Under 30 and Angry in Chile

The Guanaco is the nemesis of angry Chilean youth.

An ominous-looking armored vehicle used by riot police, the Guanaco gets its nickname from a llama-like animal that spits when threatened. The vehicle’s water cannon sprays a powerful torrent laced with tear gas that mows down crowds, burns the eyes and eats through clothes.

These days, the Guanaco is working overtime.

Even before protests for and against the arrest last month of former dictator Augusto Pinochet in London on human rights charges, this most orderly of Latin American nations had experienced a surge of youth riots. Gatherings of young people--soccer games, the anniversary of the 1973 military coup, the triumphs of tennis star Marcelo Rios--often end in rampages by youths who trash public property.

The unrest reflects disgust with Chile’s entrenched authoritarianism eight years after the restoration of democracy, say youth leaders and worried politicians.

“When democracy returned, I felt very committed,” said Camilo Cintolesi, a 26-year-old member of the rap group Tiro de Gracia, which rages at police brutality. “Soon I got disillusioned, and during the last election I didn’t vote. This democracy is a lie, a fiction. The human rights issues haven’t been resolved. And Pinochet still has power.”

Although Pinochet’s fate is in the hands of a British judicial panel, which will rule today on whether to set him free or hold him for extradition, the tyrant turned senator still looms over Chilean society. His regime’s institutions and attitudes still constrict the democracy, according to youth leaders, opinion polls and political analysts.

Even though voters have elected two consecutive center-left governments, the constitution imposed by the Pinochet regime in 1980 ensured that appointed officials in the Senate, judiciary and National Security Council preserved his influence after he stepped down. The military and its right-wing allies have blocked human rights investigations, banned divorce and abortion, limited freedom of expression and otherwise thwarted democratic reforms.

This ossified political culture alienates the generation that will inherit the task of consolidating democracy. The number of 18- and 19-year-olds registered to vote has plunged to less than 6%. The percentage of registered voters between the ages of 20 and 24 has dropped from 71% five years ago to below 50%. A million young people, enough to decide an election in this nation of 14 million, shun politics.

“Their message is that politicians don’t represent them, don’t speak to them, that they feel invisible,” said Ernesto Jorquera, director of research and planning for the government’s National Youth Institute. “If we don’t do something fast, this could be potentially more dangerous in the future.”

The motto of this troubled ‘90s generation was immortalized by Rios in an Orange Crush commercial. The ad showed the longhaired, sleepy-eyed tennis star channel-surfing and scoffing, “I’m not even there” at everything he saw--except an image of the soft drink.

The phrase has come to represent youthful distaste for almost everything: politicians, a coldly competitive free-market economy, and traditional religious, community and sports organizations.

While a small minority of the young is active in politics, many of the youths channel their energy into proliferating rebel subcultures and urban tribes: soccer hooligans, anti-everything anarchists, neo-Nazi skinheads--and rappers, part of a hip-hop craze sweeping Santiago.

Working-Class Fight for Free Speech

Tiro de Gracia, Chile’s most popular rap group, fuses U.S.-style sounds and swagger with commentary on issues such as abortion and drug abuse. Its name translates as coup de grace, or the more down-to-earth “kill shot.”

Three of the rappers come from working-class southeast Santiago, where they grew up idolizing U.S. rappers such as Public Enemy and Cypress Hill. They joined forces with Cintolesi and another university student.

Tiro de Gracia’s songs sample pop hits such as Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us” and dialogue from Spanish-dubbed versions of “Lost in Space,” the U.S. television series once popular here.

The group has not eluded the censorship--practiced by both the government and private sector--that led to Human Rights Watch’s recent assessment that “freedom of expression is more restricted in Chile today than any other democratic country in the Western Hemisphere.” A cable channel barred the group’s video “Aimless Voyage” because of images of an addict preparing a heroin fix.

Nonetheless, Tiro de Gracia had the distinction of performing in the presidential palace.

President Eduardo Frei invited the group to a ceremony in August marking the repeal of a law that enabled police to stop and detain people at will. Now police must justify stops and read suspects their rights.

The rap group posed with uneasily smiling police chiefs and treated the dignitaries to a diatribe titled “Power Over Power.”

“The song talks about the fact that the legacy of the military regime has lasted too long,” said Patricio Loaiza, 26, one of the musicians. “It talks about how the people are trying to get the power back.”

Added Fabian Sanchez, a scruffy 22-year-old known as Tough Tongue: “And it was great because in the song I talk all kinds of trash about the police.”

Nation Scarred by Old Battle Lines

Tension between young people and the disciplined, green-uniformed force known as the carabineros is a good example of how conflicts dating back to the dictatorship still plague the democracy. The federal paramilitary force still answers to the Defense Ministry, despite attempts to shift it to civilian control. Human rights leaders accuse police of being brutal and indiscriminate with young people and leftists.

On the other hand, youth violence is a bona fide problem. Chile is one of South America’s safer nations, but violent crimes and those committed by youths are rising. Police are analyzing the phenomenon with the help of psychologists and sociologists, trying to distinguish between hardened lawbreakers and youth at risk.

“It’s clear that some young people gather in order to feel a sense of belonging without necessarily forming a criminal group,” states a recent police intelligence report on gangs.

An increasing number of 13- and 14-year-olds are being arrested for all types of crime, and one of every three defendants convicted of violent robbery is younger than 19, according to government statistics. Attacks on police by mobs of ski-masked vandals armed with rocks and firebombs have become alarmingly common at political and nonpolitical events alike.

“There is a certain code among kids about getting on television, being seen, causing damage,” said Jorquera of the youth institute. “It has to do with being seen publicly. Because they feel marginalized socially, politically and economically.”

The government’s recent repeal of the summary detention law was a rare gesture to young Chileans, youth leaders say.

The national debate strikes them as behind-the-times.

Youths Feel Marginalized

“What we reject is not politics, but what the political parties offer us,” said Ivan Mlynarsz, 23, the student body president at the University of Chile. He said students overwhelmingly want politicians to do away with conservative laws, such as the ban on divorce, and move on.

“They still argue about censorship, abortion, divorce. We don’t even want to waste time talking about those things,” he said. “And the politicians have no solutions to other problems.”

Mlynarsz wants the government to tackle inequality, rising youth unemployment and prohibitive university costs. He has the edgy intelligence and solemn stare of a born leader. A member of Chile’s Communist Party, he embodies another trend: Although hard-line Communists cannot win a seat in the National Congress, they control half the elected student governments at public universities.

Mlynarsz has been arrested three times during the past 12 months, notably last November among protesters whom police intercepted at the Defense Ministry. The demonstrators were trying to deliver a “birthday present” for Pinochet: a plane ticket to Spain, where he would face charges linked to human rights abuses. Those Spanish charges led to Pinochet’s arrest last month.

Surveys show that about 70% of Chileans younger than 30 repudiate Pinochet (“Grandpa go home,” is a common refrain) and the democracy’s inability to rid itself of him, according to Jorquera. Youth leaders welcome Pinochet’s arrest as a sign that the time has come to do the unfinished work of the transition.

“At least the myth is over that he will never be judged,” said Gabriel Pozos, president of the Commission for Juvenile Rights. “Perhaps this is a better moment to establish new rules, to hold a referendum about abolishing Pinochet’s constitution. Politics have been frozen for too long.”

Centrist and leftist parties also are targets of young people’s exasperation for having compromised with the ex-tyrant.

“They lost the revolution,” Pozos said. “And then they came into power and sold out. So everything has stalled. They are the same dinosaurs as 30 years ago.”

Politicians realize that this estrangement hurts the democracy and their own electoral strength. Socialist Ricardo Lagos, the front-running candidate in polls for next year’s presidential election, is vocal about reaching out to youth.

“This profound youthful skepticism has to do with the society’s schizophrenia, its denial of reality,” said top Lagos strategist Jaime Estevez, a former president of the Chamber of Deputies. “This country has to have a conversation with itself about the dictatorship. It’s an almost psychiatric issue.”

Raging Against Authority

The rage from past traumas, experts say, erupts in such settings as soccer games. Big clubs boast tens of thousands of young, regimented, fanatical hooligans. Almost every weekend brings a casualty list.

In September, a “super-classic” match between the Colo Colo club and its rival, the University of Chile, ended with 61 arrests and a stabbing that left a fan hospitalized in serious condition. The leader of the university’s fan club was detained for possessing a machete.

Politics tinges this seemingly apolitical arena: Some hooligans chant war cries against the dictatorship, while others revere Pinochet as a strong figure.

“There’s a certain generalized violence out there,” said Loaiza, the rap artist. “The hooligans are just one of the ways in which the disillusionment, the pent-up energy, turns into violence.”

Police have developed a dossier, complete with a map and glossary of slang, on youth gangs in the Santiago area. They identify at least 25 groups of up to 100 members, from nonviolent neo-hippies to armed robbers, according to a police intelligence report. The roster of names is an ode to globalization: Los Power Ranger, Los Punky, Los Grunge, Los West Side Mafia, Los Skin Head.

In 1996, legislators tried unsuccessfully to criminalize gang membership. Youth leaders complain about being demonized. “It’s the unholy trinity: violent, drug-addicted and young,” Pozos said.

But experts worry about the worst-case scenario if the political crisis combines with an economic downturn. Young people are feeling the brunt of unemployment following Asia’s economic troubles. Their malaise is a symptom of Chilean democracy’s imperfect health.

“We should be worried because you learn about democracy by practicing it,” Jorquera said. “You don’t become a member of the democracy because suddenly you’re married, you have a house and you are worried about the neighborhood. You have to be participating all along, especially in a society with authoritarian customs.”

In a comic book version of the censored song “Aimless Voyage,” Tiro de Gracia paints a bleak view of Chile’s future. The images tell the story of a drug addict who contracts AIDS and infects his girlfriend. She in turn dies during a clandestine abortion. In an intersecting narrative, extraterrestrials dispatch an emissary on a last-chance mission to save humanity from self-destruction.

The spacesuited alien appears before the young man in an urban landscape and hands him a “sacred heart” containing the powers to save the planet. But the youth tosses the glowing heart into a trash can and wanders off into the night, chanting his refrain:

Where am I going to go

I’m on an aimless voyage and I’m going to crash

Where am I going to go

I’m on an aimless voyage and I’m going to crash.