50,000 anti-APEC protesters took the streets Friday
ST Photo - Tom Burgis
50,000 PROTEST IN SANTIAGO AS CHILE SAYS NO TO APEC
189 Arrested As Police And Demonstrators Clash Throughout Capital
(Nov. 22, 2004) Santiaguinos returned to work today after three days of mass protests and violence in the Chilean capital that saw 189 arrests and numerous injuries.
On Friday, hours before some of the world’s most powerful leaders – including U.S. President George W. Bush, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao of China – arrived for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, 50,000 people took to the streets for a march organized by the Chilean Social Forum under the slogans “another world is possible” and “Santiago is ours.”
The protesters walked along a predetermined route lined with Carabineros from Parque Almagro to a rally in Parque Bustamante.
The march turned violent when a small group of protesters began to throw rocks and glass bottles at police. Organizers called for calm but, as the park filled with gas from helicopters, marchers fled onto the surrounding streets and into Plaza Italia, where masked demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, smashed shop fronts and tore up benches, and police in riot gear responded with water cannon and baton charges.
One man was taken to hospital after being hit in the face with a bottle.
According to police, 189 people were arrested, including five foreigners – three Germans and two students from the United States. The foreigners were later released but will face charges of criminal damage at a hearing on Dec. 9.
Several protesters and 23 carabineros were injured. Two offices received gunshot wounds in further clashes in the La Victoria and Villa Francia suburbs, where there were 11 more arrests.
Cristián Labbé, the mayor of Providencia, said the cleanup operation will cost 100 million pesos (US$170,000) and slammed the governor of the Metropolitan Region, Marcelo Trivelli, for authorizing the march.
President Ricardo Lagos said the violent protesters were not representative of Chile. “They do not represent a single significant sector of the country,” he told journalists Saturday, insisting that only peaceful demonstrations are legitimate forms of protest.
Hundreds of protesters have been arrested throughout Chile over the past week, and thousands of additional police were on duty in the Chilean capital in the largest security operation since the papal visit in 1987.
Chileans are angered by the willingness of the country’s socialist President Lagos to adopt U.S.-sponsored economic models and foster Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Marchers called for APEC delegates to turn their attention from the superrich to global poverty and achieving sustainable development in the Third World.
A member of the Chilean communist party known as Manuel attacked Lagos for betraying the party of Chile’s iconic president, Salvador Allende. Allende became the world’s first elected socialist head of state in 1970 and died in the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power.
“Salvador Allende was a revolutionary socialist. Lagos is a capitalist. We need to change Chile and to change Latin America,” Manuel said.
The poet Raúl Zurita, an active member of the political resistance during Pinochet’s military government, said, “We are here against Bush, against APEC, against the dictatorship of the rich.”
Aside from discontent with Chile’s proliferating FTAs and the injustices of globalization, demonstrators voiced their outrage at the Bush’s policy of preemptive war. Banners denounced the U.S. president as “terrorist number one” and the loudest chant was “no to war, yes to peace.”
Among the diverse crowd were student and political groups, monks and members of Chile’s indigenous Mapuche.
The president of the Council of all Lands of Chile indigenous rights group, Aucán Huilcamán, later presented an open letter addressed to the APEC leaders, making “an urgent call to the members of APEC to include the indigenous issue in their agenda and to establish mechanisms for the full and effective participation of indigenous peoples as a way to guarantee and assure our cultural projection and the respect of indigenous peoples’ human rights.”
The Mapuche are angered by the presence of multinational forestry and farming corporations in the areas of southern Chile they regard as their homeland.
Muslim marchers protested the Russian presence in Chechnya and called for an independent Palestine.
Abdul Gafari, a Chilean Muslim, told The Santiago Times, “We are here against the terrorists Bush and Putin. We don’t want to see more Muslims killed – not just Muslims, all the innocent people who are being killed. The powerful can just do what they like, that’s the problem.”
At 500,000, the Palestinian community in Chile is the largest outside the Middle East.
Behind the Muslim group marched a contingent of Franciscan monks.
“We are here to protest the dehumanization that goes hand-in-hand with globalization … to promote the value of the human being,” said Brother Julio.
Further protests, peaceful and otherwise, took place throughout the city. A series of events organized by the Chilean Social Forum explored the alternatives to neoliberalism; outside the Espacio Riesco center, where APEC delegates convened Saturday, a group of Falun Dafa practitioners denounced human rights abuses in China and what they describe as the persecution of their fellow practitioners by the Chinese military.
Inside the conference centers, the voices of dissent were few.
Peruvian economist and development expert Hernando de Soto told a meeting of businessmen that 65 percent of the 21 APEC economies’ populations are excluded from the benefits of globalization, giving the lie to the “trickle down” theory of free trade economics.
“Of the 2,600 million people in the APEC countries, 1,700 million have not managed to join the international market and are not globalized. It doesn’t matter how much talk there is about the World Trade Organization and the Doha Round Table … We’re talking about two thirds of the population – as much as 80 percent in some countries. This is the problem,” De Soto said.
Despite the violent end to its march, the Chilean Social Forum will continue its work, said Luis Sepúlveda, the Chilean writer and one of the Forum’s leaders
Asked whether a mass demonstration could influence the APEC leaders, Sepúlveda was not optimistic. He told The Santiago Times:
“This won’t change anything. It’s the political climate in Chile that has to change. The people marching are calling for the country to take a different route, for leaders to take them into account when taking the big decisions. Chileans want a Latin American vocation, and the majority wants to see better relations with the other countries of the region before free marketeering with the economic superpowers.
“We will carry on our work after today. This is a process that will shape the actions of the political class of tomorrow. All the young people who are here – they’re going to decide the future.”
By Tom Burgis (editor@santiagotimes.cl)
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