VALPARAÍSO, Chile — On a Valparaíso street choked solid with traffic not long ago, I looked up as Chilean students on a balcony unfurled a bedsheet banner. “Please pardon the bother,” it read, “but we’re having a revolution.”
Insurrection was once easier to spot, what with peasants storming Bastilles and heads rolling down Paris cobblestones. Yet even momentous news traveled slowly. Today, in a smaller and rounder world, sparks anywhere can ignite flames an ocean or two away.
Often it is only smoke and smolder. As Occupy Wall Street spread, New Zealand cops muscled a crowd of 99-percenters from City Hall back to their tents. A disheveled protester railed to me about brutal police. “Auckland is not Oakland,” he allowed, “but we’ve had enough.”
Yet it is sometimes deadly serious. That Tunisian fruit vendor who burned himself to death ignited revolt across the Arab world. A year later, he is still emitting sparks. Five young men just died in neighboring Morocco after other self-immolations in Jordan and Bahrain.
Valparaíso’s student upheaval is a long way from the struggle in Syria or a looming showdown in Iran. But, stepping back, it reflects the same new world reorder.
As it happens, I had covered the first act of that Chilean drama in 1973: Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing coup against Salvador Allende. When the general imposed tuition on free universities, protest was no option. Tanks cruised the streets, activists vanished by the thousand — and few outsiders were watching.
Today, in a democratic Chile, police stick to water cannons and tear gas when things get ugly. Students whip up huge crowds, with international support, with no more than tweets and posts. They want to roll back tuitions that have moved upward over the years. But that is only part of it.
By banging all night on pots, they got a lot of us to listen. They focused attention a society run by a few rich oligarchs. These days, with the world the way it is, all they needed for a revolution was paint on a bedsheet.
