CHILE: Stop the Repression Against the Youth — Campaign of the International Youth Alliance for Socialism

Posted on January 23, 2020

Socialist Organizer would like to draw your attention to the campaign launched by the International Youth Alliance for Socialism (AIJS, in its French acronym) in defense of youth activist Victor Chanfreau and his comrades in Chile.

The revolutionary process in Chile broke out with the spontaneous mobilization of high school students against the increase in transportation fares. Raising the demand for the sovereign Constituent Assembly, the movement of the masses rose up against all the institutions inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship, institutions that the leaders of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Frente Amplio supported for 30 years.

Today, the high school students of the Coordinating Assembly of High School Students (ACES), of which Victor Chanfreau, 18, is one of the leaders, are rising up against another legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship preserved by the apparatuses for 30 years: the privatization of universities and their unequal financing based on student evaluations by a pseudo-examination called the PSU. These young activists are now in the line of fire of the Piñera government (which has already been brutally repressing them for the past three months), which calls them “seditious” and threatens to throw them in prison.

The Chilean supporters of the OCRFI called on the International Alliance of Youth for Socialism, formed at the end of August, to launch a campaign in defense of Victor Chanfreau and his comrades. A first result in France was an appeal issued by about a hundred young people (including activists from different youth organizations).

We call on all supporters of democratic rights and social justice to support and promote this campaign [See endorsement coupon below], to contact high-school and college students and youth organizations — and to invite them to take a stand and to organize any actions they deem appropriate. Also, please relay the first results of this campaign to the AIJS campaign organizers in France, who will pass your reports on to the comrades in Chile.

Thanks, in advance, for your support,

— The National Organizing Committee of Socialist Organizer

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Campaign to Stop the Repression of High-School Students and Main Leaders of ACES in Chile

CHILE YOUTH APPEAL

Faced with the repression of its main spokespersons, mainly through the application against Victor Chanfreau of the Domestic Security Act – an Act that in specific cases is a law against terrorism – we declare the following :

1. We condemn the systematic repression of social protest by the Chilean government, and we are addressing all of the world’s democratic organizations to declare a state of alert that the safety of Víctor and his fellow students is at risk.

2. The Chilean government intends to wield its fullest repression against this young leader, whose grandfather was murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship, and is characterizing the ACES youth organization as a seditious organization. We adopt as our own the demand by all of Chile’s democratic organizations for an end to the criminalization of the social protests, which now total 82 days of mobilization for the legitimate demands of the majority of the population.