Santiago, Chile (Day 4 to 7)

Santiago, Chile...Writing 1-22-2012

Oh Santiago, I wish I could have stayed with you longer than 3 days. Very small in comparison to Buenos Aires or Mexico City, but nonetheless the capital and most populated city in Chile...And, just as any city should be, it is filled with art, culture, and progressive movements....But, these progressive movements, and the street riots for change, led mostly by university students, but also many parents of those students, is held back by what still stinks in the air from 17 years of dictatorship (1973-1990)...Many are fighting, have been fighting since 1990, through street protest and literature, to recover all that was lost during the dictatorship and could have been made a reality if Salvadore Allende, the democratically elected president, was not murdered the day the dictatorship began in 1973...Nai and I had planned to go to the Salvadore Allende museum in Santiago, but we got lost and ended up in The Museum of History and Human Rights...It was important to see this museum as it mostly covered the view of Salvadore Allende, his ousting by a military coup, the years during the dictatorship led by Pinochet, and how the dictatorship ended...But it was difficult to take in, as some of the methods of the dictatorship reminded me of what I have seen in Holocaust museums, where detention camps were set up throughout remote regions of Chile for any one that showed the slightest disposition against Pinochet´s dictatorship, and disposition there was, as at least half the country had expected Salvadore Allende to be their president...Primary documents in the museum showed that many family members had been stolen or dissapeared during the dictatorship to never be seen again, or at best, those that were stolen were able to send generic fill in the blank letters to their family while they were held in detention camps...Yet the worst of the dictatorship was the extermination of ideas, particularly those of Salvadore Allende...Walking the streets today in Chile, murals on any random street scream for the stop of private, foreign mines in Chile, reading the newspapers or walking through the university and talking to students, you sense that the recent, nearly nation-wide manifestations for reform to the education system (no more tuition, fairly distributed school funds, etc.) are still very alive...Yet, the current chilean president, Piñera, refused to accept the request of the students to reform the education system...And many of the young of Chile today, fight against what they call neoliberalism, or a democracy that fails to listen or react to the people´s request, the people saying that what they are living with today are remnants of the dictatorship...Free education is something that is not thought about much in the U.S, as the day you are born your family begins a piggy bank for your college funds, in other words, tuition is expected to be paid...However, in Chile, which has Argentinian neighbours, and other nearby countries with free education and free health, the students of today are questioning the tuition that they must pay, as well as the distribution of greater funds to schools that perform better in nation wide exams (which only continues cycling funds to schools that perform well, while those that perform poorly fail to recieve support to improve)...I find this topic interesting, the fact that some countries have free education and free health, while others do not. Two very basic request of any person, yet in some places free, in others no...I´ve talked to most of my professors about this back at UT, regarding education, and some believe that it is crucial to pay a tuition to fund the school and ensure that the tools, teachers, and research is satisfactory, while other teachers are strongly against students having to pay tuition as they feel that it not only in genearal discourages the population from pursuing higher education, but it also discourages students from following what they truly want to study, as they feel pressured to study something that will reap the benefits after years of paying tuition, considering that many students are left with debt once they graduate...Anways, Santiago was beautiful, between its amazing parks, nearby mountains, and playgrounds with trampoleans!, but there is quite a bit of political tension concerning, first and foremost, the current education system, but also private/foreign mines, and other civil rights such as recognizing gay marriage that is difficult to overlook even as a mochilero (backpacker) passing by for a few days....