The Protest Part One: One Hundred Thousand Heads Held High

Yesterday was the protest. I was going to update it all then, but other life intervened. This is the part one of two. The second post can be found here.


The day is unusually clear. Normally Santiago is choked with winter smog, the two mountains keeping all of the gas and dust in. But it rained the night before, clearing up the city. People can see far off into the distance. It is a good day for a protest.


I get there at 10:30, having missed the lab group heading out. We meet up on one of the Green line stops and head over. At first the protest seems tattered. We stay in one place for a while, and I see maybe thirty people pass. My friends aren't worried, though. According to them, this protest will make the last look like a crazy drunk with a microphone. I'm both optimistic and worried. The government cracked down hard on the last one. Would this time be any different?

I take a few photos, not particularly interested at this point. Everybody from the Engineering School is wearing green. Some riot police pass by, preparing for things to get ugly. A grad student jokes that they look like Ninja Turtles. The resemblance is there. I continue to take some photos, all too boring to talk about. My excitement is wearing thin.

And then we turn the corner.

I don't think this picture really conveys the scale on the ground. Nobody else thought so, either, so we pushed deeper into the crowd. Somebody helped me up onto a ledge, where I had a better view of things. This is what I got.

This is three campuses of Universidad de Chile. UChile has 13 campuses. There are 34 colleges in Santiago. We weren't a crowd. We were an army.

My group beckons me. We fall behind one banner. Everybody starts chanting the university anthem. And we start marching. I am now a protester.

It's pretty hard to describe what it's like. I am just a drop in the ocean, a single voice among a hundred thousand. I do not understand the language, can not translate a thing anybody was saying, don't even have a complete idea of what the entire thing was about. I know the overview but not any of the details. Yet I am marching with them, so I am protesting. My feet and legs added to the rest of them. And we are in the center. If the gas came in or the crowd starting crushing, I'd be the first one down. Desperately trying to remember the survival tactics, I start mapping out the escape routes. Pay careful attention to the shops and alleys, trying to figure out where best to run. I know deep down that if something does happen I won't have the freedom to choose where I go, but planning this makes me feel a little safer.

Our group is moving slowly. I find out it's not too hard to move around. You have to either use one of the street islands if you want to remain in the thick of things, or along the sidewalks if you want to cover long distances. The streets are packed, but the sidewalks are still clear for now. I tell my friends that I'm ranging ahead and they should worry about me. I will call them when I'm headed home.

I'm able to get a better sense of the crowd now. It's perhaps three long metra stops across, estimated at 1.5-2.5 miles. I have no trouble believing the estimates of 100,000+ people. The people range from banner wavers and chanters to choreographed dancers and marching bands. I tried to capture a good sense of it with my camera. I've provided translations where I could:

This still doesn't quite capture the scale of things. I'm starting to grow frustrated at my impotence. I can share details but not the big picture. I'm consigned to only show a grounds eye view of things. It's impossible to convey the energy and the sum total of the experience.

And then I come across this:

It's a bus shelter. I grab on to the advert and hoist my body up. A short scramble later and I'm on the roof. I finally have a birds eye view of the protest.

Getting down is a lot harder, mostly because I'm still shaking from the sight. I continue following the crowd. The sidewalks are getting packed and it seems to be slowing down. My eyes and throat start to water. There's something in the air, something that frames the place with a terrible sense of chaos. I finally reach the head of the crowd. We've stopped moving. We're done moving. The show is over and we don't get an encore.

The police won't let us.

Part two can be found here.