We are the power
Just over two weeks ago, the carnival march in defense of Bosque Panul took place, where more than a thousand people took to the streets to celebrate and share this struggle that has now lasted seven years: converting Bosque Panul and the other mountain forests into Public Parks under community control.
Just over two weeks ago, the carnival march in defense of Bosque Panul took place, where more than a thousand people took to the streets to celebrate and share this struggle that has now lasted seven years: converting Bosque Panul and the other mountain forests into Public Parks under community control.
But why do we march? We march because the established institutional path is not broad enough to resolve the social demands our communities are making, let alone allow them to develop a project of life of their own.
The model for generating public policy — and the state apparatus that sustains it — serves only to impose policies from above, not to build them from citizens upward. We feel like outsiders. We feel excluded. Because we are only invited to vote alongside political parties — and of course, democracy cannot be reduced to merely voting: deciding is not only voting, and participating is not only voting. Besides, what is the point of participating through voting when there is only one option, and the candidates are all more of the same?
So the problem is not one of participation — it is that the apparent channels of participation are denied, hidden, or out of step.
What do we seek when we take to the streets? To reclaim the agency that has been kidnapped from us; to say loud and clear that no one profits from our territory.
Panul will never be protected as long as the current institutional framework exists — sheltered by a Constitution that relegates the most essential collective rights in favor of the all-powerful "right of property," which basically translates into the supreme belief in the power that money confers, and the use of influence for personal benefit at the expense of nature and the community.
The mountain has taught us that decisions about the territory must be made by its own children. The territory we inhabit gives us everything essential to keep us alive and happy — it is, in other words, the external part of our body. So profound is this interrelationship that without an adequate environment we would die. How can we allow others to decide about the space we inhabit? And to destroy our forests, our streets and avenues, our schools and stadiums?
Red is committed to continuing to advance in the recovery of the place that shelters us. Let us follow the path of water: in its urge to flow, water seeks a way through. Faced with an obstacle, it seeks simultaneous paths — and when there is no path, it accumulates until it passes over the obstacle.
If we are going to conquer institutions, let it be to fill them to overflowing — let our victory be resounding and let us use it to build an institutional framework in our own image and likeness, celebrating ourselves and seeking the good life. NOT to fight over quotas, positions, and slots in a system that is alien and hostile to us.
The proposal
As organized residents, we have been developing socio-environmental work with students, schools, and universities, as well as with neighborhoods and grassroots organizations, to jointly develop a Public Park under community management.
That line of work has led us to support and ally with other social and environmental causes in this and other regions that oppose, as we do, the capitalist system of plundering nature and its inhabitants.
We believe, however, that our alliances must be fundamentally rooted in social work that reclaims civic matters and public affairs for citizens themselves — transcending the current system of representation that does not guarantee the change the country needs.
We believe the current political party system hinders social mobilizations by diverting social movements toward an exclusively electoral position — within a system of apparent alliances seeking to "change the system from within" through mechanisms that prevent real change.
Get involved
Red invites you to a social learning experience in which questions of form reflect questions of substance, and are built in community.
In this way, to overcome systemic or institutional criticism, Red has built from its own experience:
• An organization that works consciously to empower each member according to their talents and availability.
• An organization that privileges direct, assembly-based democracy with the delegation of mandates to commissions dedicated to social and environmental work.
• A collective dream of living well.
This involves developing our sovereignty collectively and participatively, based on solidarity, fraternity, and cooperation — celebrating ourselves and seeking the good life.
This path has only just begun. Everyone is invited to build it.
Next assembly: March 15. More information at www.redprecordillera.cl
Red por la Defensa de la Precordillera. February 2013.
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