Declaration: GCAS South American Collective

GCAS South American Collective (GCAS SAC)

After two weeks of demonstrations, an echo of what students in Chile thought more than a decade ago, many feelings begin to be retold, while the energies that push the demonstrations do not find their end.

We have seen and continue to see the ineptitude of a government regarding the discomfort of those it "governs"; a lack of connection that insults and grieves, but, above all, feeds the anger of all of us who are tired of enduring.

These feelings are transversal, which at times looks promising when we notice that we share a common feeling. But it is not only that, because we also share a common reason, affirmed in the facts. As in the cliché, a light is turned on in dark moments; we know that light is not deiform, but that we make it, we make it in community.

In GCAS SAC, as a group initiated in a common territory and with the intention of always being a collective, we reject and have rejected the model that still remains unchanged today, and that is the origin of a discontent that not only exists in Chile, but that, carried out in a violent body like those human experiments of the Third Reich, is already scattered throughout the world. Not a minor reference when we have already seen recordings where uniformed police give 10 seconds of "advantage" before shooting their detainees. There are "official" deaths, and health workers confessing that they are being pressured not to give out other information. We cannot continue enduring a democracy that only has that name to make us believe that it is, and that even its spokesman, coming from among criminal ranks, declares war on a national chain to no one but "his" people.

Persecuted by a ghost that did not seem to disappear yet, we are now faced with its substantiation. The story that many of us heard from the mouths of our families, from those dark times when the military betrayed - once again! - the people they swore to defend, seems to show in parts their operating system; measures like curfew, which many of us live for the first time in our lives as something cleverly surprising, or the military themselves repressing the legitimate manifestations of the people. Not only that, we all know! Deaths that are murders, multiple violations of human rights, the use of violence that, of course, has no comparison between its poles, because these are bodies against weapons to kill.

Information is something that, while not complete, can at least be circulated. All Chileans have the advantage - which feeds the sense of duty - of being able to look at the information that denies us and often denies that official one, and thus affirm our certainty that this is not right, that the artificial path of neoliberalism leads to the suffocation of the common good. We cannot deny what we have seen and heard.

Well, we do not simply want to repeat what we have all heard: we want to restate it. Today the majority of Chileans have emphatically expressed themselves against inequality and the abuse of the country's privileged groups. Probably for the first time there seems to be no class distinction or partisan differences in a common demand, namely the compelling desire for a different country. These days have hit many people hard, but they have also raised a mood of hope for possible changes in the midst of mass demonstrations, with rage, it is true, but also with a joy close to carnival. Let us not waste that strength, let us not repeat the mistakes of the past. May that which emanated from the young people of more than ten years ago as a dream be today no longer the promise, but the fulfillment of a new and better reality.

Dignified lives for all! Dignified pensions! Dignified education! Dignified health! Dignified salaries! An end to the preservation of inequality!

October 26, 2019

Coverphoto by: Daniel Hunt @Daniel_IV_ Website: http://www.daniel-hunt.net/