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Hundreds of students marched on Alameda Avenue in Santiago to protest against the results that gave victory to rejection and for an improvement in education in the country. With them was the special envoy of RFI.
Less than 48 hours after the plebiscite, high school and university students marched and took over the Alameda. “We came out as a university organization spontaneously. Although the citizens voted against a new Constitution, the ideal would be for a new Constituent Assembly project to be carried out and to decide again what is going to happen,” a student told RFI.
“We are protesting so that the constitutional process remains alive, so that the demands for social rights remain alive because this is not finished. We students are not going to let go of the streets and we are going to continue fighting,” assured another protester from the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago.
According to Mario Aguilar, President of the teachers’ college, disappointment is strong in the educational world. The right to education was one of the most extensive chapters of the constitutional proposal rejected on Sunday.
“Nine articles were exclusively for education. He spoke of the strengthening of public education, he gave a very important value to education workers, especially teachers, he established free public education as a constitutional right, which is a very important advance”, he affirmed.
“In Chile, education, even higher and public education, is very expensive. There was tremendous progress there. One of the central demands of all these educational movements was free education, and that was established. I think that in the new generations and particularly among high school students at this time there is a strong feeling of frustration because there was a fight that they started. They were the ones who gave rise to what was later known as the social explosion, there were people who lost their lives, people who lost their eyes, people who were mutilated, people who were tortured, there was a very harsh repression that we had during the government de Piñera and all that struggle was pointing to a profound change, deeper than what is being achieved so far”, he added.
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