>> I remember you, Amanda.
This is Democracy Now.
Democracynow.org, the
war and peace report.
I'm Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh.
>> Two leaders of the Chilean student movement
are in the United States this week where
they will be awarded the 2012 Letelier-Moffitt
Human Rights Award.
The prize
is named for the Chilean diplomat Orlando
Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt
who were murdered in Washington by agents
of the US backed Chilean dictator General
Augusto Pinochet in September 1976.
Over the past year the Chilean students' movement
has led some of the largest protests in Chile
since the days of opposition marches to
Pinochet a generation ago.
The movement has rallied hundreds of thousands
into the
streets of Santiago and other major cities
to demand greater access to affordable university
education, as well as deeper structural changes
in Chile.
The country has the highest per
capita income in the region, but also one
of the most unequal distributions of wealth.
>> Joining us are Noam Titelman the current
president of the Catholic university
student federation.
He's one of the main leaders of the Chilean
student protests.
And he's a
student in commercial engineering and Spanish
literature at the Catholic University of Chile
in Santiago.
We are also joined by Camila Vallejo, vice
president of the University of Chile
Student Federation from late 2010 through
2011.
She was president of the organization and
has been a main spokesperson for the national
student federation, the confederation of
Chilean students.
Camila Vallejo is also a member of the central
committee of the Chilean
communist youth and a geography student at
the University of Chile in Santiago.
Her
interpreter is Marcial Godoy, and we welcome
you all to Democracy Now.
Noam, let's begin
with you.
You talk about the significance of the movement
and what is taking place now in Chile.
In the United States we, it is hard enough
to get protests covered in the United
States, let alone in Chile, no matter how
significant they are.
>> Yes, I think the first thing to understand
is that we have a very special
educational system which was imposed during
the 1980s and during the Pinochet
dictatorship which has one basic principle.
It's that the market always works.
And we found
out that, obviously, it's not that way always.
And what we've seen is that, for example,
while our public education is dying, we have
only 36 percent of students going to public
schools.
Here in the states, it's almost 90 percent.
It's really a very special example of how
privatized can a state become.
And all of this started accumulating a lot
of problems, a lot
of inequalities, and this exploded on many
occasions during the last decades.
But during the
2011, it had a special messification of this
issue, and we saw almost -- almost all of
schools
and universities of the country paralyzed
for almost six months.
Over a million people in the
streets.
And we even saw some students willingly losing
their academic year, many
thousands of them.
And all of this is obviously because something
is not working with this
extremely privatized educational system.
>> Camila Vallejo, can you talk about how
it is that the movement was able to
mobilize such large numbers of people?
>> [Question and answer in Spanish].
>> First, I want to 
remark in light of the Letelier-Moffitt prize
that we're
receiving that Orlando Letelier was one of
the first to warn about what would come with
the
implementation of neo-liberal policies during
the dictatorship.
>> [Answering in Spanish].
>> She warned that through violence in Chile
there would not only be a -- sort
of a market society put in place, but actually
that all many things that were previously
considered basic rights would be turned into
a neo-liberal guard state.
>> And Orlando Letelier was the former Chilean
ambassador to the United
States who was blown up in a car bomb on Embassy
Row in Washington
D.C. in 1976.
>> That's right.
Right.
>> [Answering in Spanish].
>> And that these circumstances would end
in the privatization of basic rights
and of basic goods, and that families would
have to become indebted to procure these basic
things, and that's what led really in Chile
to these massive protests.
>> Camila Vallejo and Noam Titelman, we have
to end it there, but we'll
continue in a post-show discussion and post
it online at democracynow.org.
That does it for
our broadcast.
If you would like of today's show you can
go to our website
democracynow.org
