THEY ARE MARKING US

By Cristóbal Olivares

It all began with a tiny spark: thirty pesos. About four euro cents.

That was the 4.1% increase in Santiago’s metro fare. The amount may seem trivial.

Yet it ignited the largest uprising Chile had seen in decades.

On 18 October 2019, high-school students in Santiago began refusing to pay. They jumped turnstiles and organised mass fare evasions. Others soon joined them.

What began underground, in the metro, spilled into the streets. Within days, the revolt had spread across the country.

On 25 October, more than a million people took to the streets of Santiago in the largest demonstration since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Thirty pesos had crystallised years of anger over social inequality, education and healthcare.

The demands were many: reform of the pension system, a higher minimum wage, better public healthcare, a new Constitution and the resignation of President Sebastián Piñera.

The government responded by declaring a State of Emergency. Basic freedoms, including freedom of movement, were restricted. Curfews were imposed for the first time since the dictatorship.

Police repression was brutal.

One form of violence became particularly visible: the loss of an eye.

By early March 2020, around 3,838 people had been injured. According to the Chilean Society of Ophthalmologists and human rights organisations, 460 suffered serious eye injuries. Protesters were left with ruptured eyeballs, permanent damage and blindness.

Rubber pellets and tear-gas canisters fired by Carabineros riot police caused hundreds of these injuries. The numbers were so extraordinary that it soon became clear that some Carabineros officers were deliberately aiming at protesters’ faces and eyes 

They had a phrase for what was happening to them: “They are marking us.”

The eye began appearing everywhere on banners, flags, posters and wall : injured, bandaged, blinded.

The wounded eye became one of the defining symbols of the uprising, carrying the memory of its violence.