I live in El Bosque, the same municipality where the food protests begun.
The particular neighborhood where this happened is very close to mine and I have very close info about what happened.
The local municipal government closed down the street markets recently for non-registered and non essential sellers, causing the flow of income for the people who worked without a license in them (usually very low income, very hard working people) to dry up almost without warning.
The municipality and the local and nearby neighborhoods did their best to try to support the people that lost their source of work, but the municipality has seen the government take away most of the resources they had due to the local government being from an opposition party, and the neighborhoods nearby couldn't give more help when total quarantine was declared (far too late), which dried up most of the income the people in this municipality had.
Santiago is a highly socioeconomically segregated city, and El Bosque is a mostly low income, old age suburban municipality, with very crowded areas and middle to bad infrastructure. This wasnt a big center of protest during the October Awakening, but the people here did participate quite a bit in demonstrations. Now, the people, who had spent the last 2 MONTHS telling the government they needed help, made a demonstration that was very brutally repressed, which sparked several other protests around the city.
Turns out, the economical situation was severely bad, and the media had been hiding it.
The same "oh but they should have protested peacefully" bullshit argument was immediately released by government, but more alarmingly, several figures of the right wing coalition that is in power have said that people should be prosecuted and arrested for demanding help.
Not just that but also there have been several disgusting comments from accommodated people trying to pretend that the hunger was fake and that the protests were politically motivated. Its a textbook example of the same distraction tactics the media and the government is also using in the US rn.
Several political figures have said since February and March that a full lockdown and an emergency program of economical support was necessary, but the current government has refused to apply or take any actions in the latter, and the lockdown was only progressively applied in areas and stages, with the government's actions being too optimistic until a few weeks ago the cases exploded due to the bad management of the crisis. Chile is on the list of countries with the highest rise of cases, but interestingly it has very low deaths. (Though, the government has decided to keep a lot of information secret, which combined with some alarming discoveries such as many corpses of people dead of Covid19 related complications not being marked as Covid19 Deaths in their certificates... making our own conclusions is all we can do in this regard, especially since the minister of Health is a very aggressive mafioso type person who has been criticized many times for many reasons, far too many to list. He's the guy who said that "the virus could mutate into a better person". Literally. Those were his words.)
The governments response was to make several token overtures of support, and give tiny emergency funds that are still swirling around the state bureaucracy, and give out extremely publicized boxes with food supplies to central and crowded areas, in a extremely slow process that barely started a few days ago, with municipalities like ours being apparently last in the list to receive food aid.
The Comunas (communes/municipalities) of south and west santiago are some of the most crowded, poorer and most vulnerable ones of santiago, and the government has been the most scarce around here, with even majors of the same coalition of the government denouncing the abandonment of the government.
Cacerolazos, Demonstrations, Ollas Comunes (Communitary Driven Soup Kitchens) and Protests have flared up in many places in these areas, and its expected that they repeat if the government is still being slow in following the recommendations of experts and keeps refusing to help.
One final thing that needs to be mentioned:
The Cacerolazos are a protest form that started before and during the Dictatorship times. People protested the lack of food by banging on empty pots from the doorstep of their homes and on the streets. They were seen during the October Protests as a way to criticize the economical and social policies of the last decades and are being seen now in a more literal way, which is a very telling thing of the very vulnerable place we are in. The fact that the Ollas Comunes have had to be organized again, is making a lot of people remember the economical crisis of the 80's during the dictatorship.
There arent many online fundraisers to help people here because our online financial services are internally oriented, but if you want to help, telling people what is going on helps a lot. If international media picks up on what's going on here, even if passively, it demolishes the government's narrative of "international praise" that they are using a lot to deflect criticism.
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