Verbal learned that she would have to run under her legal male name or pull out of the race. Verbal decided to step down.

She tweeted (@valeverbal) [es]:

@valeverbal: Confirmado: por tema de plazos, con recurso protección no alcanzo a salvar candidatura con mi nombre social. La bajo hoy ante Servel. :-).

@valeverbal: Confirmed: Due to deadlines, having appealed I wasn’t able to save my candidacy under my social name. I will withdraw today before Servel (Chile’s election agency) :-).”

Verbal’s candidacy steps among Chile’s recent strides towards sexual equality. Chile elected its first openly gay politician, a municipal councilman, last fall. A civil-union bill is in the works. A freshly minted anti-discrimination law forbids violence and discrimination toward the LGBT community and others. But hate crimes continue. The way out of this is to get more LGBT representatives in government, according to Verbal.

So Verbal ran for a seat representing northern Santiago’s Recoleta-Independencia district. She focused her message on achieving equality, rather than her district’s specific needs.

Verbal's campaign poster, shared on Twitter via @valeverbal

“My mission was going to be to generate national laws. I promised my district to work for the rights of anyone who feels discriminated against; I also wanted equality for economic and social development.”

The transgender woman ran for office having applied for — but without having secured — a legal name change. Verbal – who was born a man, but said she always felt like a woman — prefers to keep her birth name a secret. She said that the name not only misidentifies her, but has tangled her identity since childhood.

“I thought, perhaps naively, that given the vacuum of electoral laws, and filling in that space with the anti-discrimination law, there wouldn’t be trouble getting what I asked,” she said.

Verbal explained that voters wouldn’t recognize her birth name on the ballot. The campaign would be a wash with her having been in politics for years as Valentina Verbal.

She belongs to Chile’s center-right National Renewal Party (RN) and spent the past years fighting for an anti-discrimination law.

Verbal found a surprising ally in a fellow RN member, Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera.

He is pushing for a law that legalizes civil unions. The president also signed the first anti-discrimination law into effect.

That legislation, previously stagnating in Congress, was fast tracked after four attackers beat gay 24-year-old Daniel Zamudio to death before carving swastika into his skin. LGBT victims of hate crimes have had the “Zamudio Law” to protect them since May 2012.

Under the Zamudio Law, a lesbian pair brought their neighbors to court two weeks ago, according to the Homosexual Integration and Liberation blog (Movilh [es]).

The blog [es] reads:

Un matrimonio y su hijo hacen turnos de día y noche en las afueras del domicilio de la pareja lésbica para agredirla física y verbalmente y someterlas a constantes y graves humillaciones.

A married couple and their son take turns day and night outside the lesbian pair’s home to physically and verbally assault them, subjecting them to constant and severe humiliation.

Although Valentina said that fellow politicians are generally accepting of transgendered status, she’s encountered pushback in her political career and especially on social media. She recently tweeted about her frustration with transphobia.

@valeverbal: Pensando en cerrar mi cuenta de Twitter. Me cansa bastante el nivel de intolerancia de much@s en esta red.

@valeverbal: I’m thinking about shutting down my Twitter account. I’m fed up with the level of intolerance many have on this network.

She didn’t close her account, a platform she uses to defend her political ideas and LGBT rights.

While Verbal won’t be elected this time around, she said, “I’m sure of one thing: I will continue in politics.” She added, “In order to get strong social changes, it’s necessary to make them from a position of power, in particular from Parliament. Because Chile is a very legalistic country, it’s important to have laws to provoke these changes.”

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Countries across Latin America are on a mission to wrangle them onto the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) list for protection. They’re armed with a new iPhone app that promises to make fin identification  — previously a roadblock to protecting the prehistoric predator  — quick and easy.

“Basically, you push a button. It asks a question. You look at the phone, and you say, ‘Does it have a big white patch on there?’ You click ‘yes,’ and it just guides you through, and at the end it tells you the answer to what it is,” explained Demian Chapman, a marine biologist with PEW Charitable Trust's shark-saving campaign. He streamlined his shark fin research from a stack of paper into an all-inclusive icon, tentatively titled “shark fin soup.”

Cites tussled with the idea of putting three hammerhead sharks — scalloped, great and smooth  — along with the oceanic whitetip and spiny dogfish on their endangered species list in 2010. They rejected all but the porbeagle shark, pointing out that regulators have to be able to tell fins of different species apart to enforce the law, previously thought to be an impossible task. Listing the sharks at the March 2013 meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, would help fund financially strapped programs in Latin America and restrict global trade.

Defenders of Wildlife, an animal advocacy group, blogged:

Being listed under CITES would mean that international trade in the fins and other parts of sharks would be closely monitored and regulated to make sure that the species would not be threatened with extinction. Given that one of the largest threats to the species is due to trade, regulation could make a huge difference.

Inspiration for the app first struck Chapman from Chinese fin traders. They easily rattle off names for each shark’s fin and fork over a different value for each one.

“If Chinese traders can tell the sharks apart, so can customs workers and other enforcement. We found that it is very easy to train people to do what the Chinese traders do,” said Chapman.

Hammerhead shark, Cocos Island, Costa Rica. Image from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Tens of millions of sharks end up in shark fin soup each year, according to Oceana, a marine conservation group. Diners prefer the larger hammerhead fins, chalked full of a key soup ingredient called fin needles.

Thanks to their beefy fins, hammerhead numbers plummeted 80 percent in some regions.

In Panama, hammerheads swim to shore to give birth, making them easier prey than deep sea fish for smaller boats. As a result, 96 percent of cleaved fins belong to sharks too young to have reproduced, according to MarViva, an organization that helps enforce fishing laws in Central and South America.

Chapman flew to Latin America, where the fin trade is booming, to collect samples. He has gathered, photographed and analyzed over 1000 fins from more than 40 shark species around the world. His team crossed referenced their findings with DNA samples to ensure accuracy.

They transformed their research into an app, currently formatted for the iPhone with future designs to make it available across the board for smartphones.

Every shark on the app sports unique characteristics on their dorsal fins.

“The oceanic whitetip, as its name implies, has this massive white patch, which is very distinctive on the top of its dorsal fin. The porbeagle actually has a similar white patch, but it’s on the lower edge of the fin,” said Chapman.

Questions flash: “Is it a shark fin? Are the edges black or white? The questions are very specific… We make decisions based on those answers, that’s what computers are really good at,” said George Mandala, the app developer.

Untrained law enforcement will sort through fins with enough knowledge in hand to spot a red flag, allowing for further testing to find out if a fin belongs to an endangered species.

“These guys are not marine biologists. This boils it down for them to really quickly be able to say yes or no,” said Mandala.

Scientists will verify and answer questions through an email feature.

“We can agree or disagree and give you pointers on things to look for,” said Chapman. “What we’re really interested in is taking away the ability of people to break the law and just slip fins through with enforcement not being able to know what they are looking for.”

The app intrigued other endangered species groups, who struggle with authorities catching endangered animals being traded, Mandala said.

“From a computer programming standpoint, a question is a question, so if they wanted to do it for elephants, or lions, or tigers, or whatever, it could be retrofitted to that.”

Scientists lack data about migratory patterns and exactly how many fins make it to market. The app, currently available in English, French and Spanish, will send key information that will help collect statistics: fin photos, location and a description.

Latin America launches hammerhead rescue effort

In Latin America, Honduras first petitioned that the three species of hammerhead join the Cites list. Costa Rica and Brazil immediately signed on, followed by Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador.

Although Panama voiced support, the Defenders of Wildlife launched their “Ask Panamá to Support Shark Conservation” campaign to turn up the pressure on the Panamanian government to support the predator at the Cites meeting next week.

The petition reads:

Panamá may cast the decisive vote on these critical proposals…This is a critical opportunity to put badly-needed controls in place to halt the rapid decline of these top predators.

MarViva and other shark advocacy groups promoted the campaign through Twitter and Facebook. So far, it has 17,808 signatures.

Latin America leads hammerhead protection, according to Sean Juan Posada from Mar Viva.

Last year, the president of Honduras outlawed shark fishing entirely. Honduras hosted its neighbors at a conference to raise awareness and rally shark support in October, where Posada and representatives from Latin American nations first laid their eyes on the identification app.

Overcoming the hurdles to convince Cites to list the sharks, he said, will open up the funding needed to get them protected.

“Getting support from authorities is our biggest challenge. They don’t have the resources. They don’t have boats, or people to cover extensive areas,” Mr. Posada said. “They have laws, but the ability to enforce the law is lacking.”

Chapman said he’s “very interested in making sure there are still sharks around for me to study for people to swim with for tourism and to fulfill their ecological role. They need protection and they need someone to speak up for them.”

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“I never considered the elevators as a tourist attraction. In those days, I was just worried about getting back to the barracks late,” said Reyes.

For Reyes and his neighbors, the elevators provide an essential service, cheaply lifting and lowering residence during their morning and evening commute, but now Valparaíso’s elevators are teetering on the brink of extinction. The World Monuments Fund named them one of the world’s 100 most endangered historical treasures.

About 130 years ago, there were 30 elevators. Now, only five are still cranking, which is why residents are fighting to ensure that the local government makes good on their promise to purchase and repair the elevators.

Photo by Katie Manning

The wooden boxes, passing each other on parallel tracks, wear many hats. Up to about a dozen passengers peer through the carts’ wraparound glass goggles. Tourists snap up memories of Valparaíso's seemingly perpendicular slopes, layered with crayon-box colored houses.

Over the years, the elevators allowed workers to migrate upward and outward and grow the city beyond the shore.

Reyes, now 82, stayed put after his service, working as a professor at the University of Chile in Valparaíso and a scientific journalist. He clips newspaper articles about repair plans and recognitions that the elevators won over the years.

He said, “They are in our heart and in our spirit. Having them is necessary. It contributed to the the history of our city and how it developed.”

Many Porteños, or Valparaíso residents, live in the less-pricey hilltop perches and work down on the shore. They shell out only 100 to 300 Chilean pesos a ride (25 to 50 U.S. cents). But the elevator's cheap price doesn't turn enough coins for their upkeep.

Consequently, 10 remain out of service leaving Porteños searching for alternate transportation.  Reyes explained that many can't afford to take a taxi. The roads often cut off suddenly, which means a sweaty-uphill climb between bus routes. This makes for a long commute and poses an obstacle for the elderly.

Reyes said, “Valparaíso is poor. It's not like the beach resort towns next door. And it's not just the practicality, the elevators are also a point of pride for our community.”

UNESCO sites the antique elevators in the first paragraph of it's explanation of why Valparaíso made the list of World Heritage cities. It reads:

The colonial city of Valparaíso presents an excellent example of late 19th-century urban and architectural development in Latin America… The city has well preserved its interesting early industrial infrastructures, such as the numerous ‘elevators’ on the steep hillsides.

The “Elevator Users” (Los Usarios de Los Ancensores) disagreed that the elevators are “well preserved.” Hermann  Cabezòn, 41, leads the group because their rusty state burdens residents and falsely advertises one of the cities premier attractions, he said.

“They're an important emblem of what it means to be from Valaparaiso. We deserve the elevators, and they deserve to be maintained,” according to Cabezòn.

The group said their social media and picketing campaign encouraged  the Supreme Court's 2009 mandate that the government purchase the rest of the elevators from private owners. In January this year, Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera officially announced the government's purchase, recovery and repair 10 elevators: Florida, Cordillera, Larrain, Mariposa, Monja, Villaseca, Santo Domingo, Artillería, Concepción and Espíritu Santo. According to the city's regional governor (el Intendente) Raúl Celis, they've set aside 2.4 billion Chilean pesos, or U.S. $4.8 million to buy them. This month marked the tentative deadline for the purchase.

“We hope that in the shortest possible time – we believe that by the end of this month or early December – we'll be able to make the legal transfer of the elevators and sign the deed,” according to Celis.

Photo by Katie Manning

Reyes said he's not convinced the deal will go through considering how much time has passed since the court's decision. He laid down a photocopy of a local newspaper from 2006 onto a coffee-house table in central Valparaíso. The paper mentioned a proposal to buy the elevators four years ago.

Reyes now writes for online citizen-journalism site, El Martutino [es], to spur the municipality to keep their promise. He faulted authorities for lagging past the deadline of the Barron elevator's repairs. He wrote,

¿Dónde y cómo se fija un valor patrimonial?

Reyes and other citizen journalists at El Martutino [es] are bringing attention to the struggle to save Valparaiso's elevators.

The Elevator Users, under @ValpoAncensores, tweeted [es] a photo to their nearly 500 followers showing evidence of the municipality's as yet unfulfilled pledge to patch up Barron.

REALIDAD DE ASCENSOR BARON,VALPARAISO,CHILE pic.twitter.com/onDKI3KW

Alongside the Twitter account, they organized a Facebook page [es] with 3,540 followers.

While the Elevator Users focus on the practical use for residents, Reyes also mentioned that the elevators attract crucial tourism dollars.

One rider from Toulouse, France, 69-year-old Michel Aymeric bobbled down the Concepción elevator while on day fifteen of a 20-percent wine business and 80-percent pleasure trip. He skirted out of the capital to drink in Valparaíso’s coastal view and “find a nice girl.” He said, “In Valparaíso, you have both the soul and something that’s joyful.”

His desire for a convenient route to a “touristy” café convinced him to step onto the oldest of the elevators. He mimicked the rumbling of the elevator with roughed-up noises from back of his throat. It was “fantastic and original. We French people like old things, so we like that. It's a pity that they haven't fixed the rest.”

Tourists stare at the view and Citizens worry about their commute, but the elevators’ 130-year-old story seems to enchant all. The Elevator Users Facebook group debates [es] whether changing out the cars – rather then repairing the battered originals – would injure their monumental status.  Reyes'  expressions grew more colorful as he rattled off century-old facts from their transport role in Valparaíso's seaport history that, he said, makes them unique and demands preservation.

Cabezòn said,

For now, this historical image of our city is a lie. It is a false emblem until the government fixes our main means of transportation, which everyone comes to see, but not enough can ride.

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This might soon change. An anti-discrimination law – six years in the making – was up for vote in the Senate this week. Much to the chagrin of the LGBT community, a low turnout among the senators pushed back the vote to November 8. As it stands now, the legislation forbids any discrimination based on: race, age, sex, gender, religion, belief, political or other opinion, birth, national origin, cultural or socioeconomic standing, language, marital status, sexual orientation, illness, disability, genetic structure or any other status. Verbal and others who switched their outward gender identity didn’t make the original list. Now, they are fighting to be included.

Verbal, who harnesses social media to win trans supporters, wants Chileans to freely choose their legal sexual identity without facing discrimination or having surgery. “Most of us have internal problems caused by our society. Society is what complicates things,” she said.

Even though her place in the anti-discrimination law hangs in the air, she tweeted [es] that she shares the frustration popping up on social networks. Citizen reactions to the delay are still swimming through twitter under the hashtag #LeyAntidiscriminación.

Rodrigo Guendelman (@guendelman) tweeted:

Más de 6 años lleva empantanada la #LeyAntidiscriminación y hoy el Senado vuelve a suspender la votación. Qué verguenza!!!

Andres Soffia Vega, a spokesperson for a pro-sexual diversity organization called Iguales, sees this as an opportunity to reinforce their efforts. He tweeted under @ahsoffia:

Sumemos fuerza para el 8 de noviembre y sigamos trabajando.

Gay Pride March. Photo by Katie Manning

The LGBT community recently crossed a major bridge.  Last month, the government passed a bill legalizing civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Transsexuals also are legally allowed to change their gender in Chile. Verbal aims to step past the status quo. “We should have the same rights under the same name,” she said. This means gay marriage, which Chile’s neighbor, Argentina, just approved last year.

In 2009, the Chilean government signed [es] a United Nations declaration against discrimination based on gender identity. The trans community says this anti-discrimination law offers the government the ideal opportunity to make good on their pledge.

Even if trans people make it into the new legislation, Verbal said that Chile still drags miles behind international standards. Same sex couples are still not allowed to adopt in Chile, which in turn applies to many transgendered couples. The legal age of sexual consent is 14 for straight couples, while it’s 18 for same sex couples.

Alongside interviews across a medley of media outlets, Verbal blogs [es] to tell Chile why inclusion matters. She wrote in El Dinamo [es]:

Sufren una serie de barreras sociales que les impide llevar una vida digna. La  primera de estas barreras es la laboral. Mucha de ellas, no obstante sus capacidades y sin tener una apariencia llamativa (como muchas veces se cree), no tienen acceso a trabajos dignos, precisamente por no corresponder su identidad legal con la de género.

Chile’s right-wing President Sebastian Piñera, whose approval rating remains in the gutter at 33 percent, has a surprising ally among many transsexuals. Piñera supported the civil-union bill. In Chile, LGBT rights aren’t strictly part of the left or right side of politics, but some transsexuals worry that politicians posing for pictures at gay pride marches won’t translate into results on the Senate floor.

Andres Rivera, 47, began sporting a deep voice and a goatee in a very public way nine years ago when he documented his sex change in a television report. Now, he pours his energy into working as a trans activist. He founded the Organization of Transsexuals for Dignity and Diversity [es], the first Chilean NGO fighting for trans rights, and tweets under @andresrivera. He said, “I believe that Piñera is opening his mind to transsexuals.”

At the same time, the former University of Rancagua professor [es] questions the authenticity of most politicians’ commitment. He said, “They use us. The right and the left sell us like meat to make political agreements amongst themselves.”

When Rivera overhauled his outward appearance, he said, he suffered major social snubbing in his hometown of Rancagua, a dusty ranching and mining city just south of Santiago.

“This decision lost me my job. My employers fought me on this. It severed me from my family… Everything went to waste. I wandered around eating things off the street. It was a terrible situation,” he said. He patched things up with his Roman-Catholic family, and now he’s determined to ensure that other transsexuals can transform their physical appearance in a less traumatic way.

Rivera noted a distinction between the struggle of transsexuals and the gay community. “We don’t have the same opportunities as heterosexuals or even gays. We’re punished from infancy” for not conforming to gender norms, according to Rivera.

Verbal hasn’t gone under the knife or taken female hormones. “I’ve always felt like a woman,” she said, but when she adjusted her outward appearance at 37, “I was really afraid of what my family would think, what society would think.”  Verbal said that Chile needs to understand “there is no difference between normal and abnormal or healthy and unhealthy.”

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Harking back to the national feeling of togetherness from October 13 of last year, Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera (@sebastianpinera) tweeted:

Los 33 mineros nos enseñaron una gran lección: en los momentos difíciles la unidad y la solidaridad son claves para superar la adversidad.

In August 2010, 33 flags were placed in the San Esteban mine in Atacama to support the 33 trapped miners. Image by Alex Fuentes on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Gonzalo Maza (@tengochicle) wrote that the government should do just that to work with Chile’s protesting students. Their progress is creeping forward considering the speedy government action during the rescue according to Maza. He tweeted:

Hace un año, el gobierno hacía esfuerzos extraordinarios por rescatar mineros. Hoy no es capaz de moverse un centímetro por los estudiantes.

Twitter user Don Gato (@rhon2008) thinks that attention should be focused on mining disaster stories sans photogenic happy ending. He tweeted:

27 mineros han muerto este año en accidentes,desgracia de 33,solo fue utilizada publicitariamente por el gobierno nunguna ley de proteccion.

Jorge Añez (@Jorge_Anez) remains less than impressed with the government’s efforts to improve working conditions. He tweeted:

Espectacular rescate, pero no provoco el cambio esperado en las condiciones laborales #mineros #chilenos

But the national solidarity Chile felt for its 33 fellow countrymen, forced to overcome the unthinkable, hasn’t evaporated on Facebook. The “Fuerzas Hermanos Mineros de la Mina San Jose, de Copiapo” (“Be strong miners of the San Jose Mine of Copiapo”) Facebook page still boasts 52,429 fans. “Yo tambien apoyo a los 33 mineros Chileons atrapados” (“I also support the 33 trapped Chilean miners”) survived this year's Facebook spring cleaning. It still has 87,695 “likes.”

While politicians and visitors laid down the first rocks of a new memorial reservoir today, social media users pitched in their two-cents about where, how and why the government needs to construct new policies.

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“While the majority of the protests have been peaceful, in some cases masked protesters have destroyed property and clashed with authorities,” according to the security message. The U.S. Embassy in Santiago isn’t aware of any North Americans injured in the protests according to spokesman Paul Watzlavick, but he wrote that the alert was in “anticipation of upcoming events.”

A flood of union workers, estimated to include up to 200,000 demonstrators, plan to descend upon Santiago on August 24 and 25. The Unitary Central for Workers (CUT) alongside about 80 other unions are fighting, they say, for social justice and to advance democracy. The U.S. Embassy expects September 11, the day of Chile’s 1973 military coup against the government of Salvador Allende, to bring another wave of demonstrations.

A Californian in Chile, who writes Don’t Call Me Gringa, blogged:

Right now, there is a feeling in Chile that this balance is out of whack and that people won’t stand for it anymore. While I may not agree with some of their methods or even some of their messages, I admire those who are passionate enough about their causes to go out into the streets and demand change.

The unions aren’t the only protestors on the block. Hundreds of thousands of Chilean students, demonstrating for a high-quality, free public education system, have been a fixture in headlines since June.

Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera, whose approval tanked to 26 percent in July, tried to strike a deal several times, but the university students say they are holding out until their demands are met.

The students sleep in school without attending class, march en masse, hunger strike, run laps around the presidential palace and stage kissing sessions all to protest what they call their unequal education system.

Mentiraproducciones uploaded this video on YouTube featuring students in the education march:

Robert L. Funk, an assistant professor at the University of Chile's Institute for Public Affair blogged:

This video says a lot about what is going on in Chile. While the government has tried to portray the students as ideological, or manipulated by ideologies, or just as molotov-throwing criminals, here we see something else. It is, of course, somewhat romanticised, but it is not too far off, and portrays something far closer to what most Chileans see than to what the government is suggesting

The U.S. Embassy urges its citizens to stay away from the action and “use common sense” when faced with potentially dangerous situations. But Eileen Smith, an American expatriate from Brooklyn, New York, brought her camera into the heat of the August 9 student protest comprised of, who she called, “149,999 of my closest friends.”

Smith wrote on Bearshapedsphere:

The teargassing was my fault. I was at a lovely, kms-long protest with singing and drumming and pretty pretty signs and great cleverness, and I went to go investigate what I knew to be a conflict zone. Bad me.

Several others from outside of Chile also said they side with the students on education reform. Lebo Sililo, an English teacher in Santiago from Johannesburg, South Africa, said, “I don’t feel threatened. I would join them if I wasn’t a foreigner.”

Adrien Fallou, 21, flew away from his home near Paris to intern in the upper-class neighborhood of Las Condes, Santiago, for the past two months. He said, “I don't really feel that the protest make the city any more dangerous because what you actually see is mostly peaceful students marching.”

Many other embassies, such as France, Ireland and South Africa have not alerted their citizens in Chile to avoid the marches.

Fallou said that he has crossed paths with protesting students and riot police stationed on street corners in Paris, while studying in the 6th arrondissement. “I don't think students protest that often in the US, so I guess it's not surprising the U.S. Embassy would issue a warning, as American citizens might be more easily surprised when arriving in Santiago.”

Although clashes between police and demonstrators destroyed millions of dollars of property, so far, the marches “have had a minimal impact on travel and business,” and the U.S. doesn’t advise against traveling to Chile according to Watzlavick.

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Chaturvedi endured that double red-eye to share her wealth of knowledge about pickers in India and also to learn from the budding Chilean recycling system. Representatives from Kenya, India, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, alongside Chaturvedi, will come together for a forum [es] in Santiago on August 16 to discuss waste pickers with a special focus on women.

Picking Cart in Santiago, Photo By: Katie Manning

Chaturvedi, founder and director of the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, advocates for environmentally friendly ways to deal with increasing urbanization in India. Chaturvedi also prioritizes the human aspect of going green in Indian cities with overflowing slums.

Working to organize as many as 1.5 million waste pickers in India requires a certain get-up-and-go. As she sat down for Wednesday morning's post-flight meeting, she politely declines a cup of coffee as she gets down to business.

She said, “Recycling (in India) is not green because waste pickers… work in really bad conditions. If they are not working in good conditions, we shouldn’t be proud about it,” and added, “A lot of people would say it’s fashionable to be eco-friendly, but they won’t go out of their way.”

Thanks to highly organized groups, like the  National Movement of Recyclers in Chile [es], trendy Chileans can go green without lifting a finger. Chile piles up more than 15 million tons of trash, according to a 2010 report. The Recyclers help by scavenging for items to bring to city centers.

For busy nine to fivers, trekking to a recycling center doesn’t always top the to-do list. Emily, an American in Chile, who publishes Don’t Call Me Gringa, blogged:

This weekend we had probably the most difficult recycling experience of our lives. Recycling in Santiago already isn’t particularly easy… There is still a pilgrimage involved – none of this home pick-up stuff I’m used to in the US.

But the Recyclers are eager to take out the trash, and some end up earning twice the minimum wage in Chile doing it according to the Recycler’s president, Exequiel Estay.

Bins in Santiago are ripe for picking on the evening shift. Image by Katie Manning

The tech-savvy Recyclers maintain a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Youtube channel (all in Spanish) to organize their support network. They’ve expanded globally by linking up with international organizations of pickers. According to Boston.com, 50 million people worldwide pick for their livelihood.

The Recyclers want to ensure that their jobs aren’t trashed when new recycling laws take effect.

One of the Recycler’s followers, Santiago A. (@racionalisimo), tweeted:

Es necesario apoyar a las cooperativas de recicladores. Hacen un gran aporte a la sociedad y se trata de formalizar un poco más su trabajo.

There is a foundation to their fear. In Colombia, legislation originally forbade recyclers from picking up trash.

Sobre politicas, a political blog in Colombia, reads:

In it [the law] there are some paragraphs which prohibits:

1. Open the bags of garbage in inappropriate places like the street.
2. Carrying trash in inappropriate vehicles.

In other words, people with low income “do not recycle” is the motto of this law and rot (do not misunderstand the word) in the street with nothing to eat.

This law clearly supports the management of garbage by people who have money and prevents people who really need this by necessity to do so.

Colombia’s Constitutional Court changed the law. It now redefines pickers as “entrepreneurs.”

In  many countries around the world, pickers challenge a negative stereotype. Chaturvedi explains that impoverished pickers in India live in conditions little better than a garbage dump, which contributes to a certain animosity.

“A lot of people say, ‘Yuck. You touched the trash and now you’re going to touch my plates? It’s awful. I’m going to get a disease,’” she said.

Considering the onslaught of marchers descending upon the streets of Santiago, “Chile should know from it’s currently circumstances how important it is to be inclusive to the people and listen to them,” she added.

As different as they may seem India and Chile share “a place to make policies that are particularly inclusive of the poor.”

Chaturvedi explains the role of female pickers in India. Photo By: Katie Manning

These laws benefit both businesses and pickers according to Chaturvedi because the “informal sector is much more efficient than the formal sector” at dealing with waste.

So far, laws about recycling are only in the discussion phase, but the Recyclers seek to be in the middle of the action during the decision making process.

“We have to look at citizenship that looks at citizens,” said Chaturvedi, “It’s not a rich versus poor thing. It’s about how do we want to live in a city with basic standards.”

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The Student Confederation of Chile (CONFECH) called students across Chile to protest in April, a month after school began. Students were fed up with the growing privatization trend in Chile that began under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in the 1980s.

So far, every protest for education reform has ended with marchers drenched by water cannon jets and clouds of tear gas. Thursday morning’s protest was no different, except some politicians said, this time the violence against students crossed the line.

Police use a "guanaco" water jet to disperse students. Image by Flickr user FabsY_ (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Over 1,000 officers driving armored vehicles, forging ahead on foot in bullet-proof “Carabineros” (police) uniforms, and riding teams of horses herded the students away from the presidential palace. Metal gates sealed off several metro stations.

The protest sky-rocketed to the top of the city's trending topics on Twitter as students vented their growing frustrations using hashtags like #4deagosto, #laalamedaesnuestra and #camilasomostodos.

Online news site El Dínamo put together two Storify posts with citizen reactions and reports, one focusing on events taking place in Santiago [es], and another one on protests across the country [es].

Eder Rivas (@ederivas), tweeted at 1:08 p.m.:

En las protestas hay toda clase de animales: guanacos y carabineros. Sólo faltan militares y armamos un zoológico.

Students often compare “guanacos”, an infamous spitting Chilean camel, to the police vehicle that fires water from its roof.

Many demonstrators remained calm, but some – covered by hooded sweatshirts, gloves and masks – pelted police vehicles with rocks. Two officers were wounded. Police detained 235 of the 800 or so protesting students.

Students actually requested permission to have this two-part march on Thursday starting at 10:30 am for high school students. CONFECH organized a second march at 6:30 pm. But both parties were told to disband by the authorities.

Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter said on Wednesday that he won’t authorize any new student marches on the street leading to the presidential office, called Alameda. He cited millions of dollars in damages, business-owner complaints, and lost class-time as the reasons behind his decision.

Unfazed by Hinzpeter’s disapproval, students exercised their constitutional right to protest. Chile's Constitution in Article 19, No. 13, guarantees the “right to peaceful assembly without prior permission and without arms.”

A contradictory regulation, issued in 1983 during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, allows the dissolution of demonstrations that do not have the appropriate permission from authorities, i.e. Hinzpeter’s approval. The rule also gives authorities the power to dissolve a demonstration. The Equality Institute took a closer look at the conflict and deemed it unconstitutional [es].

Nevertheless, Hinzpeter still envoked the decree's power to ban the students from protesting.

Camila Vallejo (@camila_vallejo), leader of CONFECH, tweeted:

Lo que hoy pasa en nuestro pais, desnuda a la derecha en su verdadera forma de gobernar, nosotros no tenemos miedo, ellos si.

Hinzpeter’s decision proved to be a political misstep for the minister. Immediately following 10:30 am demonstration, a group of deputies and senators called for his resignation due to him authorizing a “brutal crackdown on students.” [es]

Image by Flickr user FabsY_ (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

On Monday, President Sebastián Piñera presented a series of 21 reforms that would install new government agencies to handle educational concerns. His plan called for an increase in educational funding to help pay teachers and take care of unpaid student loans. It would also offer more scholarships to universities.

CONFECH said they’ll respond to the president’s plan on Friday. If the escalating violence and continued demonstrations in Santiago and across Chile today are an indication, Piñera’s plan hasn’t placated the protesters.

Sergio Canales, (@sergiocanalesv), tweeted:

Esto hace rato dejó de ser tema de derecha o izquierda, es gente normal que quiere las cosas más justas #4deagosto.

Sentidos Comunes posted live streaming video of the protests, as did @VotaInteligente. Furthermore, students inside the Universidad de Concepción in southern Chile streamed throughout the day via Twitcam.

A ‘cacerolazo‘ was planned for Thursday night, as Global Voices author Felipe Cordero (@felipe_cordero) reports on Twitter:

Impressive number of people banging pots throughout Santiago. It hasn't stopped. This is not a struggle of a minority of students #4deagosto

#cacerolazo became a worldwide trending topic on the night of Thursday, August 4.

Katie Manning reports for www.MiVoz.cl, which publishes 14 citizen journalism news sites across the provinces of Chile.  More detail about the student protests sweeping through Chile is online at www.elnortero.cl.

Written by Katie Manning · comments (11)
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