago “Chilecon Valley.” Silicon Valley and other centers of entrepreneurship have succeeded largely because of their proximity to universities with strong science and technology pro-grams. Paul Graham, co-founder of a re-nowned start-up incubator, explained that “within the uS, there are no technology hubs without first-rate universities—or at least, first-rate computer science depart-ments.”

The theory goes that universities draw a critical mass of people with the ideas and skills to found high-tech companies and flourishing start-ups. More than just entre-

preneurs are necessary; however, investors are also crucial. Some argue that govern-ments are far less effective than investors with prior start-up experience. Graham de-scribed bureaucrats as “the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors,” and said such an effort would be as absurd as “Vogue editors running a math journal.”

Sitting in the offices of Start-up Chile, such an idea no longer seems quite so ri-diculous. Start-up Chile was created and funded in 2010 by the Chilean Economic De-velopment Agency (COFRO), a government branch, to boost entrepreneurship in Chile. As one participant explained, if a nation lacks a good, in this case start-ups, it can either create it from scratch or import it.

The Silicon Valley of South America?By Rachel Brown

CHILE

T

A Start-Up Chile participant pitches his venture to potential investors. (Zhang/TYG)


23CHILE

Rather than initially cultivating local entre-preneurs, with Start-up Chile, the Chilean government has chosen the latter option: importing entrepreneurs and investing in them, with the hope that this will eventually spur on homegrown start-ups.

Ivan Vera, a Chilean venture capitalist, doubts that Silicon Valley can truly be repli-cated. As he explained “it would be stupid to try to imitate Silicon Valley here in Chile. It is like imitating Oktoberfest.” Instead, Vera believes Chile should find a way to connect itself to other centers of innovation.

To do so, Chile has created a model of its own. Initially the program did this by of-fering foreign applicants work visas, office space, and a $40,000 grant to launch their early-stage ventures. In return, admitted

entrepreneurs agreed to spend a minimum of six months in Chile establishing their companies and conducting entrepreneur-ship outreach efforts.

Although many entrepreneurs are ini-tially attracted by the equity-free money, according to Vijay Kailas, a Start-up Chile participant and founder of Ante-up, a mo-bile app for sports betting, “there’s a lot more than just the subsidy that the govern-ment provided.” With fellow entrepreneurs hailing from everywhere from Malaysia to Argentina, members of Start-up Chile ben-efit enormously from joining a global net-work.

Chilean universities are not at the epi-center of this entrepreneurship trend, but they have not been entirely excluded either. A growing number of Chilean universities have established entrepreneurship pro-grams and “incubators” where students can develop start-ups. The relationship between these universities and Start-up Chile is far less direct than that between Stanford and Silicon Valley, however. Chile’s strongest technological university, Federico Santa María Technical university, is more than 70 miles from Start-up Chile’s headquarters.

Despite its atypical model, Start-up Chile has achieved considerable success. Although created and funded by the govern-ment, Start-up Chile enjoys much flexibility. As Horacio Melo, the program’s executive director explained, “The treatment that CORFO has with us is they give us all the freedom to do a lot of the things that nor-mally in government you cannot.” The gov-ernment backs the program in hopes that start-ups will help drive Chile’s long-term economic growth. As Vera explained, it is part of an effort to shift Chile’s resource-based economy from one of “atoms,” to one of “bytes.”

Although start-ups may boost Chile’s long-term productivity, the Start-up Chile model’s long-term sustainability remains in doubt. The program received criticism for initially excluding Chilean applicants, but has since opened to all and Chileans now comprise approximately a quarter of partic-ipants. Still, Start-up Chile struggles to fully realize its goals in a risk-averse culture. For long-term success, this must change. ulti-mately Melo envisions that “the ecosystem should exist without Start-up Chile.” But since many of the foreign participants will leave after six months, it is entrepreneurial

Chileans who will remain and whose ven-tures will sustain and expand the new sys-tem.

RACHEL BROWN ’15 is in Saybrook Col-lege. Contact her at [email protected].

A Few of Start-Up Chile’s Start-Ups

Agent PiggyFounders’ Countries of Origin: Ecuador and ArgentinaWebsite that helps parents teach their children financial responsibility and smart savings practices through tra-ditional “allowances” and innovative games.

Alcanzar SolarFounder’s Country of Origin: U.S.A venture to promote the use of low-cost solar water heaters, beginning in the deserts of Northern Chile.

Ante-UpFounders’ Countries of Origin: Chile and U.S.Mobile app that allows spectators of sports games to place bets with friends and access trivia.

bContextFounders’ Countries of Origin: Chile iPad app that allows users to handwrite notes on files, share and record meetings, and generally edit files to add context.

CatmojiFounders’ Country of Origin: MalaysiaWebsite to connect cat lovers around the world through photos, videos, and social networking.

JoagaboFounder’s Country of Origin: U.K.Social media site that helps soccer enthu-siasts find and organize games wherever they are.

Scholaroo Founder’s Country of Origin: U.S.Website and mobile service designed to help students discover appropriate schol-arships from around the world.

“Graham described bureaucrats

as ‘the exact opposite sort of

people from startup investors,’

and said such an effort would

be as absurd as ‘Vogue edi-

tors running a math journal.’”

Inside the Start-Up Chile offices (Brown /TYG)

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

GLIMPSE

rowing up in Chile, I never com-plained about my chores. I didn’t have any, and neither did any of my

friends. We had nanas instead. These house-hold workers or maids––always women––are part housecleaners, part babysitters, and part cooks. unlike other countries where having such maids is a luxury available only to the elite, many middle-class Chilean fami-lies, and even couples, have one. This situa-tion, the result of a cheap female workforce in a highly unequal country, has rarely been questioned. But in the wake of recent discrim-ination scandals, films, and documentaries on their situation, nanas are in the spotlight. As conservative Chilean society shakes from student and environmentalist movements, some nanas are staging their own marches, in their frilly uniforms, calling for their job to be treated just like any other.

One of their biggest demands is for a regular workday, since being a nana is not a 9-to-5 job. About a third of nanas actually live in their employers’ homes, in small “service rooms” next to the kitchen. Even nanas who live in their own homes often have twelve-hour workdays. Nanas answer to every need (and whim) of the family, from making af-ternoon sandwiches for the kids to cleaning toilets. Chilean domestic life, at least for the

richest third, would be unthinkable without their constant presence. In many Chilean homes nanas become “like family.”

For my own family, at least, this was cer-tainly true. My parents hired our first maid right after their wedding, a year before I was born. “Pepa,” as we called her, lived for more than ten years in our suburban Santi-ago home. She cleaned the house and helped take care of my sisters and me. Like all live-in nanas, Pepa slept in our service room. I dimly remember visiting Pepa’s own house once, where her husband and children lived, but I never thought much about her spending only one night a week with them. When we went to the beach for the summer, Pepa would come with us. When we went to Disneyworld in 1999, she flew with us. And when we moved

to the uS in 2000, she came to help us move in. Pepa’s story, of maids’ lives trailing those

of their employers, is not uncommon. Miriam Gonzalez is another such nana. In her late 50s, slightly chubby and with graying hair, Miriam wears the characteristic nana uni-form: a dark blue maid’s dress with small frills. Miriam was a single mother without a high school degree when she left her home in southern Chile in search of better wages in Santiago. She was hired by Francisco and Beatriz Mualim just months after their wed-ding in 1982, when she was 27, and has lived with them since. “From the start, we had good chemistry,” she said. “I never thought of moving back to Osorno.”

Miriam would take the eight-hour bus ride south to visit her son Roberto, who was raised by his grandparents. But when the Mualims moved to the Netherlands in the early ‘90s, Miriam went with them, and rarely saw her son. In a sense, Miriam raised the Mualim children more than she did her own. “It’s like seeing your own children grow up,” she told me. “You see their steps in life, their suc-cesses, birthdays, years––and it fulfills you,” she continued, noting that she even went to their weddings. But this close bond disrupted her own family life. “When I visited Roberto, I would often call him ‘Felipe’ or ‘Francisco’

Las NanasDomestic workers in Chile: A peculiar institution or just another job?By Diego Salvatierra

G

24

Emilia Solis and other leaders of her nana union in Santiago. (Solis/SINDUTCAP)

“Chilean domestic life, at least

for the richest third, would be

unthinkable without their constant

presence. In many Chilean homes

nanas become ‘like family’.”


25

[the names of the Mualim children] by mis-take,” she said.

After decades living with the Mualims, Miriam comes and goes “as if it were home,” she said. Beatriz Mualim agrees, explaining “she is like a sister, or maybe like a cousin,” and that they have long talks over coffee. But Mrs. Mualim noted that Miriam is quick to move to the kitchen when a guest comes over for tea or dinner. “She is very proper––of course she knows better than to sit with our guests!” These subtle differentiations high-light a characteristic of the job. Nanas can be “like” family, or live “as if” they were part of the home, but they never fully are.

A similar story to Miriam’s became the subject of one of Chile’s biggest blockbust-ers, La Nana, a 2009 dark comedy that won accolades at Sundance. Like Miriam, the pro-tagonist Raquel had lived with her employ-ers, the Valdeses, for decades. She is there as their children grow up and believes herself to be part of the family. When a new maid is brought in to help her, she performs a series of semi-comical pranks to get the newcomer fired. But the new nana goes jogging and has her own social life, eventually inspiring Raquel to do things for herself. As audiences laughed at Raquel’s antics, many began to see nanas in a new light. The personal toll on nanas––as women who rarely see their own children, who do not live in their own homes, and who sacrifice large portions of their per-sonal lives––was laid bare. The system that most Chileans had tacitly accepted was now talked about and criticized. This set the stage for bigger changes.

Late in 2011, a local resident reported to a Santiago newspaper that his gated commu-nity in Chicureo, a well-off suburb, prevented nanas from walking freely on the streets. The administration required maids to wear “proper identifying uniforms” and the local golf club prohibited nanas from swimming in the pool when accompanying employers’ chil-dren. Readers and columnists denounced this as class-based discrimination. The attention on nanas continued with a documentary by Canal 13, a leading TV station. It featured an “experiment” to prove discrimination by hav-ing an actress dressed in a nana’s uniform request admission for her children at elite Santiago schools. Although it was not well received (“I would never matriculate my chil-dren in my uniform!” said my current live-out maid, Luzvenia Mendez), the documentary fueled the growing national debate.

In tandem with this public discussion,

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera moved in May to regularize domestic worker contracts and work hours. His law would reduce the workday for live-in maids from 15 hours to 12, and from 12 to eight for live-out ones, the standard for Chilean workers.

Homes as workplaces are hard to moni-tor, which makes this difficult to enforce. “There are maids who do not denounce ex-cess hours,” argued Ruth Olate, president of the Domestic Workers’ union (SINTRACAP), the oldest and largest of the three main nana unions, which helped draft the law. Still, she sees the law as an important step forward.

The law is not without detractors. Katrina Garib, mother of three in an upper middle class apartment, has employed several nanas over the years. “I find the new law absurd,” she said. “Yes, they may wake up at 7 a.m. and cook dinner at 7 p.m., but they spend a lot of time in between doing nothing.” Garib be-lieves the law is misplaced: “I paid my nanas above the minimum wage, which is very common; they’re better off than others, and shouldn’t complain so much.” Live-in maids do not pay rent and get free food, she added.

For Emilia Solis, on the other hand, Pi-ñera’s law did not go far enough. Solis is the founder of the newer unitary union of Do-mestic Workers (SINDuTCAP). Although the two unions cooperated in drafting the new law, Solis fell out at the last minute after re-fusing to compromise on an eight-hour work-day for all maids, not just live-out ones.

“Our final goal is to reduce the workday to eight hours, even for live-ins,” said So-lis at a recent union meeting. “We are not slaves––we are people,” she said with a ris-ing voice, stressing that their job is just like any other, and should be treated as such. The nanas in the room clapped. I looked around and saw a dozen old and middle-aged faces. The room was some-what empty––it was Mothers’ Day, and most maids were spending the day with their children.

“They call me a communist––I’m a communist if it means demanding what I ask for,” So-

lis told me over coffee. “We are totally radi-cal,” she added, noting her contacts with left-wing parties. “We can never get stepped on again––the dominant class takes advantage of us,” she said. I wondered if she could tell that I was part of that class.

Solis has been working as a maid since she was thirteen. She recounted how one of her employers refused to give her a contract, and when she sued, the employer turned up with a forged signature and contract in court. Emilia founded the new union to fight similar abuses. After three years, it counts some 70 active members. Out of nearly half a million nanas, the numbers are low, but Solis notes that thousands of maids have come for que-ries and support. She cooperates with Olate’s union in organizing awareness marches. The largest one, held last November, drew hun-dreds of nanas. Again in June, scores of live-out maids marched against long commutes to their upper and middle class workplaces. The sight of nanas on the street grabbed political and media attention.

Still, the organizations’ unity cracked over the new law’s treatment of live-in maids. When I asked Olate why her union, as op-posed to Solis’, supported the twelve-hour

“They call me a communist—

I’m a communist if it means de-

manding what I ask for.”

—Emilia Solis, founder of SINDUTCAP

Nanas taking care of employers’ children are a common sight in eastern San-tiago. (Salvatierra/TYG)

CHILE

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

26

workday, she retorted that lowering it to eight would hurt some of the poorest maids. “Many immigrant nannies need to work in-house––they don’t have anywhere else to stay,” she said. And with an eight-hour workday “there would be no demand for live-ins.”

Many of these immigrant live-in maids come from neighboring, poorer Peru. Peru-vian nanas, identifiable by their accents and somewhat darker skin, often face discrimina-tion from Chilean nanas who fear losing their jobs to a cheaper workforce. “Some of our union members cry that we are ‘invaded by Peruvians,’” said Olate, “but I tell them ‘No! These are our fellow workers, we’re all the same.’”

“Fellow workers” are not the only ones who discriminate. Santuza Atao, an immi-grant maid from Cuzco, said she “would call potential employers, who would say ‘Chilean yes, Peruvian no.’” Some Chilean parents are worried their children will pick up a Peruvian accent, she explained.

Santiago’s Plaza de Armas, the city’s foun-dational square, is the favorite meeting place for the capital’s growing Peruvian communi-ty. Money transfer shops with Peruvian flags line its side streets, and nearby restaurants advertise Aji de Gallina and Arroz Chaufa, typical Peruvian dishes. In a small second floor room with a view of Santiago’s cathe-dral, Matilde Rodriguez, a nana from north-

ern Peru, runs a new union for immigrant maids.

“Peruvian nanas leave everything be-hind to work… immigrating felt like exile,” said Rodriguez, who came to Santiago over a decade ago. Immigrant live-in maids “have nowhere to go on their day off” and “drift through the city, alone,” she said. Rodriguez founded the union this April to help them find support. They host workshops on attaining proper documentation and workers’ rights, and even began a campaign in Lima to edu-cate young Peruvians about the difficulties of immigration.

But Rodriguez is most proud of the knit-ting lessons they offer: “Working as a live-in nana is to live without living, to live for some-one else—it’s like slavery with psychological flagellation,” she says, with teary eyes. The solution to this harsh, “impersonal” situa-

tion is “reencountering yourself, doing things for yourself,” she said, “and knitting is for you!”

More and more nanas, whether immigrants or not, are beginning to think like this. Miriam Gonzalez, the Mualims’ maid, had told me how younger maids “like to have fun, go out, have their own homes, hus-bands, kids.” She believes that in a few years it will

be more like in Europe or the united States, with cleaning ladies paid by the hour replac-ing nanas. Miriam noted that nanas like her, who spend a lifetime with an employer, are in-creasingly rare. Indeed, there are now fewer live-in maids: the Domestic Worker’s union estimates they have dropped from two-thirds to a third over the past decade.

This trend will continue. As Chilean soci-ety grows richer and less unequal, the social situation that gave rise to nanas will become rarer. Practically all of the maids I spoke to had worked hard to get their children to col-lege—Chilean university enrollment has in-creased fivefold over the past twenty years. With better education and rising wages in other sectors, fewer young women will be-come nanas, and hiring one will become more of a luxury. Given Peru’s recent economic boom, even the inflow of immigrant live-in maids could slow down. I have a feeling that my future children will do at least some of their own chores, as hundreds of thousands of small service rooms lie empty, their would-be occupants living in their own homes, lead-ing their own lives.

DIEGO SALVATIERRA ’13 is an Ethics, Politics and Economics major in Pierson Col-lege. Contact him at [email protected].

In November 2012, domestic workers took to the streets to protest discrimination and long workdays. (Courtesy of Emilia Solis/SINDUTCAP)

“Working as a live-in nana is to

live without living, to live for

someone else.”

—Matilde Rodriguez, a nana from Peru

Solis’ maid union met to discuss President Piñera’s new law. (Solis)

CHILE


27

n my Internet sleuthing before the Globalist’s annual reporting trip, I thought I had discovered the perfect story: the Esmeralda. Six Chilean

ships have borne the name Esmeralda, and the current one has been in operation since May 12, 1953. Functioning as a floating embassy, a symbol of prestige and national pride, the ship docks in port cities around the world, invit-ing residents on board to wine and dine in the Chilean way. Some residents, though, prefer to protest at the docks.

The ship seems benign, but historical guests were not always treated as graciously as today’s. Father Michael Woodward was a British priest, community leader, and mem-ber of a Christian-Democratic political party that supported Allende. In the years before the Pinochet coup, he worked with the poor in Valparaiso, distributing food and supplies throughout the city. On September 16, 1973, just five days after the day of the Pinochet coup, the Navy forced Woodward to board the Esmeralda. Blood flowed instead of wine: he was tortured to death.

The Navy officially denies that torture has occurred and has ignored requests from Amnesty International to place a memorial plaque on the ship. Patricia Bennetts, sister of Woodward, has filed a case against the Chil-ean Navy in 2002 charging it with torture and murder. The Esmeralda captured the sordid tale of Pinochet’s dictatorial legacy in one ship. As a journalist, I was thrilled.

I arrived in Chile to find, after conducting ten interviews, that the Esmeralda wasn’t part of the national consciousness. In my first few days in Chile, I spoke with lawyers, journalists, uNICEF, students. Few seemed to know about the torture on the Esmeralda. The few who did seemed to regard it as irrelevant. “It was in the past, and such a small thing,” was the refrain I often heard. Even Walter Roblero, the highly

knowledgeable curator of the Museo de la Me-moria, the Santiago-based museum honoring victims of human rights violations in Chile, knew little of the ship beyond the contents of Amnesty’s report. If the curator of a human rights memorial museum didn’t entirely recall the Esmeralda, I wasn’t sure who would. I ran around Santiago, asking about the Esmeralda, my questions evoking vague memories at best. The story appeared to be a dead end. Then, I interviewed Claudio Nash, a professor of hu-man rights at the universidad de Chile who told me, “Those who say they do not know [about the Esmeralda] do not want to know.”

This one sentence out of the many lingered. I didn’t want my story to become a non-story, so I latched onto it. Instead of investigating what had happened on the Esmeralda, I began to wonder why no one seemed to know or care about it.

n Valparaiso, a port city in Chile where Pinochet’s coup began and where the

Esmeralda docks between world tours, I was sure I would find someone who still found the ship symbolic. But from Eduardo Silva, a cura-tor at the Museo Naval y Maritimo, I received a response similar to those of the others. He said, apologetically, “There are lots of other memorials.” The torture on board the Esmer-alda was too small a piece of history to allow it to stain the pride attached to the ship, he said.

A day later, I spoke with Mónica Pilquil Lizana, a human rights advocate, at a student protest. She spoke quickly, distantly, of the Es-meralda, and only when I brought it up, soon returning her focus to the violence against protesters. This jarred me—maybe, I thought, the torture on the Esmeralda simply wasn’t relevant anymore in light of the violence at the protests. Still, when I returned home from Chile, I tried my last resource: Patricia Ben-netts, sister of Father Woodward, who current-

ly lives in Spain. In the ten years since she filed her case, it has moved slowly through courts and many charged have been released.

I thought the lack of consciousness both Bennetts and I encountered was a product of a denial of Chile’s dictatorial past. I was sure it was—and I was looking for evidence to sup-port my claim. “Isn’t it bad that the Esmeralda doesn’t even have a memorial to those who died?,” I would ask. Later, while trying to write my story, I re-read my notes and found that in my investigation, I had asked leading ques-tions, trying to tease the “right” answer out of my sources. I was, in short, trying to create a national drama that did not exist.

While the lack of remembrance for the victims who died on the Esmeralda is tragic, I can’t assert truthfully that any malignance lies under that amnesia. It might be that Chil-eans are trying to move on from a complicated past to sort out a present complicated by per-vasive student protests, or that they want the boat to remain a symbol of national pride. I am not sure why it is not the perfect story I was convinced it was, but asking about it of everyone I met in Chile was like asking some-one from Dallas about the JFK assassination: Yes, it happened there, but it does not define Dallas, nor does it serve as a lens to pass any judgment on the city today.

As much as I wanted my story about the Esmeralda to be incredible, an exposé on Chile’s past and its “inability” to reconcile that past with a changing future, it wasn’t. And good journalism isn’t in the business of creat-ing a fiction out of facts that don’t quite add up, even when that fiction would make a compel-ling tale.

ANISHA SUTERWALA ’14 is an English major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at [email protected].

Forgetting the Esmeralda A student journalist chases a story that wasn’t.

by Anisha Suterwala

I

I

Tolgay/TYG

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

GLIMPSE

raucanía—the poorest among Chile’s 14 regions—is the home-land of the Mapuche, the coun-try’s largest indigenous group

and the only native population in the Ameri-cas to successfully resist Spanish coloniza-tion. Since capitulating to the Chilean army in 1882, however, the Mapuche have gradu-ally lost control of their ancestral lands due to privatization policies and invasive logging operations in the densely forested region. Araucanía’s lush hills and snow-covered peaks hide the clusters of makeshift tin-roof homes where Mapuche families still reside. For the one-third of the Mapuche population that has remained in rural Araucanía, sub-sistence agriculture is the only means of sur-vival. In their struggle to maintain their way of life, so closely tied to the land, a choice divides the Mapuche people: to conform to these legal and commercial forces or to con-front them.

The Mapuche—“People of the Land” in their mother tongue Mapudungun—have maintained an uneasy relationship with the Chilean state for almost two centuries. The clash between modern and indigenous per-ceptions of land ownership is at the root of this fragile relationship. Organized as com-munities (comunidades), the Mapuche have managed their land communally with a shared religious site, water source, and har-vested produce, while the Chilean govern-

ment recognizes private ownership and land titles.

“The land reforms mark the beginnings of the communities’ fragmentation,” remarked Ylenia Hartog, a Spanish lawyer whose in-terest in indigenous populations and the Ma-puche conflict drew her to Chile.

Hartog, a vivacious woman and an avid advocate of indigenous rights who is cur-rently representing two Mapuche tribal chiefs (lonkos) at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IAC), insisted that “the Mapuche’s living space has been drastically reduced to reservations (reducciones) be-cause of privatization policies dating back to the nineteenth century. They lost most of their cattle and arable lands, so in a way, they were condemned to hunger and pov-erty.” Comisiòn Radicadora, a government agency that was responsible for the land allocations, led this process by resettling the communities to the mountainous and marginal areas of Araucanía in exchange for their fertile lands near the Bío Bío River. As a form of reparation, the Mapuche were granted mercy titles (títulos de merced).

“But with these titles came significant reductions, and they could only keep 10 per-cent of their original territories,” stressed Hartog. This introduction of private proper-ty titles and the auctioning of the Mapuche’s ancestral territories gained momentum following General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973

coup, gradually reducing Mapuche territo-ries to the disjointed plots they are today.

The Mapuche are also confronted by the environmental consequences of logging op-erations, in addition to being discredited as landowners. Vast plantations of fast-growing eucalyptus and pine trees stand out when driving through the rolling hills of Cura-cautín in northeastern Araucanía; clearly, neither species is native among virgin for-ests of coigüe, raulí, and tepa trees. Logging companies Forestal Arauco and Forestal Mininco have planted eucalyptus and pine trees to compensate for their operations, but have failed to restore the region’s ecosystem. Expectedly, the Mapuche’s verdant terrain is now afflicted with soil erosion and acidifica-tion.

According to lonko Bernardo, the tribal chief of a 17-family community in Curacau-tín, these effects of deforestation are crip-pling harvests, compelling his son and many others to seek employment in Temuco, the capital of Araucanía. Bernardo’s community is among the majority that has tolerated this gradual loss of land; like many others, his community conformed to the land al-locations by relocating southwards to the mountainous outskirts of Curacautín due to the scanty compensation offered to his com-munity.

The Mapuche have lost their land due to a complex network of forces, but their demand

AA Mapuche community at the base of the Tolhuaca volcano near Curacautín, a town in the Malleco province of Araucanía. (Tolgay/TYG)

By Sera Tolgay

The Warriors of Araucanía

The Mapuche change battlegrounds to keep ancestral lands.

28


29

for land rights is simple and local. Among many others who have remained in rural Araucanía, lonko Bernardo is unwavering in his tight-knit relationship with the land: “I’ve never been to a supermarket. The earth can give you all that you ask.”

lthough most Mapuche communities have come to terms with relocation,

some prefer a strategy of confrontation, de-manding the full restitution of their ances-tral lands. In Malleco, the hotbed of conflicts, radical Mapuche activists––most of them poor farmers and lonkos like Bernardo––have expressed their dissatisfaction through arson attacks and land occupations against logging companies. Yet their choice to chal-lenge the commercial and legal forces has a heavy price: persecution under the anti-terrorism law.

Since the 1990s, the anti-terrorism law, which originally targeted political opponents of Pinochet’s military regime, has been spe-cifically used to prosecute Mapuche incur-sions, with harsh penalties.

“The anti-terrorism law is controversial because it allows testimony by anonymous witnesses, and also has very harsh penalties, harsher than most criminal offenses” said Hartog. “This violates the right for due pro-cess. I don’t think they are receiving a fair trial.”

When asked about the fairness of the anti-terrorism law, Violeta Hernandez, from

the legislative division of the Ministry of the Interior, insisted that the law is a necessary security measure to counter terrorism. The Mapuche attacks, though, are far from be-ing a campaign of organized terror; none of these sporadic attacks have claimed a single life.

At the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Hartog is currently representing An-iceto Norin and Pascual Pichun, two lonkos detained since 2001 for allegedly setting fire to a house in an ancestral Mapuche territory in Malleco. She emphasized that there is no evidence incriminating them, except for the testimony of anonymous witnesses. Even so, “Their alleged crimes were against property, and do not fit the characterization of terror-ism in international treaties, which requires grave violations against persons,” explained Hartog.

Although she is not expecting a dras-tic change of events in Araucanía any time soon, she is hopeful that her ongoing case at the IAC will “at least give an orientation to indigenous rights issues in Latin America,” because the court will develop case law on reparations, vital for the survival of frag-mented indigenous communities throughout the continent. Regardless of their choice to fight or admit defeat, fair land reparations will be pivotal for all Araucaníans.

n response to recent court cases and local protests, the Chilean government

has taken more initiatives to address the increasing de-mands of Mapuche groups. In 2009, after a two decade-long debate, the Chilean Congress resolved to ratify the Indig-enous and Tribal Peoples Convention. Each ministry now has a representative to ensure that the government respects the principles of the convention, ranging from the right to have a transla-tor in courts to multilingual education. Claudia Ancalao, a young Mapuche and an orga-nizer for the assistance pro-grams of CONADI in Purén, Araucanía, admitted that “ the government surely imple-ments programs that try to address the dire needs of Mapuche communities in Ar-aucanía.” CONADI, Chile’s in-digenous development corpo-

ration founded in 1993, has recently provided economic assistance, language programs, and scholarships to many communities in Araucanía. “Yet I think that the economic support, like wheat, tractors, fertilizers, has a short-term effect, making the Mapuche de-pendent on government aid. This does not solve the problem of land rights.”

As Mapuche communities relocate fur-ther south, losing access to the resources in their once expansive territories, their an-cient practice of self-sufficiency has become more strenuous to maintain.

“The overwhelming economic inequality forces people to be conformist. Most prefer to accept the situation, but there is a pro-found sadness in the community,” lamented Pablo Catrileo, a Mapuche student from rural Araucanía studying at Pontifica universidad Católica, one of the most prestigious univer-sities in Chile. Those who have remained in their rural communities have hope in their educated youth, like Pablo, who are garner-ing support from their university professors and international organizations in Santiago and beyond.

Neither conformists nor violent radicals, these students represent a third way: intel-lectuals who are active in universities, court-rooms, and government organizations. With such a dedicated youth, preserving the Ma-puche’s way of life need not be a lost cause. “The Mapuche are warriors,” Pablo insisted. “They are fighters.”

SERA TOLGAY ’14 is a Political Science major in Branford College. The majority of the interviews for this article were conduct-ed in Spanish. Research for this article was made possible by the Richter Summer Fellow-ship. Contact her at [email protected].

“The overwhelming economic

inequality forces people to be

conformist. Most prefer to ac-

cept the situation, but there

is a profound sadness in the

community.”

—Pablo Catrileo, Mapuche student

A

A typical Mapuche home in the outskirts of Curacautín. (Tolgay/TYG)

I

CHILE

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

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clown came to the protest wear-ing stilts. He held a sign—“No More Military Spending!”—and also, a toilet plunger. Nearby, two

women chanted that “water is a right,” and a group from the communist party unfurled a long red banner. The clown passed a white-haired communist, and gave him a plunge on the head.

university students planned to descend on Valparaíso to protest for education reform—but it seemed there would also be a protest about every single other problem in Chile.

Then a little girl appeared, blowing a whis-tle and waving a flag that declared, “educa-tion is a right.” Soon behind her came the stu-dents—hundreds of them. They were out in force to repeat their demands: free and high quality education for all.

A hooded figure with a bandana over his face emerged from the periphery. In front of a group from the universidad de Chile, he lit a cardboard tube on fire. It smoldered for a while, throwing off smoke, and slowly burned out.

Meanwhile, President Sebastián Piñera addressed the Chilean Congress a few blocks away—his state of the nation address was the immediate occasion for the march. He spent some words on education, ending with a little fatherly advice.

“Never before in our history has a gen-eration had so many opportunities to educate themselves,” the President said. “But [the students] should remember that they also have responsibilities. To their studies, to their families, to their country, and above all, to themselves.”

Back at the march, parents began to take the young kids home. The roofs were spotted with dark figures clutching rocks. Officers waited behind a white plastic barricade as protesters in gas masks began to dismantle it. Then a rock flew from a rooftop, and the fight began.

Forty minutes later, after a flurry of tear gas and arrests, the white plastic barricade lay twisted and burned, and the President’s speech ended. He had not promised free edu-cation for all. No one was surprised.

ernando Hidalgo, a 19-year-old sociol-ogy student in square-framed glasses,

sat in a park outside of Santiago’s univer-sidad Central to explain his involvement in Chile’s massive student movement. Since the summer of 2011, students have been fighting to lower or eliminate tuition payments and make higher education accessible to all. The government has yet to accede to most of their demands. Still, Hidalgo said that the move-ment has had other important effects.

“An enormous trampoline,” he said. “Yes—the student movement has definitely been a type of trampoline that other social movements have jumped off from.”

Some of those movements are separate from the central student unrest, though per-haps inspired by it (a notable example is the mobilization in Aysén, a region to the south). Additionally, however, the student movement itself has grown to encompass a wider range of causes.

“We’ve started to see that education is connected to constitutional changes, and to

societal inequalities over all,” said Sebastián Donoso, universidad de Santiago’s student federation president. “The movement isn’t just one dimensional anymore.”

Some say that increased participation has diluted the movement’s education-focused message, but most leaders favor greater numbers.

“The only way forward, when the govern-ment isn’t listening, is to win the support of the population,” said Jorge Brito, president of the student federation at Valparaiso’s univer-sidad Técnica Federico Santa María.

He opened the door to their headquarters. The vibe was like that of any typical college dorm room: Music played, and one student sat on a stool while his friends shaved his head. Brito waved and asked them how they were doing. Then, he retreated into his office.

All smiles at a Santiago protest, though one attendee is disguised as Guy Fawkes. The plastic masks can be bought easily on the streets during a march. (Shor/TYG)

The Lover, the Fighter, and the AntFor Chilean students, protest styles diverge

Aby Sally Helm

F

“The ruling class doesn’t tend

to listen to protests. But when

there’s violence? When there’s

a scene, and the roads are cut

off for more than ten hours,

and there’s damage to pub-

lic property, or costs to pay?

Then, they listen.”

— Fernando Hidalgo, student

CHILE


31

No barbershop antics here: It was quiet and casually professional. Two desks sat among bookshelves lined with white plastic binders. Their spines read, “Agenda: CONFECH meet-ing, March 2011” and “Agenda: CONFECH meeting, April 2012.” Brito closed the door to muffle the razor’s whine.

On his campus, Brito plans federation events and meetings, and he also works with the nation-wide Confederation of Student Federations (CONFECH), which is respon-sible for organizing many of the movement’s activities. With participation as his goal, he spent last year planning protests that some-times felt like parties.

“One time, it was very beautiful, we did ‘dances for education,’” Brito said. “Another time, 500 of us gathered in the center of Val-paraiso, and 1…2….3…we all fell to the floor. Thirty minutes we were on the floor. And people were passing”—Brito lowered his voice to a whisper—“they were saying, look, look, what’s happening, what’s happening.”

That’s what creative protest is about, students explain—calling attention to them-selves, so that officials take note of their con-cerns.

“One way to get people involved is to talk about our demands, to say that education should be free and high quality,” Brito said. “But another is the form that you use to say those things.”

Student leaders have spearheaded some of the more creative tactics, but their follow-ers have also chosen diverse ways to repre-sent themselves. They Photoshop images of Minister of Education Harald Beyer with his

pants down, they put on bear suits, and they pretend to be pirates. In May 2012, Rocío Sara came to a march in Santiago dressed up as an ant.

“It’s from that movie! A Bug’s Life. You know that movie? ” Sara asked. She wore a headband with two protruding antennae made from balls of tape, and she had painted her arms and face with swirls of bright sea-blue.

“Going out to the marches—it’s like being awake, always,” she said. “It’s not to achieve the demands, re-ally. It’s just a form. It’s to say, ‘we can march.’”

For Brito, however, the cre-ative forms have a practical end: He hoped that they would inspire widespread mobiliza-tion, which ultimately would spur the ruling class to action.

“But, the government didn’t respond, and didn’t respond, and didn’t respond, and didn’t respond,” Brito said. “And we kept going, and going, and go-ing. And finally, many of our peers opted for violence.”

Fernando Hidalgo, the glass-es-clad 19-year-old, is one of those.

“When you gain more expe-rience in this... you realize that violence is a method that even-tually brings you to a level of greater productivity,” Hidalgo said. “The ruling class doesn’t

tend to listen to protests. But when there’s violence? When there’s a scene, and the roads are cut off for more than ten hours, and there’s damage to public property, or costs to pay? Then, they listen.”

Hidalgo is a self-proclaimed encapuchado: “hooded one.” Faces wrapped in black scarves or obscured by bulky sweatshirts, they lurk on the edges of the festive demonstrations, coming out for the inevitable brawls at the end. Not a march goes by without reports of rocks or Molotov cocktails thrown at police officers, and tear gas or water cannons un-leashed in response. The violence has even spread beyond the marches—in both Santia-go and Valparaiso, students have burned cars and destroyed other property, purportedly in solidarity with the cause.

A taxi driver says that he used to support them, but students have shut down public streets too many times. Now he calls them “a bunch of good for nothings.” One moderate student says he believes in education reform, but that the demonstrations are just “a bunch of noise.” Hidalgo said that he and his clan have been unfairly characterized.

“What happens is, in the media… it starts to look like we’re all vandals, we’re all delin-quents,” he said. “But really, there are many reasons behind the capucha.”

Brito doesn’t see these reasons.“If you want a society with more solidar-

ity, you don’t go and burn the car of a woman

At a May 16 student protest in Santiago, a salesman holds up confetti in one hand and lemons in the other. The lemons will protect students against the worst effects of tear gas, which police officers com-monly use during the brawls at the end of the marches. (Shor/TYG)

Rocío Sara holds up a cardboard leaf that she has brought with her to a student protest. (Shor/TYG)

CHILE

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A sign orders Minister of Education Harald Beyer to put his pants on. (Shor/TYG)

who’s just trying to go to work,” he said. “I don’t know how that advances our move-ment. I don’t know how that helps us achieve our demands. I don’t know.”

He tries to minimize the damage of the en-capuchados when it comes to public opinion. Last year, after some protesters burned a car, Federico Santa María’s Student Federation held a party in a disquotheque to pay for a new one.

“But one of the other universities’ fed-erations didn’t participate, because they said that all forms of protest are valid,” Brito said. “Even violence.”

That’s the kind of talk Hidalgo respects.“Some people within the movement reject

the capucha, something that I don’t really understand. I think that you have to support all the forms of opposition—absolutely all of them,” he said.

For Hidalgo, it’s student leaders who don’t know how to get things done.

“If someone goes dancing in the Plaza de Armas, in the capital building, they’re going to be laughing,” he said. “People come with flowers, with balloons, with cheers, and ev-erything very beautiful and all of us express-ing ourselves. But we’re not going to achieve anything.”

Brito can easily spend an hour listing sta-tistics about poverty, facts about Chile’s high-er education system, and proposals for how to reform it—but he doesn’t deny the lack of concrete results.

“up until now, the student movement has achieved practically nothing in education,” Brito said. “But, it has changed minds. And so today more changes are possible…we can

start participating in our democracy again.”Hidalgo’s brand of participation might not

be what he had in mind, but the two men have strikingly similar ideological goals.

“I think that we have to defend the little that remains for us of our democracy,” Hidal-go said. “Ruthlessly.”

The Santiago policeman stared fixedly at a parked car. At 21, he’s the same age as many of the students he has arrested at marches gone out of control. When he agreed to speak (anonymously), he flicked his eyes up and down the block as if afraid of being watched.

Even speaking anonymously, the officer toed the party line. The protestors are vio-lent ruffians, while what the police do isn’t violence—it’s just “necessary force.”

“Tell me,” he said, “have you seen an of-ficer throwing a Molotov cocktail at a stu-dent?” He shook his head. “You’re not going to see that.”

A police van rolled up to the Santiago cor-ner. The officer approached it and saluted smartly, slamming his boots together.

“Not everyone understands my choice to become a police officer,” he said, returning to his post. “It’s about duty. It’s about protecting my fellow citizens.”

He thinks the students should appreciate the prosperity and stability that they’ve in-herited.

“We have freedoms, but we have to act responsibly,” he said. “There’s a limit to our liberties.”

The encapuchado doesn’t accept that kind of limitation, and doesn’t think it’ll hold up for long.

“Even with the toughest terrorism, the state can’t block the authority of the people forever,” he said. “Protest itself is a symbol of freedom. If you go to a march today in Chile, it’s two or three hours of liberty.”

For Sara, the ant, that’s success enough.“I think that the marches will have a re-

sult, no matter what,” she said. “They’re for all of us. To be united, and to be in opposi-tion.”

Satisfied with her explanation, she looked up ahead at where her friends had disap-peared into the crowd. All around her, a chant picked up force. It was both raucous and cho-reographed, and they all seemed to know it.

“Chi! Chi! Chi!” “Le! Le! Le” “Chile!” “Chile!” “Chile!”

SALLY HELM ’14 is an English major in Berkeley College. The majority of the inter-views for this article were conducted in Span-ish. Contact her at [email protected].

“Protest itself is a symbol of

freedom. If you go to a march

today in Chile, it’s two or three

hours of liberty.”

— Rocío Sara

Banners wave as students and their supporters gather on the streets of Santiago. Organizers reported that the march on May 16th drew over 100,000 participants. (Shor/TYG)

CHILE


33

port city founded in the nine-teenth century, Valparaíso is known for its labyrinth of brightly colored houses that hug

the peaks and dips of the city’s many cer-ros—steep hills plunging down into the Pa-cific Ocean. In a city of past and present, this scenery, neither industrial nor residential, neither modern nor antiquated, has earned the city its demarcation as a uNESCO World Heritage site.

At the heart of the city are the funicu-lars, sets of counterbalancing cable cars that have creaked up and down the cerros for over a hundred years. They numbered 31 at the peak of their use, and were built in the late-nineteenth century as transportation up hills with gradients of at least 45 degrees. Although funiculars are common in moun-tainous regions throughout the world, no city has so many. While the tourism industry keeps most funiculars in operation, the fu-niculars also regularly transport residents of Valparaíso, from young men on their way to work to elderly women going to the market.

Today only 14 funiculars are functional, of which five are owned by the city and nine by private companies. Ticket prices of the fu-niculars vary wildly, with some private ones charging three times as much as public ones. These higher prices, though insignificant for most tourists, impact workers who rely on funiculars for daily commutes. The fact that prices remain so variable means that, despite the efforts of many over the past decade, the initial goals of Camilo Vargas Koch—known as el Hombre Ascensor, the elevator man—remain unfulfilled. Since the election of the

fiscally conservative Sebastián Piñera, Var-gas has been unsuccessful in his attempts to spearhead a government buyback of funicu-lars.

For Vargas, the funiculars are an eco-nomic investment and a practical means of transportation, not to mention a cultural landmark. Many think the government’s ten-dency to prioritize decisions in Santiago is to

blame for the state of disrepair of more than half of Valparaíso’s funiculars, leading out-siders to consider the machines relics, whose aesthetics outweigh daily value. But for those whose homes are nestled high in the hills, the slow, decrepit cars are a waste of crucial city infrastructure. “Yes, they are part of cul-ture, but the funiculars are the best method of transportation in the city,” said Juan Torre Barca, who spends his days sitting outside of El Peral, an operating funicular, selling the book he wrote about the funiculars and their history. Like Vargas, Torre thinks repairs and modernization, to make the decrepit funiculars safe and the others operate auto-matically, are the obvious answer. But, such changes would hurt the livelihoods of the op-erators, many of whom devote their lives to

running the funiculars. Luis Segovia, who has op-

erated El Peral for over 35 years, believes that a govern-ment buyback might cost him his job. Segovia has worked for the funiculars in every ca-pacity: selling tickets, operat-ing the machine, repairing the engine. Like family to many commuters, he has watched as small children in the neigh-

borhood, including his own, grew and now ride the funiculars with their own young children. “We know the funiculars are old, but there has to be a process with the people, because people make our heritage… and that is priceless. And now they come and say, ‘you old ones, to the side,’” Segovia said.

Modernization is one way to ensure that the cable cars continue setting the rhythm of life in Valparaíso. But as Segovia explained, to modernize “would be to lose what is magi-cal about the funiculars of Valparaíso. The sounds of the machinery, their surroundings, the colors, the types of people.” The people of Valparaíso want to protect these romanti-cized machines, yet without their operators, the funiculars cannot be the same. Valparaí-so cannot have it both ways: the poetic cable cars of the past cannot also be the functional transportation of today.

EMILY ULLMANN ’14 is an American Stud-ies major in Timothy Dwight College. Con-tact her at [email protected].

By Emily Ullmann

The Future of Funiculars?

A

“Although funiculars are com-

mon in mountainous regions

throughout the world, no city

has so many.”

Luis Sgovia, the operator of El Peral. (Ullmann/TYG)

CHILE

Ascensor Artillería in Valparaíso. Ullmann/TYG

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GLIMPSE

t 5,000 meters altitude, in the midst of a woozy, oxygen-scarce haze, it is easy to mistake the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile’s

Atacama Desert for a scene out of Star Wars. Here, massive, white titanium antennas from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project are scattered across the plateau like robots stationed for interga-lactic war.

Thousands of years ago, Atacameño tribes native to this land passed on ancient legends about the beginning of the universe. Now, astronomers and engineers are building ALMA with an ambitious goal: find definitive evidence for the cosmic origins of life. To com-plete work on the $1.3 billion project by 2013, they are working around the clock to finish construction of 66 radio antennas.

Though the number may seem high, it makes ALMA scientists’ work more feasible. “Considering the wavelength of the kind of molecular radiation we’re looking for, if we only built one antenna, its diameter would have to be 1,000 kilometers,” explained associ-ate astronomer Kartik Sheth as he scribbled equations on a whiteboard. Sheth, a member of the North American team at ALMA, works in the observation room, where astrono-mers—outnumbered five-to-one by computer monitors—are constantly swiveling from screen to screen.

In addition to the North American contin-gent, the other two largest teams are those of Europe and Japan. Established as an inter-national collaboration between these three groups, ALMA exists on the basis of coopera-

tion, with the share of antennas built by each group determining the amount of observation time they receive. Though technically a sci-entific project, ALMA is first and foremost a political agreement.

“International cooperation in any other area is almost never this smooth. The more fundamental the question, the more expan-sive the project, and the more international cooperation you will see,” said Juan Cortez, a Chilean science operations astronomer at ALMA.

In the ALMA observation room, interna-tional rapport comes easily. The scientists speak English in every accent imaginable, Germans joke with the Japanese, and every-one eats lunch together. But 50 yards north of the observation room, geopolitical-based boundaries emerge between the various an-tenna assembly camps. High, corrugated met-al walls separate the European camp from the American and Japanese camps on either side.

The first grumblings of dissatisfaction came in 2009. Over half of the American an-tennas had already been assembled, but the Europeans had yet to start construction of their first antenna. It became clear that the international cooperation that defined the observation room was nowhere to be found in the operation camp.

Chilean contract workers who do most of the on site antenna assembly have serious criticisms of the process. Although all the antennas are made to the same specifica-tions and serve the same purpose, they differ slightly in design and appearance. “There is no shared technology between nations at the

building stage and every group insists on us-ing manufacturers from their own country,” said Sifredo Vargas, a Chilean mechanical en-gineer working for the European team.

When the goal is to construct antennas capable of capturing wavelengths never ob-served by man before, this kind of lack of co-operation seems downright illogical. “Making these complex antennas is not like taking a hammer to a nail. But each team is trying to make its own antennas, almost like a secret. “Why?” added Vargas’ coworker, Pierre Cha-pus.

Chapus hypothesizes that another cause of the European’s slow progress is poor orga-nization. “The mentality of the European of-fice was, ‘We know we have a problem with this aluminum part. Let’s just send it to Chile to see if they can work with it.’ But they don’t seem to remember that we are in the middle of the desert here; there is no factory to call for new parts,” said Chapus.

Back in the observation room, ALMA as-tronomers are positive that the project will soon be able to piece together a unified pic-ture of the cosmic atmosphere. But even when working together to pursue scientific truth, the slow and frustrating process of building ALMA antennas is not enough to bring the in-ternational community together in productive cooperation.

ASHLEY WU ’15 is in Morse College. Con-tact her at [email protected].

Chile’s 66 Eyes to the Night SkyBy Ashley Wu

(Brown/TYG)

A

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GLIMPSEGLIMPSE

One of the 66 titanium radio antennas of the ALMA project, tasked to find definitive evidence for the cosmic origins of life. (Brown/TYG)

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GLIMPSE

Mining, and its DiscontentsBy Sanjena Sathian

Chilean-owned Chuquicamata, the largest open pit mine in the world, employs many of the residents of Calama in northern Chile. (Zhang/TYG)

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37

orkers at the El Teniente copper mine outside of San-tiago like to gossip at lunch. The hefty, orange jumpsuit

clad men get only one hour for lunch, in the middle of 10 to 15-hour days of tough manual labor. Over cafeteria trays of mysterious look-ing jello and unknown lunchmeat, the con-versation is like that of most workplaces; the men talk about their women, their weekend plans, their bosses—the first two they discuss with relish, the last with disdain.

But for some of the miners working at El Teniente, complaining about their bosses means real danger. It means shaking their fist at more than just an employer. It means enormous, sometimes dangerous, displays of anger.

The day I walked into the mine’s lunch-room, a hush muffled some of the conversa-tion in line. I had heard rumors of a protest to occur in Rancagua, the mining town an hour south of Santiago where most of the miners at El Teniente live. Word about it would spread only to those who were trusted with the in-formation. When I asked some of the workers if they knew about the protest, most laughed and ignored me. Others shrugged and then looked at each other meaningfully.

The crowd of large, tough men eyed me. One smiled, his leathery skin turning velvety soft. His name was Rodrigo Varga.

“There are violent protests sometimes,” he said. “I support the disorder. It makes noise.”

everal days later, a protest did erupt in Rancagua. It was organized by one

of the country’s most left-wing unions, the Confederation of Copper Workers. Just one day later, more protests made the news in

Calama, a city in the heart of northern copper mining country. Miners from the Chuqicama-ta mine near the city took to the streets, shut-ting down highways and blocking inter-city transit buses. The protests differed in their immediate grievances: the one in Rancagua was about labor rights for mine workers, while Calama’s was a citizens’ protest calling for a redistribution of government royalties gathered from taxes on mining companies. They represented two distinct kinds of anger growing against the mining industry in Chile: the laborers’ protests are a fight from below, standard union disputes, while thecitizens’ protests come from a deeper anger among the middle class at Chile’s fundamental eco-nomic system. And this May, the two move-ments were converging—and radicalizing—with unprecedented momentum.

For an industry that generates so much of the wealth in the country—hardly anyone disputes the notion that mining is creating riqueza, riches—the big question mark hang-ing above the dry desert sky is where it’s all going. The protests over the last several months are responses to the inequity of this industry. The narrative that dominates in Santiago politics is simple enough. Mining supplies Chile with over 50 percent of its en-ergy, brings in money, and secures relation-ships with powerful allies like China, Japan, and Korea. Because of the mining industry, around 20 flights a day depart from Santiago

north into the Atacama Desert. Because of the mining industry, foreign investment in Chile has increased in the last several de-cades. Because of the mining industry, this nation is where for-eigners come to feel safe in Latin America. Because of the mining industry, Chile is not Bolivia or Venezuela.

Many tellings of Chilean his-tory link the country’s identity with its vast mineral resources. In the 1970s, socialist President Salvador Allende nationalized mineral rights and created the state-owned copper company Codelcoby buying out shares of

foreign private companies. Chile is one of the top three producers of copper in the world to-day, alongside Peru and the uS. But Codelco doesn’t reap in all those benefits, or even most—today, about 70 percent of Chilean cop-per is mined and extracted by foreign compa-nies, who enjoy long periods of tax-free time in the country while they recoup their initial investment capital.

But it’s Codelco that represents the grand hope, and the grand failing, for many Chil-eans. Codelco provides jobs for 40,000 people in a country of three million. The private com-panies are smaller and hire fewer Chileans. Both the protesting cities, Calama and Ran-cagua, are home to most of the miners work-ing at nearby Codelco mines.

The cities are like feudal estates. And if Codelco is the grand lord, the miners I spoke with in the El Teniente cafeteria are a step above serfs. Like the increasingly large ma-jority of workers, they are not employed by Codelco, but instead by a third party compa-ny who subcontracts out labor to save money. Those third party companies hire the subcon-tratos, or sub-contract-workers, and they’re not responsible for providing them with as many health or education benefits as Codelco provides to its employees. The justification Codelo workers give for the division is based on training: empleados are higher-skilled and usually educated—at least with a bach-elor’s degree, many with some post-graduate education as well. But the subcontratos aren’t interested in hearing the reasons any longer. They’ve been angry for a long time, and in the past five years, they’ve started to say some-thing about it.

n the lunchroom at El Teniente, Varga, the smiling subcontrato, told me he

can’t see progress coming—ever. Not prog-ress in the way he and his fellow subcontract workers are treated, and certainly not prog-ress in the way the economic system in Chile is structured.

“It’s classist,” he said. I asked him if he thought he could see the riches of the indus-try anywhere in his life. A few of his friends crowded around to join in the answer.

“In my orange suit!” Pablo Nuñez joked. Nuñez, the class clown of the group, invited me to sit down to lunch with him, Varga, and Carlos Oscares. They are heavy-set, middle-aged men, each sporting his own brand of graying scruff and a yellowing smile. The three of them told me about their health ben-efits (they get a check-up once a year), their hours (long), and their families (big, hungry).

“I support the disorder. It makes

noise.”

—Rodrigo Varga, miner

SI

W

A protestor in Antofagasta, in northern Chile, demands royalties of at least five percent from copper. (Zhang/TYG)

CHILE

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GLIMPSE GLIMPSE

Zhang/TYG

A year ago in Rancagua, they didn’t have a grocery store. Now they do. That’s the best example of change from the mining industry to which they can point.

Vivan Abul, who runs one of the subcon-trato unions in Rancagua, told me that sub-contratos do as much as 70 percent of the work in El Teniente and other Codelco mines. It’s the “dirty work” she told me—unskilled, un-glamorous, and often unsafe. Oscares had friends who developed lung diseases or cancer, which he attributed to the time they spent in the mine, and their single check-up a year wasn’t enough to treat them. They weren’t working for Codelco mines anymore, and he had since lost touch with them. Each of the miners had a story like this.

Abul told me that most of the accidents in mines happen to subcontratos. They receive the same safety equipment as employees of the company, but less training—and they’re the ones standing near heavy equipment and trucks in the belly of the dark mine.

Leaving El Teniente, I felt light-headed descending the mountain. The mine looked like a comically overgrown children’s Lego toy—full of primary-colored scaffolding and a few wisps of smoke spiraling up into the sky.

The last thing I saw before I dozed off was a bright yellow billboard cheerily declaring, “la seguridad está antes que la producción” or “safety before production.” I remembered what Nuñez had told me earlier, his mouth full of sloppy cafeteria meat.

“Someone died here two weeks ago. Run over by a truck. One of our guys.”

gnacio Pino, one of the supervising lawyers at El Teniente, works with the

Codelco employee union in Rancagua that represents only employees with advanced de-grees—engineers, lawyers, and doctors. Sit-ting in Codelco offices in Rancagua, I couldn’t help but notice Pino’s striking resemblance to President Allende; he is white-haired, dis-tinguished, grandfatherly, and exceedingly eloquent. He wore a crisp white button-down, suspenders, and glasses.

“We, as people with social sensibilities, want better conditions for everyone,” he said, when I asked if he supported the subcontra-tos’ cause. “But I cannot support this kind of protest.”

Pino showed me photographs of the fa-mously violent subcontrato protests from 2008: burning buses overturned up the moun-

tainside to El Teniente. Men charging at supervisors with fury etched into their cal-loused hands. The worlds seemed unbridge-able: Pino, in his wood-paneled office, is a middle-class liberal with no social impetus charging him to join the fight. He struck me as a foreigner to the dark, clammy roads that twist through the mountain. But when he spoke about the economic system in Chile in general, he told me again that he was sympa-thetic to the problems the subcontratos faced.

“Our big problem is the economic model. Chile is a rich country but the proportion of access that the rich classes have is more,” he said. “Have you read Marx?”

I nodded.“Eighty percent of the riches of the coun-

try belong to twenty percent of the country,” he said, and spread his palms before him on the desk. That was all the explanation he owed.

The system was wrong; intellectually, he agreed with criticisms of it. But the subcon-tratos’ fight simply wasn’t his. Criticisms of Chile’s economic system are common in ca-sual parlance like this; I heard hundreds of indifferent dismissals of “the system.” The attitude I encountered—in Pino and others—

I

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39

Zhang/TYG

speaks to an irresolution within Chile. And as the country tries to define itself, some, like the subcontratos, are moving drastically to the left in search of an identity. Others re-main comfortably at the center, holding Chile in the status quo.

I met with Hugo Díaz, another Codelco-employed union leader, after Pino. He’s heavyset and looks rougher than Pino. Díaz told me he had once been jailed for his radical left-wing beliefs during General Pinochet’s military dictatorship. But in the years since Pinochet, he said he moved slowly away from radicalism. It wasn’t necessary any longer. He used to believe that all workers should unite. Now, he spends his time making sure his fellow empleados are taken care of by their parent corporation. He is sympathetic to the subcontratos, but like Pino, their fight is not his fight.

“The left is centering itself,” he told me, regretfully. “But what happens as it centers itself? The people at the bottom get left in the street.”

Subcontrato leader Abul, one of those people at the bottom, told me that subcon-tratos are turning increasingly to criticizing the economic system in general because they are beginning to understand the larger fabric their protests fit into. These days, she said, the fight was growing into something beyond just demands for rights.

“When the workers get class conscious, right?” she said. “There, it begins.”

hen I arrived in Calama in the north, it was as though Abul’s prediction had taken place in fast-forward. The ardent anger of the miners was meeting the cooler frus-tration of families, towns, and citizens—and Santiago was starting to notice. The day after Rancagua’s labor protest, the subcontratos joined the mayor of Calama in denouncing FONDENOR, the Fund for Development of Northern Chile. FONDENOR, announced a few days earlier in Santiago, takes money gained from royalty taxes on transnational companies and attempts to redistribute it across northern districts where mines are located. Politicians in Santiago claimed the fund would give northerners access to some of the wealth of this industry that sprawled across their deserts and towns. Northerners disagreed, arguing that the plan didn’t go far enough to close large tax loopholes and for-eign companies paid little to nothing to Chile to mine its land.

Photos of the protest were splashed across front pages the next day—images of

rough miners in step, their mouths half-open, mid-yell. They stood next to grandmothers and families and middle class white-haired men. Here was a convergence, and it centered around a call for re-nationalization of the cop-per industry.

“Ole, ole, ola, ola, es cobre nuestro, y nadie más,” protesters chanted: It’s our copper, and no one else’s.

But calling for re-nationalization is a glitzy answer to problems that are much coarser. It’s hard to fit everything that might be wrong with the system onto a convenient-ly sized protest banner.

In the glassy, clean corporate Codelco of-fices in Calama, I asked Alejandro Pizarro, who has worked for the corporate side of the company for a little over a decade, if he sees a problem with the economic system in Chile. He nodded, just as nearly everyone did. I asked him what he thought re-nationalization would mean. He smiled at me, like a parent at a smart and inquisitive child.

“Those who want re-nationalization—they want more Codelco,” he said. Pizarro marched in the citizens’ protest against FON-DENOR the week before. He doesn’t think re-nationalization means much, but he wants a better distribution of the mining resources, like most people. It’s an easy cause to get be-

hind.Pizarro said the benefits he gets through

Codelco are attractive to the rest of the popu-lation. What protestors want isn’t for the country to turn insular, he said; what they re-ally want is a job with prestige and benefits like his. And it’s the system’s fault, he said, that there aren’t more jobs like his.

Calama residents say there are two Cala-mas: the dusty-streeted, scraggly one, and the one with glass-paneled office buildings and a private hospital just for Codelco work-ers. Here, disparities are acute. Codelco em-ployees have their children’s educations paid for through high school and receive a gener-ous stipend for college. But there’s no public university in Calama, and that means most Calama residents lack a secondary degree. It’s a cycle: secondary degrees are what sub-contratos would need to get better pay and benefits. And as future mining jobs look to become increasingly technical, subcontratos are sure to need higher education—one that’s nowhere in sight.

In union protests, Rancagua’s subcon-tratos find themselves asking for access to systems that Chileans have long believed the government owes its citizens: education, healthcare––even basic safety. The north-ern protesters, seizing on the universality of those values, have turned the workers’ pro-tests into something larger, something that has not yet developed a clear face. Pizarro called the notion of re-nationalization a “po-litical mirage”—something for people to chant in protests, to radicalize so that Santia-go might actually crane its head, look north, and notice the anger brewing.

ear Calama’s central plaza, a one-story building painted with large portraits of Pablo Neruda and Salvador Allende is hard to miss. Neruda and Allende, the Chilean heroes of the left, are shown next to quotations they once said about copper. Allende’s quotation reads, in translation: “I want to insist that because the people are government, it is pos-sible that today we can say that copper will be the Chilean people’s.”

Inside the building there are banners hung around a small meeting room, read-ing: “trabajadores del mundo se unen para luchar”––workers of the world unite to fight. These are the offices of the Confederation of Copper Workers, the most radical of the sub-contrato unions. They played a significant role in the protests in Calama the week be-fore—the ones that were about FONDENOR but then became a cry for re-nationalization.

The secretary general of the union, Jedry Velis Palma, is a scruffy-looking man with a mischievous smile. I asked him why his union felt the citizens’ protest was worth pursu-ing—didn’t they worry about securing their own labor rights in the short-term, like the subcontratos in Rancagua? He grinned.

“This is the bigger fight,” he said. “These

“Because of the mining indus-

try, foreign investment in Chile

has increased in the last several

decades. Because of the mining

industry, this nation is where for-

eigners come to feel safe in Latin

America. Because of the mining

industry, Chile is not Bolivia or

Venezuela.”

W

N

CHILE

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

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two fights must be together, without a doubt. These are national, transcendental ques-tions in the country. Education is universal. Resources are universal. Re-nationalization could permit more resources for the social public good.”

Marching for labor rights alone will get Palma and his fellow workers another check-up every year or perhaps a few raises. But calling for something bigger, he hopes, might change the way Santiago thinks about eco-nomics.

The afternoon I sat in the Confederation’s office in Calama, surrounded by images of hammers and sickles and newspaper clip-pings of Palma and his comrades being tear gassed at protests, Palma said he thought the anger against FONDENOR would trickle down into sympathy for their cause.

“Soon they will see a reason to join us,” Palma said, speaking about the middle class-es.

The teleological faith in improvement that Palma had in his cause was evident later that

day, as he stood before a room of subcontra-tos, suited in orange and on their way to the night shift at Chuqicamata. The miners re-garded him with skepticism, but Palma, ev-ery ounce an eloquent politician, breathed a certain life into the room as he recounted the recent protests, ticking off the groups repre-sented in the march: employees of Codelco, the mayor of Calama, pro-education groups, grandmothers, children. He ended with a punch, the same punch that subcontrato leader Vivian Abul ends her speeches with, the same heavy Marxist rhetoric on which many of the lowest members of Codelco have come to rely:

“When the workers get class conscious-ness—that is how the fight works!”

The subcontratos before Palma that night were skeptical. They didn’t want to join the empleados. Some said they didn’t want to be caught on camera at a protest. Palma smiled, nodded at the right moments through each complaint by all twenty-something men in the room. And then he told them he would

represent them regardless of whether or not they joined the union. The movement, he told them, had already begun, and was moving out of control, bigger and more epic in scale than any of them individually.

The workers filed out, still looking skep-tical.Their faces were softer than the faces of the subcontratos had been back in the El Teniente cafeteria. In Calama, these work-ers were worried, but their hardness was be-ing rubbed away by a persistent hope—hope generated by men like Palma and a sense of escalation spreading across the north. Palma smiled as they loaded the buses to drive to-ward Chuquicamata. Then he rubbed his palms together and stared cheerily at the buses’ retreating dust.

“Sigue todo, sigue,” he said. It goes on.

SANJENA SATHIAN ’13 is an English major in Morse College. The majority of the inter-views for this article were conducted in Span-ish. Contact her at [email protected].

Zhang/TYG

40


41PHOTO ESSAY

Museo al Cielo AbiertoAn Open Air Museum: The Murals of Santiago and Valparaíso

Tolgay/TYG

by the Globalist Staff

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

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Shor/TYG

Tolgay/TYG Zhang/TYGTolgay/TYG

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FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

42 GLIMPSE

y Chinese friends smile when I praise their skyscrapers, their tree-lined avenues and high-speed rail. But when I praise their schools, they rush

to correct me. Once, I mentioned education at a Beijing dinner party. My aunt, mar-ried and in her thirties, exclaimed: “That is one of the biggest reasons I don’t want to have a child! It’s horrible. I feel that put-ting my child through this would be even worse than not having children at all.”

Americans both admire and fear Chinese education, taking our own students’ medio-cre scores on international exams as a sign of inferiority. Of course, the Shanghai middle-schoolers who topped the 2010 PISA–a read-ing, math, and science exam administered in 74 countries represent an elite fraction of China’s students. But even if every Chi-nese teenager performed at Shanghai stan-dards, it would hardly justify the nation’s assembly-line model of public schooling.

When I tell a group of parents at the gates of Beijing 161 Middle School how Americans envy China’s science and math scores, one father smiles grimly. “Of course Chinese students can take tests. They’re constant-ly drilled on repetitive problem sets. The thing is, they can’t do anything else.”

Chinese students pick up few practical skills, even in subjects in which they out-score peers abroad. Jane, a high school Eng-lish teacher in Zhejiang province, lamented that her students graduate with little speak-ing ability, rendering their language training “almost pointless.” They’re too busy train-ing for the gaokao, the national college en-trance exam. One graduate of Qinghua—one of China’s top two universities—said that offering original ideas on the gaokao often does more harm than good; graders worry their careers will end if their supervisors find them awarding high marks to students who deviate too much from convention.

Nor is the gaokao as egalitarian as West-erners assume. Although students from rural areas comprise the majority of gao-kao takers, less than 20 percent of the ru-ral applicant pool makes it into China’s top

universities.Top-tier schools are overwhelm-ingly urban and lower their cutoff scores by as much as 13 percent for rural students. Al-though free secondary education was recently expanded to children of migrant workers and villagers, and 12,100 uni-versity spots are now reserved annually for students from poverty-stricken counties, the millions of students from rural areas who take the exam each year continue to stand at a significant disadvan-tage compared to their urban classmates.

Tellingly, many families with the resourc-es and connections to send their children to China’s top secondary schools prefer to send them overseas or to international schools to shield them from years of mind-numbing memorization and intense competition. Paul, a Hong Kong native now living in Beijing, just laughed when I asked if he would consid-

er public school for his children. A Jiangsu police chief told me the only reason he hadn’t sent his daughter to the u.S. for high school was that he didn’t think she was old enough to be alone in another country. He does, how-ever, hope she will go abroad for university to learn to think critically and independently.

Why does the usually pragmatic Chinese government retain such a flawed system? Every teacher, parent, and school official I spoke with agreed that a more subjective ad-

missions process would invite rampant cor-ruption and make higher education even less accessible to those without family connec-tions. China’s schools may be failing its stu-dents, but the alternative would be worse as long as widespread corruption persists.

My theory is that the government keeps the system because the core purpose of Chi-nese education is not innovation or inclusive-ness, but social stability. In this sense, it is remarkably successful. Passing an unruly group of Hong Kong students, I heard their tour guide remark to a museum staffer, “If they were from the mainland, they’d obey every word they were told instantly. They’d be too afraid not to.” The Chinese parents with whom I’ve spoken ended their frus-trated tirades on the system’s failures and exclusiveness with a resigned “,But that’s just the way it is,” or, “There’s just too many kids. Competition is inevitable.” Forget test scores. Instilling deference to authority and acceptance of the status quo at home while fooling the rest of the world into envy is the real triumph of Chinese education.

ASHLEY FENG ’16 is in Calhoun College. She is currently working in college counsel-ing in Nanjing, China. Contact her at [email protected]

“China’s schools may be failing

its students, but the alternative

would be worse as long as wide-

spread corruption persists.”

Miracle or Mirage? An inside view of education in China

MBy Ashley Feng

Lang Chuang Elementary School in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan prov-ince in central China. (Feng/TYG)


GLIMPSE

Inside the Moroccan KitchenBy Charley Locke

ouscous plays a vital role in Moroccan cuisine. On Friday, Islam’s day of prayer, Moroccans go home for lunch to eat couscous and rest with their extended families. Moroccan couscous takes an

entire morning to prepare, as the grain must con-tinually be removed from the couscoussier and fluffed together. Often, the older women of the family come together to prepare the couscous, un-like most meals of the week, which as of recently are prepared and eaten with the immediate fam-ily. The tradition of Friday couscous brings to-gether the extended family once a week, lending the meal some of the feelings of community that have faded as the nuclear family structure in Mo-rocco has risen. Moroccans traditionally eat the dish out of a communal gsaa with their hands. It is served alongside leben, or Moroccan buttermilk.

C

Vegetables in the Rabat souk (market place). (Locke/TYG)

LETTER FROM 45

Locke/TYG

FALL 2012, ISSUE 1

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4 cups dry couscous grainA few pieces of chicken3 tomatoes1 onion2 tablespoons turmeric 2 tablespoons ginger1 1⁄2 tablespoons pepper 3 tablespoons salt3 cups vegetable oil1/2 cup olive oil1 handful parsley1 packet (0.3 grams) saffron2 cups of boiled water 8 long carrots1⁄2 a cabbage head6 zucchini2 squash3 potatoes2 white sweet potatoes1 cup fresh fava beans1⁄2 cup chickpeas (soaked in water overnight) 5 tablespoons fermented butter or olive oilServes approximately 8.

1) Press couscous grain into the bottom of the couscous platter.2) Put the meat into the pot.3) Cut the tomatoes and onion in half and grate them into the pot.4) Add in the turmeric, ginger, pepper, salt, saffron, 1 cup of vegetable oil, and the olive oil. 5) Tie up a bunch of parsley and add to pot.6) Put the pot on medium flame (no lid). Leave for 5 minutes.7) Pour in 2 cups of boiled water. After 5 minutes, pour in 2 more cups of boiled water.8) Peel and cut in half the carrots, cabbage, zucchini, squash, sweet potatoes, and pota-toes. Soak in a bowl of cold water.9) Place the fava beans in a separate bowl of cold water.10) After 10 minutes, place the couscous grain in the top pot. Place plastic over the lip of the bottom pot and place top pot above.11) After 50 minutes, add vegetables to the lower pot.12) After 40 minutes, pour the couscous grain into the platter. Pour 3-4 cups of cold

water on top and add 2 tablespoons of salt. Fluff the grain around with your hands to break up the clumps. Cover it with a cloth.13) After 30 minutes, add 2 cups of vegeta-ble oil and fluff the couscous grain around again. Add 2 cups of cold water, break up the clumps, and cover with a cloth.14) After 30 minutes, put the couscous back in the top pot.15) After 15 minutes, put half of the cous-cous grain into the platter. Add 3 table-spoons of fermented butter and fluff with hands.16) After 5 minutes, dump the rest of the grain into the platter.17) Pour 2 cups of water into the big pot.18) After 5 minutes, turn off the flame. Put 2 tablespoons of fermented butter into the pot.19) Fluff again and then spread it equally around the platter. Ladle contents of the pot on top of the grain.20) Pour the remaining sauce into bowls and serve alongside the couscous to add onto each individual portion of the couscous.

Finished couscous dish. (Locke/TYG)

The preparation of couscous: (from top) couscous soaked in water, the fluffing of couscous, and fava beans. (Locke/TYG)

CHARLEY LOCKE ‘14 is a Humanities major in Calhoun College. Contact her at [email protected].

Ingredients:

Directions:

LETTER FROM


GLIMPSE

(Gordon/TYG)

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