5 years after the revolt and the beginning of a new historical stage of capital, we share a brief analysis, based on the registration and dissemination of dozens of free media that gave face to these processes, confronting the disinformation of power and its hegemonic media, media that together with us were in the streets of their territories, and that allow us to generate a broad view today, beyond understanding these revolts as particular events of a single territory.
On October 18, 2019, the steam of a series of demonstrations ended up blowing the lid of the pot, the limitations of the established order were overthrown by thousands of people in a self-proclaimed “awakening” that almost no one believed possible in that current $hile. Already on October 19 the revolt was expanding through each region, we were fed up with the 30 years of shit since the implementation of the experimental economic model, which ended up materializing in this country of massacres and sadness.
But the analysis cannot start here. The analysis should start by mentioning that not only in the evil (or mall) called $hile the revolt arose, but that in most of Abya Yala there were very important, massive and radical uprisings, in Europe and Asia similar situations were happening.
In February 2019, Haiti began an uprising against the power of the rich and the government of Jovenel Moïse. After a visit by the IMF, the government decided to accede to the instructions of the organization and eliminate the fuel subsidy, causing price increases. The next day the angry mobs, tired of their own misery and the wealth of a few, burned luxury cars, clashed with the police, managed to stone the president’s house, looted large stores and helped in the escape of hundreds of prisoners.
By October 17, a report sent to La Zarzamora by Alba Movimientos reported: “The capital woke up completely paralyzed, with countless barricades, with no other transportation than a few motorcycle taxis, and without any type of governmental or civil activity. There are demonstrations announced in Mirebalais, Ouanaminthe and the entire metropolitan region of Port-au-Prince: Delmas, Petion Ville, Tabarre, Croix des Bouquets, etc.
Hundreds of young people are already gathered at the emblematic “airport crossing” on Delmas Avenue. They are honoring those killed by government repression with photo displays, murals, and voodoo ceremonies. It is expected that the demonstrators will begin to gather there.” This scenario occurred in parallel with the fermentation of the uprising in $hile.
In Ecuador on October 2, 2019, a wave of demonstrations began after the announcement of new economic measures agreed between the government and the IMF, which included eliminating a fuel subsidy among other reforms. This generates the immediate response of transport organizations, workers, students, individuals and the main organization of the indigenous nations of Ecuador the Conaie, who generate a general strike.
On October 4, a state of emergency was declared, and by October 9 the repression had brutally attacked and deaths, injured people and arrests began to be counted. From the “Ecuadorian Coordinator of Counter-Information” comrades reported: “There are 7 people dead, of which one is a newborn baby, 95 seriously injured, more than 500 slightly injured, 83 people missing (of which 47 are minors), more than 800 people detained, 57 journalists assaulted by the police, 13 journalists imprisoned, 9 media outlets taken over, in addition to the arrest of 14 Venezuelans who were arbitrarily detained.”
It was an 11-day strike, however, as in the rest of Abya Yala the social process continued in the following years.
In Honduras, during the month of October 2019, massive protests took place demanding the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernández. The main reasons had to do with the privatization of basic services, corruption, poverty, extractivist contract killings (which in 2016 murdered the defender of the Gualcarque River Berta Cáceres) added to the trial that the president’s brother faces for drug trafficking in the United States.
On November 21, a series of protests began in various cities of Colombia, they were part of a national strike. Once again, the motivation is economic precariousness that adds to the corruption of power and the murder of indigenous social leaders. Since January 2019, the protests threatened the stability of the government of Iván Duque, however since November 21 institutions such as the palace of justice, mayors’ offices and the Colombian Congress were attacked by the furious protests. The ESMAD begins the brutal repression against the people in the streets leaving a balance of approximately 35 people killed, 250 injured and 100 people arrested.
The same year in Bolivia an institutional crisis was provoked after the non-recognition of the elections that gave Morales the winner for another term of office. After a coup d’état, Jeanine Áñez proclaims herself president. This provoked a series of protests and the subsequent repression that left dozens of deaths.
In the following years, the uprising in Peru would come with the imposition of the Dina Boluarte dictatorship and the radicalization of the protests in January 2023: “the repressive forces of the dictatorship attacked demonstrators who were protesting at the Inca Manco Capac airport in Juliaca, demanding Boluarte’s resignation and the closure of congress. People were attacked with lethal weapons, helicopters and tear gas, leaving more than 18 dead and around 38 people injured who were transferred to the Carlos Monge Medriano hospital,” we reported from La Zarzamora on January 10, 2023.
Although these uprisings end up being co-opted by the institutions and reformist objectives, they responded to a crisis beyond their own territories and governments in power. In Abya Yala, the intervention of the IMF, the establishment of neoliberalism and the continuity of colonialism (now based on the extractivist usurpation), caused a generalized weariness that accounted for the consequences of the imposition of the neo-capitalist economic model on the lives of the peoples.
All this force of the peoples in rebellion was then violently exterminated, first by repression and then by the pandemic, which gave transnational power the necessary time to plan the entry of the new phase of capital, which is nothing more or less than the so-called “energy transition”, based on new technologies with “sustainable” energies, electromobility and artificial intelligence.
What is not disseminated is that these new technologies use raw materials that are present in the soils of Abya Yala, and our territories yesterday in revolts, today are being threatened by extraction to sustain this so-called “energy transition”, which is nothing more than a new form of capital and its continuity of the colonialist process.
Today they want Abya yala to sustain the new weapons of power and world surveillance from the devastation of their territories. This is what we see in the various extractivist projects that the resurrected governments together with the large transnationals intend to install or have already installed in them.
Canadian and Chinese capital, among others, see our territories as a warehouse of raw materials, with which they will continue to enrich themselves and give more privileges to the tycoons who move the world economy.
Returning to the territory occupied by $hile, we can mention the examples of Penco, with the threat of extraction of rare earths by Minera Aclara, an alloy of minerals used for weapons, space technology and electromobility. We also see it in the salt flats of the north that are being destroyed for the extraction of lithium, used for the electric batteries of the luxury cars of the rich.
Today the defense of the land is paramount, our process is not over, neither is that of capital, and what we have just witnessed is a new change of clothes of the system that has destroyed the land and the lives of humans and animals in Abya Yala.
After this regional experience, considering their similarities, both in the origins and in the “textbook” repressive responses, exercised by the powers that be, we are left to recover what we have learned: autonomy, living without states, without parties, without welfare, as we did in those days and nights of fire, in which food was communal and collective self-defense. But the most important thing is to rescue that the revolt did not respond to a single territory, but to an entire region drowned by capital, states and colonialism.
This is not over and has shown us once again that the struggle is constant and that it must continue without waiting for a new mass uprising. Against denialism, fascism, the nefarious institutions of the state, business, patriarchy, imposed idiosyncrasies, speciesism and the doctrines of the latifundia. For life, for the earth and all its existences, we continue.-
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By: La Zarzamora