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La Victoria, Chile: Half a Century Building Another World
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
CIP/Americas Policy Program - Nov 18, 2007
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4742
La Victoria, Chile: Half a Century Building Another World
by Ral Zibechi
English translation by Lezlie L. Shackell
La Victoria settlement in Santiago, Chile, recently observed its 50th
anniversary. It was one of the first organized occupations of urban
land on the continent and in a half century built an alternative city,
defied the dictator****p, and continues to find ways to break out of the
neoliberal model.
Avenue 30 de Octubre proudly s****ts dozens of murals painted by the
settlement's brigades of muralists. To the visitor, they mark the
arrival at a different neighborhood, distinguished by a population that
made, and keeps on making, history.
"Do you see that window where the candle is?" Macarena points toward a
miniscule opening at the top of a modest home that is almost identical
to the other self-built houses in the settlement. "That's where Father
Andr(c) Jarlan died. A bullet killed him while he was reading the Bible,
the very passage that says, 'Father forgive them, for they know not
what they do.'"1
Other testimonies say the priest was reading the De Profundis psalm
[Psalm 130: "Out of the Depths"] and even state the precise passage he
was reading when he was killed by a bullet fired by the national
police, or "pacos" as t hey are called in Chile. In any event, Father
Andr(c) Jarlan is part of the abundant mythology that surrounds La
Victoria. His death occurred on Sept. 4, 1984, within the framework of
a national protest against the Augusto Pinochet regime. That day police
entered the settlement shooting into the air, as they did each and
every time they entered the neighborhood after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup
d'(c)tat. Upon learning of the priest's death, thousands of people lit
candles and marched to his home.
Thirty-three years after the coup, on Dec. 10, 2006, upon learning of
Pinochet's death, La Victoria was one big celebration. "Neighbors came
out of their houses, embraced each other, and cried. They opened water
faucets and doused themselves like in Carnival, shared wine, and
danced," recalls Macarena. In this battle-hardened neighborhood, few
are the families without a relative killed, imprisoned, or disappeared
by the military dictator****p.
A Turn in History
The night of Oct. 29, 1957, a group from Zanjn de la Aguada, a
five-kilometer by 100-meter belt of poverty in the center of Santiago
with a population of 35,000, prepared to carry out the first organized,
massive seizure of urban land. At 8 p.m., they began to dismantle their
shacks, tied strips of cloth over their horses' hooves to prevent
making noise, and gathered "the three sticks and flag" with which to
create the new settlement. Around 2:30 a.m., they arrived at the chosen
site: a state-owned property in the southern part of the city.2 "The
darkness made us advance step by step. With the first light of dawn,
everyone began to clear his piece of brush, build a hut, and raise the
flag," recalls one of the participants.3
The "encampment" withstood police eviction actions, and families began
to build the settlement. From the first moment, they themselves defined
the criteria they would follow. The construction of the settlement,
which they called "La Victoria" [victory], was "an enormous exercise in
self-organization by the settlers," who had to "join forces and invent
resources, putting into play every bit of knowledge and all their
skills." The government did not throw them out, but neither did it
assist in the construction of the new settlement.4
The first aspect that distinguishes this action from previous struggles
was its self-organization. The first night there was a large assembly
that decided to create committees for neighborhood watch, sustenance,
and health, among others. From then on, all im****tant decisions were
screened via collective debate. The second distingui****ng aspect was
its self-construction. The first public buildings, constructed by the
settlers themselves, were the school and the health clinic, which
reflected the inhabitants' priorities.
For the school, each settler had to contribute fifteen adobe bricks;
women brought the straw, young people made the bricks, and teachers
stacked them one on top of another. The school began to function within
a few months of the camp's establishment, although the teachers were
not paid. The clinic began attending to residents under a tent until
the building was erected, in the same way the school had been. Two
years after the seizure, La Victoria had 18,000 inhabitants and more
than 3,000 dwellings. As Mario Garc(c)s remembers, it was a city built
and governed by the poorest, based on a rich and extensive community
network.
The "seizure" of La Victoria shaped a pattern of social action that was
repeated with small variations during the following decades, and even
up to today, not only in Chile, but throughout the rest of Latin
America. The pattern consists of collective organization prior to the
seizure, careful selection of a suitable space, and sudden action,
preferably at night, along with the search for a legal umbrella of
relations with churches or political parties, and the elaboration of a
legitimizing discourse for an illegal action. If the seizure withstands
initial eviction efforts by public forces, it is very likely the
occupants will be able to remain. This pattern for social action put
down its first steps in Santiago and Lima in the 1950s and was
practiced in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the most "European" cities
due to their homogeneity, only in the 1980s. This pattern is very
different from individual families joining shantytowns known as
"favelas," "callampas," and "villas miseria."5
A New City
Land seizure "entails a radical break with institutional logic and with
the fundamental principle of liberal democracies: property."6
Legitimacy takes the place of legality, and the land's use value
prevails over its exchange value. With a seizure, an invisible group
becomes a socio-political subject. In La Victoria, something more
happens: the construction of homes and the neighborhood by the
residents themselves means the appropriation of a space by its
residents that subsequently is inhabited by a "we" who become the
area's self-government.
This feature applies to all aspects of daily life. Not only did the
inhabitants of La Victoria build their houses, streets, and water
system, and install electricity, they also erected a health clinic and
a school, the latter according to their own criteria, in that it is a
circular building. They governed their lives and the whole area,
establi****ng forms of popular power, or counterpowers.
Women played a prominent role, to the extent that many affirm that they
left their husbands to go on the land seizure, or did not inform them
of the crucial step they were about to take in their lives. "I went
alone with my seven-month-old daughter, since my husband didn't go with
me," recounts Luisa, who was eighteen at the time of the seizure.7
Zulema, age 42, remembers: "Several women secretly came with their
children, hiding from their husbands, like I did."8 Even in the
mid-1950s, popular sector women"strictly speaking, we would have to say
mothers, the women and their children"had a surprising level of
autonomy. Not only did they take the lead during the occupation, but
also when it came to resisting eviction and facing the police with
their children.
Chilean historian Gabriel Salazar states that prior to 1950, popular
sector women had learned to organize tenement house assemblies, tenant
strikes, land seizures, health groups, resistance to police evictions,
and other forms of resistance. In order to become "home owners," they
had to become activists and promote land seizures. This way, women
settlers began to develop "a certain type of popular, local power,"
that amounted to the ability to create free territories in which they
practiced a "direct exercise in sovereignty" in truly autonomous
communes.9
La Victoria was built as a community of sentiments and feelings, where
identity is not anchored in the physical place, but in affections and
shared life experiences. As the testimonies affirm, in the early days
everyone called each other "compaero," partly because everything was
done by all of them. However, it was not an ideological comrade****p but
something more sobering: the November rains caused the deaths of 21
nursing infants. The death of a child is something special. In Brazil,
when the landless occupy a property, they raise a large wooden cross.
Each time a child from the camp dies, they drape a piece of white cloth
on the cross and leave it there: it is something sacred. In La
Victoria, when a child died, and sometimes an adult, a long caravan
walked through the streets of the neighborhood before heading to the
cemetery.
Prior to the 1973 coup d'(c)tat, the popular sectors were the main
creators of urban space. In September 1970, the capital was in full
transformation due to the encampments, which were "the most influential
social force in the urban community of greater Santiago."10 Pinochet's
coup sought to reverse the almost hegemonic position attained by the
popular sectors. That third of the capital's population"those who had
built their own neighborhoods, houses, schools, health clinics, and
pushed for basic services"was a threat to elite authority. The military
regime attempted to reverse the situation by displacing the entire
population to places built by the state or the market.
Between 1980 and 2000, 202,000 "social housing units" were constructed
in Santiago, in order to move a million people, one-fifth of the
capital's population, from self-built areas, to segregated housing
complexes removed from the town center. An enormous mass of low quality
housing was built for the poor all over the country. The regime first
proceeded to "clean up" the rich neighborhoods, with a twofold
objective: eliminate distorted property values created by settlements
in the central sectors, and consolidate spatial segregation of the
social cl***** as a security measure.
Urban specialists in Chile think that the dictator****p's eradication of
the poor from the consolidated city was a radical measure, singular on
the continent. It would seem that the wave of mobilizations in those
neighborhoods in 1983"after 10 years of fierce repression and social
restructuring"convinced the elites that they should proceed with
urgency, since the settlers were the protagonists of the massive
national protests that put the dictator****p on the defensive. In 1980
there were new seizures that threatened to spread.
Women Against Pinochet
Since 1983, settlements created by popular sectors after the seizure of
La Victoria played a decisive role in resisting the dictator****p. The
self-built, self-governed neighborhoods replaced factories as the
epicenter of popular action. After 10 years of dictator****p, popular
sectors defied the regimen in the streets by staging 11 "national
protests" between May 11, 1983, and Oct. 30, 1984, led by young people
who used barricades and bonfires to demarcate their territory.
>From the early 1980s, women and young people began to rise in
leader****p through their pro-survival and socio-cultural organizations,
and they reacted to the dictator****p's attempts to dismantle the
popular world. The appropriation of territories during protests, where
barricades impose limits to state presence, has been the means to
reject external authority within the self-controlled spaces. Heard
often behind the barricades, referring to the national police, was:
"They're not passing here." This effectively "closed off the
population" and represented the "affirmation of the popular community
as an alternative to state authority and rejection of the proposed
totality of the dictator****p."11
The state response was brutal. Slightly over a year later there were at
least 75 dead, more than 1,000 wounded, and 6,000 arrested. In a single
protest on Aug. 11-12, 1983, 1,000 were arrested and 29 killed; 18,000
soldiers participated in the repression, in addition to civilians and
national police. This underscores the intensity of the protests, which
could have occurred only after a resounding community decision. Despite
the repression, there was no defeat. Community identity was restored,
and success was embodied in the very existence of the protests and in
the ability to launch repeated and sustained challenges to the system
for a year and a half following a decade of repression, torture, and
disappearances.
Among the new actors, basically women and young settlers, some
differences should be examined. The popular sectors, and in a very
singular way, lower-class women, developed new abilities, the principal
one being the capacity to produce and re-produce their lives without
relying on the market, in other words, without following patterns.
Gabriel Salazar states that, "If women's experience in the 60s had been
profound, that of the 80s and 90s was deeper still, causing an even
more vigorous and integral social response."
In the 80s, settlers did not organize just to take over a site and
raise an encampment while awaiting state decree. "They organized among
themselves (and with other settlers) to produce (forming bread-making
collectives, laundries, weaving centers, etc.), to subsist (community
kettles, family gardens, joint purchases), to educate themselves
(women's collectives, cultural groups), and also to resist (militancy,
health groups). All this was carried out not only without the state,
but also against the state."12
Women's strength, and this is characteristic of current movements
across the continent, is based on something as simple as coming
together, sup****ting each other, and resolving problems "their" way,
using the infallible logic of doing things as they do at home, thereby
transferring to collective space the same style as in private space,
plus the spontaneous community attitude seen in movements such as
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.
These women have modified our understanding of the term social
movement. They did not create bureaucratic structures or ceremonies
with the usual pomp and cir***stance inherent in those institutions
that are necessarily separated from their base. But they acted, and did
they ever! Under the dictator****p, Chilean women settlers became little
ants that crisscrossed between and among area houses, meeting and
chatting with all the neighbors. Their mobility allowed them to weave
"neighborhood nets" and even community networks that made formal
neighborhood board meetings unnecessary.13
The image of these poor women acting within their neighborhoods, moving
around weaving territorial nets that are, as Salazar points out,
"community cells," is the best image of a non-institutionalized
movement and of the creation of non-state power"in other words, neither
hierarchical nor separated from the whole. With this also, a new way of
making politics is born by the hand of new subjects who are not
registered or included in state, political, or social institutions.
For these women the transition to democracy was a disaster. After 1990,
with the return of the electoral process, they suffered a defeat they
never had imagined. In other words: "The settler movement was not
vanquished by the dictator****p on the battlefield the settlers chose,
but on the field of compromise chosen by their supposed allies: middle
class professionals and left-center politicians."14
La Victoria Today
At the Pedro Mariqueo Cultural Center in La Victoria, during
preparations for the 12th anniversary celebration of the founding of
the Primero de Mayo Radio station, I was able to personally confirm the
level of autonomy of new residential organizations. One statement
impressed me more than any other: "Our problem began with the [return
to] democracy."15 This did not seem to be an affirmation of an
ideological nature, just common sense that was shared, but not overly
emphasized, by the approximately 30 people present.
The panorama presented by those at the meeting was worthy of analysis.
The majority were young people, though some were older, and most were
women. Each person was responsible for one radio program, and there was
everything from hip hop to transvestites to laborers, Christians,
socialists, punks, and people who did not define themselves. The
diversity was enormous, almost as great as that in the population. In
some ways, we could say that all those people are experiencing, on a
small scale, harmony in diversity, social action in diversity, and
resistance in diversity.
Upon leaving the Pedro Mariqueo Center, where the radio and library are
located, I felt that the underdogs were preparing something big"they
practice how the new world will be. The community television station,
Channel 3, is nearby and is run by Cristian Valdivia, a painter,
carpenter, and computer repairman"occupations that allow him to survive
and dedicate time to his passion, community TV. Channel 3 has a range
of nine kilometers and broadcasts from 6 p.m. to midnight, Thursday
through Sunday. Twenty-four people maintain the "educational,
informational, and recreational" station where neighborhood cultural
and social centers have their own programming.
The channel does not receive external funding, only the sup****t of
members, groups that have programs, and some neighborhood shopkeepers.
"We don't ask the municipal government for anything," says Valdivia.
"We do what we can by using people themselves: that is, more than
economic resources, we deal with human resources."16 Even children have
their own program. The group wants to contribute to the creation of a
network of community television channels throughout Chile, and they
already loan their equipment to other areas.
After 50 years, it seems evident that in La Victoria, as in so many
places in Latin America, social change is basically cultural change.
For neoliberal governments, even those headed by progressive forces,
autonomy and cultural difference are dangerous. In fact, La Victoria is
an area where the state intervenes by dispatching the national police
to keep residents under surveillance. Using crime and drugs as an
excuse, the Safe Neighborhoods Program was enacted in 2001 under the
Ministry of the Interior. The program uses funds from the IDB and calls
for police and social intervention in the "marginal" or "conflicted"
neighborhoods. Nine areas have been affected, the first being La Legua,
and the second, La Victoria.
The objectives of the plan are obvious when the authorities themselves
admit that it aims to "combat crime and street peddling in downtown
Santiago."17 In each area they seek to involve social organizations,
particularly the neighborhood boards, and this results in a division
between the people and the organizational centers. "We are watched by
the police 24 hours a day. Any activity that occurs is supposed to be
re****ted to the police," says Valdivia.
Walking through La Victoria toward the home of the Little Sisters of
Jesus, who worked with Father Andr(c) Jarlan, we see truckloads of
rifle-armed police on the corners. Mara In(c)s has us enter a small,
modest, yet dignified house that is very similar to nearby houses,
where the four nuns live. She serves us coffee and slowly describes her
experiences in the south with the Mapuche communities. She speaks
softly, often pausing, perhaps because she is well over 70 years old.
When we ask her about La Victoria today, she lowers her gaze and makes
a gesture that is somewhere between weariness and annoyance: "The cops
must leave here." And she ends by staring off into space or, perhaps,
at the image of Jesus hanging next to that of Father Andr(c).
End Notes
1. Personal interview, April 2007.
2. The first land occupation in Chile is do***ented in books by
Mario Garc(c)s and the work by the Grupo Identidad de Memoria Popular
cited in the list of references.
3. Mario Garc(c)s, et al., El mundo de las poblaciones, p. 130.
4. Mario Garc(c)s, Tomando su sitio, p. 138.
5. "Callampas," as shantytowns are called in Chile, get their name
from a mushroom that appears overnight, as they do.
6. Grupo Identidad, p. 14.
7. Grupo Identidad, p. 58.
8. Grupo Identidad, p. 25.
9. Gabriel Salazar and Julio Pinto, Historia contem****!nea de Chile
IV, p. 251.
10. Garc(c)s, Tomando su sitio, p. 416.
11. Marisa Revilla, "Chile: actores populares en la protesta
nacional, 1983-1984," p. 63.
12. Salazar and Pinto, p. 261. Bold emphasis in the original.
13. Salazar and Pinto, p. 267.
14. Salazar and Pinto, p. 263. Bold emphasis in the original.
15. Personal interview, April 2007.
16. Paula Fiamma, "Haciendo televisin participativa."
17. http://www.gobiernochile.cl/
[Ral Zibechi is an international analyst for Brecha, a weekly journal
in Montevideo, Uruguay, professor and researcher on social movements at
the Multiversidad Franciscana de Am(c)rica Latina, and adviser to social
groups. He is a monthly contributor to the CIP Americas Program.]
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