For those who do not know, I am Chilean and I live in Chile. Since October 19 there have been massive social protests in Chile against the entire ruling class. Maybe you have received news about it, but I don't know if you are aware of the escalated in violence and human rights violations due to the use of the military and public forces in an attempt to preserve normality.
Last week president declared "emergency state" and a curfew was imposed in the majority of the large cities of this country. After a march of about 1,2M people, the president removed the emergency state, retired the military forces, removed the curfew and changed some ministers. Unfortunately, he still doesn't pay attention to the actual social demands.
The social demands here are because in our country the size of the state is ridiculously small due to the neoliberalism imposed in dictatorship. In this country, you have to pay (and a lot) for stuff that the state relies on privates to supply. While for some this may sound not that bad, the problem is that the corruption is so huge that politicians sell the state resources to the best bidder, without worrying how that will impact the rest of us.
To put some context, the dictatorship started in 1973 and ended in 1990. Since then, we have been governed by both left and right parties that only perpetuated this model, which caused that 1% of the population owns about 26.5% GDP (180,000 people owns 1/4 of all the country's wealth) and 10% of the population owns 2/3 of the country's wealth (~2M people). We are 18M people living here. Our rich are really rich and own pension funds, sanitary companies, large retail stores, newspapers, TV, electric companies, banks and so on.
I wanted to share this so you can understand what is going on and to tell you about the uncertainty that I feel everyday is very stressing and at sometimes I don't know if this is going to get even worse.
Last week president declared "emergency state" and a curfew was imposed in the majority of the large cities of this country. After a march of about 1,2M people, the president removed the emergency state, retired the military forces, removed the curfew and changed some ministers. Unfortunately, he still doesn't pay attention to the actual social demands.
The social demands here are because in our country the size of the state is ridiculously small due to the neoliberalism imposed in dictatorship. In this country, you have to pay (and a lot) for stuff that the state relies on privates to supply. While for some this may sound not that bad, the problem is that the corruption is so huge that politicians sell the state resources to the best bidder, without worrying how that will impact the rest of us.
To put some context, the dictatorship started in 1973 and ended in 1990. Since then, we have been governed by both left and right parties that only perpetuated this model, which caused that 1% of the population owns about 26.5% GDP (180,000 people owns 1/4 of all the country's wealth) and 10% of the population owns 2/3 of the country's wealth (~2M people). We are 18M people living here. Our rich are really rich and own pension funds, sanitary companies, large retail stores, newspapers, TV, electric companies, banks and so on.
I wanted to share this so you can understand what is going on and to tell you about the uncertainty that I feel everyday is very stressing and at sometimes I don't know if this is going to get even worse.