Massive protests in Chile have been going on for over three weeks already. This time, feminists are the ones leading the marches in Santiago, Valparaiso, and other regions where they have also been organizing activities at universities and neighborhoods to generate a political dialogue capable about a new model for their nation, and demanding a constituent assembly.
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The 8M Feminist Coordinator called for a march and a day of feminist plurinational protest. The orgnanization has been denouncing the institutional sexual violence perpetrated by security officials against women and LGBTIQ people in the context of the social uprising and the police repression.
The Chilean National Institute of Human Rights (INDH) has registered hundreds of cases in which citizens have presented proofs of the security forces commiting crimes against them. Up until November 06 the offical number of denounces due to sexual agressions perpetrated by Chilean police and recorded by the INDH was nineteen. The denounces for torture that this state institute recognizes has rised to 168. These crimes also include attacks on children, elderly people, human rights observers, political leaders, and journalists.
Meanwhile, Chilean Minister of Women and Gender Equity, Isabel Plá, has denied receiving complaints for gender-based violence during the three weeks of protests. She only spoke for the wounded carabineras (policewomen) that participated in the repressive actions oredered by Piñera's government against demonstrators.
The 8M Feminist Coordinator has become an organization that articulates various social and political groups, as well as individuals, who all together carry out actions in a transversal manner and are present in all dimensions of the social movement, promoting the meeting, dialogue and collective action between different organizations to support a common agenda.
The 8M Feminist Coordinator also participates of the Unidad Social (Social Unity) movement, an instance that gathers hundreds of organizations, which share their rejection to any possible negotiations with President Sebastian Piñera's government.
Many of these girls taking the streets today are the daughters and granddaughters of the generations that lived under Pinochet dictatorship, influenced by the important resistance of the second wave of the feminist movement too.
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