Considering that the economic crisis
is not only seen in Puerto Rico, but globally,
universities as a whole
in almost all parts of the world are being affected.
The case of Puerto Rico
can be seen as more problematic
considering that this country is a colony of the USA.
The economic disaster,
both in the empire and in the colony
is exacerbated more in terms
of general education.
And mainly in the aspect of higher education,
which has led to seeing the future as
something very tragic.
Each year there are less students.
And obviously that’s because of the crisis.
Every year more people leave the country
- especially young people.
More youth join the army.
They go study at institutes.
They go study in the US.
Historically, the University of Puerto Rico,
which is the public university of the country,
is and continues to be,
generally speaking,
a bastion of critical thought.
To be able to talk about the 2010 strike
- or, specifically about how the strike began in 2010 -
we have to go back and talk about the 2005 strike.
In 2005, a new increase in tuition was taking place.
We're talking about a 33% tuition increase.
The strike was sparked because of that.
It was sparked so that education could stay accessible.
It was also the strike in which the campus was occupied
and shut down.
The organizing was typical
of traditional leftist socialist political organizations
- very centralized -
which created resentments and tensions.
We cannot call it a failure,
although the tuition freeze was not won.
Yes, the tuition hike was carried out...
the strike ended in a very chaotic way
But it led many to an awareness of what we want.
At the beginning of 2009
we started to re-organize the university.
We began to realize that we had to break down
these traditional centralized and hierarchical structures.
We began to decentralize.
We began to form affinity groups
- they were called action committees.
From there came the idea of creating a university union.
Action committees were organized by faculty,
in the case of the Rio Piedras campus.
And they allowed us to have a strike committee
overnight, without even having a strike.
Then we started to push the assembly to strike.
And in the assembly, it was already organic.
We were no longer going with the purpose
of convincing people.
We were going to vote for the strike.
And so the strike started.
And the strike was like a snowball.
As the snowball kept rolling, it kept growing.
And from there 11 campuses were occupied.
To be able to carry out the strike and be successful,
we had to sacrifice our studies.
So the occupation of the campuses,
of each of the faculties, was that.
To create the impossibility for normality.
We're on strike... therefore there are no classes.
Making a fortress of the Rio Piedras campus
- as did our comrades did in the other campuses -
was done to avoid a confrontation with the cops
That would have kicked us out,
and then the strike would have ended.
That still happened.
But inside, there was an atmosphere of freedom.
An atmosphere of coexistence
and social transformation.
That's where that idea comes in.
We learned to make barricades.
We learned to confront the police like never before.
"Out! Out! Cops get out!"
We learned to think strategically.
We learned to attract the people, the public.
Not only was the campus taken,
the streets were taken too.
I think that 2010 and 2011 transformed people.
It allowed the strike of 2017
to be a different strike.
There was a consciousness,
and the genie was out of the bottle.
<<The Senate will finally vote on what to do
on the so-called ‘PROMESA’ bill,
which would establish a means for Puerto Rico
to restructure its 72 billion dollars in debt
but would also impose a Financial Control Board
- or what I and other people call it -
a colonial control board
over the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.>>
The Fiscal Control Board
overrules the government of Puerto Rico
and decides the austerity measures to be imposed
on the people.
And one of the first things it did
was propose cuts to the University of Puerto Rico.
The cuts - first they were $300 million
now they are $450 million.
One of the things that was discussed in the fiscal plan
was a tuition increase.
In 2016, when us students found this out,
we began to organize.
And we went on strike
in 2010-11 committees were organized by faculty.
In 2017, we did the same thing.
But new committees were created,
such as the athlete's committee,
the seed-garden committee,
and other committees and working groups,
such as the gender working group.
The strike was also connected to the crisis
that the country was going through.
it was tied to the fight against the Fiscal Control Board,
to the struggle for independence.
The majority of our protests
were outside the university.
The fact that we were on strike
helped a lot with organizing May Day,
and the tactics that were used.
Black bloc tactics were used,
and striking students were able to
organize that black bloc.
They were able to make contacts with other people
who were not students,
but who could participate in the strike, because
even though it was a student strike
it was open to the people.
Education in Chile is deeply segregated by class.
The level of privatization caused students to go into debt.
Families would be spending such a large portion
of their earnings to pay for education
that people started to realize that it was a right
that they were being deprived of
and that they had to begin to mobilize.
Traditional universities, especially state universities,
have a long tradition of student organizing and mobilizing,
where student federations are established organizations
and are “accepted” by the rectories
and the government as a valid interlocutor
when discussing student issues.
The private universities that were established in 1981
are institutions that,
generally speaking,
have only had university federations since the 2000s.
It was at that moment that the students began
to demand their right to organize
in a federation that was legitimized
by the rectories of those institutions.
The university federations are grouped in CONFECH.
The CONFECH is the federation of Chilean students
and is like the main body
bringing together the different university federations
of the majority of Chilean universities,
whether they be private or public.
The movement of 2011 was a really defining moment.
People felt and believed in a struggle of their own,
and seeing that the demonstrations
began to attract many students,
a much deeper analysis began to take form
with regards to education.
The main slogans that guided the mobilization
cover different areas.
The first has to do with free education,
the demand that higher education
be free and accessible for all students,
regardless of the socio-economic level of their families.
The second has to do
with the forgiveness of debts incurred by Chilean families
during the process of educating their children.
The third has to do with the orientation
that education has in our country.
And there, the CONFECH’s demand
is to advance the creation
of a national development project,
in which the universities
– and in particular the public and state universities –
play a strategic role in the design of public policies,
in conjunction with the state.
It was at that point that secondary students
also came together with their own demands,
and the need to coordinate
with high school students was sparked,
since they also had been resisting, since 2006
– which was known as the Penguin's Revolution.
We could see a level of support
that no other kind of social movement
during the last decades had seen,
since the end of the dictatorship.
There were even polls that pointed to
over 80% of the population supporting student demands.
We saw demonstrations
of up to one million people in the capital,
with entire families participating,
with workers' unions participating,
with people in the streets
who were not affiliated
with any political organization supporting.
The student demands
had resonated with a great majority of the country.
For example, the fight against indebtedness,
but also the struggle for a less classist educational system
that contributes to the development of the country,
and not just to the profits of the ruling class.
Within what was called the anarchist movement,
it was thought that the participation of anarchists
within the dynamics of the student movement
– for example in the election leaders,
participation in voting,
participation in assemblies, etc –
was something that did not correspond
to the principles of the anarchist movement.
As of 2003, we decided that it was something
that did not correspond to our current reality,
that as a libertarian movement
we had the responsibility to nourish the student movement
with our political perspective.
And that if it meant that our comrades
had to take on representational roles
in an attempt to to democratize those spaces,
it had to be done.
There were different visions.
On the one hand,
there were groups that were very, like, platform based,
and who called themselves anarchists.
But they were groups that, after all,
also sought leadership positions.
And on the other hand,
there were young people who were looking
for a much more horizontal organization,
a much more direct manifestation, or, direct action.
Beginning with small affinity groups,
a movement that unites from below.
I think it served to effectively keep up the pressure.
So that it wasn’t so easy to impose the direction
that this movement could take.
It was already super distorted
by the filters of the political parties
that directed the assemblies in some way.
f we did not resist in some way,
we were going to let it be much easier
for them to control things.
At the end of the day,
you realized that it served to link you with other people
who were not even part of your student organizations.
But who also had their own networks.
And it allowed you to see what the mistakes were,
or the things that don't really make sense
in the spaces in which people were mobilizing.
I think it's possible to draw several lessons
from the experience the Chilean student movement
has accumulated during the last decade and a half.
One of them has to do with the ability
of the student movement and its political organizations
to protect its internal democratic structures.
That allows students in the country
to be represented democratically,
and grants legitimacy to their spaces of representation.
The other lesson has to do with the need to move
from economic demands to political demands.
Questioning not only the way in which neoliberalism
expresses itself concretely in terms of education,
but by questioning the foundations
of neoliberal educational policy.
And what that means, is questioning, for example,
the role that banks and the private sector
play in education to the detriment of the public sector.
Another lesson has to do with the ability
of the student movement to exercise,
or establish ties of solidarity with other social movements.
During 2011-2012,
we forged a process of coordination
and relationship with labour unions,
with neighbourhood organizations,
with environmental organizations,
with organizations that fought for
and demanded gender equality,
and with an endless number of other social groups
within Chilean society
that share with us a critique of neoliberal society.
Because that allows their political demand
not to be exhausted within the educational demand,
but rather to be projected into a political project
that overcomes the student struggle,
and that is ultimately related to
the struggle against the neoliberal model
– and therefore to the construction
of a different political alternative.
In the coming years,
we will confront the austerity measures
of the Fiscal Control Board
and US Congress.
But I think that we're stronger now
because students are more organized.
To be able to defend the right to mobilize,
we have to be capable of formulating a political discourse
that allows us to count on
the substantial support of the people,
so that our demands are understood.
So that the tactics utilized
- be they street battles,
street demonstrations,
or university building occupations,
is understood by the citizens.
To achieve that, it's important to
publicize our objectives.
To publish videos explaining why we are mobilizing
- the reasons why we are mobilizing -
and connect the demands of the students
with the hardships that workers endure every day.
If we don't fight to transform our country,
we won't be able to fight for a real education.
The independence of Puerto Rico would be
one aspect of our success.
Quality public education is
one aspect of our struggle.
The education of the street is
another aspect of our struggle.
I can say that many of the comrades who
were involved in the 2010-11 strike,
and the one in 2017,
understood that.
That's why they are organizing alternative projects.
New organizations emerge
that were not tied to past political groups.
These new organizations emerge
to meet the needs of the students.
Give priority to grassroots organizing more than
groups that direct from the top.
Otherwise it becomes an imaginary mobilization.
It was the massive student movement,
plus the support of the people for our political demands
that allowed us to confront the repression
with a violence of self-defense
that was legitimized
by a large group of the population.
Police and state repression
transformed us.
It radicalized us.
Changing us from student fighters
into street fighters.