Posts Tagged

Repression

Today is the 28th day of the mass protests that have gripped Chile; it is also the one-year anniversary of the killing of Camilo Catrillanca, a young Mapuche leader, by Chilean police. A year ago, popular mobilisation of the scale witnessed today in Chile seemed almost unimaginable, especially after I spent months in the Araucanía region in Southern Chile (or the Wallmapu to the Mapuche), where anything but the most innocuous collective organising has been heavily repressed. While simmering discontent was mixed with fear in the South, in the capital it seemed the frustrations of the student movement (see for example Donoso, 2013) and the return of the right-wing Sebastián Piñera to the presidency in 2018 made an eruption of …