"Ah, the smell of tear gas. Brings back memories of my youth.
"Anyway, I headed off to Santiago early yesterday morning. A pleasant bus ride, and Santiago is a very cosmopolitan city with a somewhat European feel. I basically strolled around and ate. Right before lunch, I chatted with a women who was giving out leaflets and spoke reasonably good English. She told me that students all over Chile were on strike about fees, quality of education, and various other measures that had declared during the military rule of Pinochet and never rescinded. She mentioned there had been 'trouble' at one university.
"I didn´t think too much more about it until about 6 p.m. when I was ready to head for the metro and then out to the bus station. The metro stop I was heading for was Universidad de Chile. The metro runs underneath the main east-west thoroughfare, Calle Alemeda, a wide street with a green median down the middle. As I came up onto Alemeda, I found a crowd of a couple of thousand people and a heavy police presence with military-like vehicles. A couple of big water cannons and a couple of¨"troop transporters." The water cannons had already been in use, shooting long streams of high-pressure water. In response, students were throwing rocks at the police vehicles. There was a steady sound of clank-clank-clank as rocks bounced off the metal sides of the vehicles. Younger kids had taken to throwing rocks at street lamps to break them, and other students had broken down some iron grillwork from somewhere and were trying to make barricades in the street.
"A good part of the crowd was merely spectators, lots of ordinary Santiagans who had merely been on the way home from work. But they certainly sided with the students, and big cheers would go up every time a group of students rushed the police vehicles with rocks. The police didn´t have nearly enough manpower to disperse a crowd this big. Periodically the water cannons was race down the street a few blocks while shooting water streams along the sidewalks. But the crowd simply melted back into the side streets until the cannon passed, then immediately came right back out onto Alemeda. Mostly the police vehicles sat at one intersection and only hosed and tear gassed students who came too close. I think the water cannon may have also been spraying tear gas on some of its runs down the street, because eventually the wafting tear gas began to be more than I was willing to bear. And I figured that eventually the police would bring in reinforcements if they really wanted to take control, and police in Latin America aren´t known for restraint.
"According to today´s news, several hundred students were eventually arrested (although that figure may include arrests from other areas around Santiago) and injuries were reported among both students and police. More important, not only the public but also the new Chilean president have taken the student side, and it sounds like several high police officials have been sacked for over reacting. It was certainly my impression that the students were beginning to turn violent mostly in response to the police tactics. Left to themselves, they probably would have paraded in the streets for a few hours, messing up all the rush hour traffic, but then dispersed and gone home.
"In any event, I did get some pretty good pictures of the water cannons firing, people running, and smoke from a tear gas grenade. I suggested posting them on the Follow the Voyage website with a caption 'what your children do while on liberty in foreign ports.' Instead, I think you´ll see pictures of children from an orphanage visiting the ship.
"The subway stations along Alemeda had been closed, so getting out of downtown Santiago took quite a bit of round-about back tracking to other metro lines, then changing trains. But I suceeded, and was back aboard ship by about 10. Just another day in the big city."
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