The Penguin Revolution will be televised.

The Penguin Revolution will be televised.
Walking home from the first day of class Steve and I stopped to take some pictures along the street (Ejército Libertador). Diego Portales, our law school and a bunch of other univerisities reside on this street.

There is a Student Strike going on here. Not college students - secondary students, hence penguins because of the black smocks and white shirts some of the girls wear to school. As far as I understand it (I barely understand it) the students are demanding massive reforms of the 'Ley organica constitucional e Enseñanza’ (LOCE).

After class we were walking to the metro down the Ejército Libertador in front of the Universidad de Santo Tomas (down the street from our school) where a couple of hundred students were in the street blocking traffic and blaring loud latin rap from inside the building. We noticed up ahead a huge swarm of students running down the street away from a water cannon mounted on a zorrico (green armored box).

Now the director of our program warned us of the potential for violence. So we were well prepared to do precisely what she said... what was it... oh yeah, she said to walk calmly on to a side street. Well, we were mid-block and the water cannon was advancing pretty fast. So we ditched the advice and ran across the street and up the stairs into the building.

The first floor of this building conveniently has a wall of glass facing conveniently out onto Ejército Libertador. As the water cannon and Carabineros stormed down the street spraying dozens of students (including several in our party). While squeezed in among the students in the lobby, there was screaming and cat calls as the Carabineros continued down the street arresting people as they went.

The big video

The Carabineros are the police in Chile, they look like regular army, they act like regular army, but they aren't. They are uncorruptible and generally but not always unfriendly in my experience. When they are in riot gear though I am pretty sure they don't want a hug.

Once they past we waited a few minutes and started moving down the street. Somehow our sense of adventure got the better of us and we took pictures of each other in front of the grafitti and I took more video of the demonstration that followed us to the metro. As the Chilean students broke into the closed shops we left on the Metro.



Demonstrators



Steve, International Journalist



Umm...victory


I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse.

Apparently several WCL students were sprayed full force by the cannon, and the liquid turns out to be water mixed with tear gas. A couple of our male students were rescued by some angels of mercy in the form of two female Chilean medical students, if any of you know their phone numbers please let us know.

The Chilean students claim they have a force of a million students on strike in a country of fifteen million. When I hear that I am reminded of the literal translation of the school motto for La Universidad Santo Tomas - "Light in Truth".

****

So later we got off the metro at Las Leones and were looking for Casa Musa, a place where they purportedly sell adapters for Chilean electrical outlets. Anyway we started asking around for directions and ran into this film crew.



Apparently we could be on Chilean television...