Short interview I did with Green Left on Alborada’s Indestructible podcast which I hosted from 2020 to 2024. Interview published on 2 July 2021. Click here to read article.
World closing in on Bondi’s accused Pinochet-era torturer Adriana Rivas
Interview with The Australian regarding the former Pinochet intelligence agent Adriana Rivas who, in February 2019, was incarcerated in an Australian prison given she was wanted for extradition by Chilean authorities for kidnapping, disappearance and presumed murder of seven people during the 1970s. I was asked to comment on here background as an ex-member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) — Pinochet’s secret police. Published on 23 November 2020. Click here to read.
What is actually happening in Venezuela? With Dr. Rodrigo Acuna
Interview with journalist Nicholas Ford for Embedded Podcast. Published on 15 October 2020. Click here to view an extract of the interview.
Use of Pellet Guns
An interview with Indus News (Pakistan) regarding the use of pellet guns against protesters in Kashmir. The interview was published on 14 November 2019 and I speak at the 35:27 minute when the attention of the program turns towards protests in Chile. Click here to view the interview.
Chile's Youth Challenge Economic Inequality, Resist Authoritarian Traditions
Interview with Faizan Hashmi for UrduPoint News / Sputnik. Published on 22 October 2019. The article is no longer online so I am republishing it below in its original format.
Chile's Youth Challenge Economic Inequality, Resist Authoritarian Traditions
By Faizan Hashmi
MOSCOW UrduPoint News / Sputnik
22 October 2019
On her way to an interview for a school project, Francisca Hale, a 21-year-old journalism major university student, walked to the Plaza de Maipu subway station in Santiago, Chile at around 5 p.m. on Friday. To her surprise, the station was shut down by local authorities as a group of police officers guarded the entrances.
By Friday, the Chilean capital had been hit by a civil disobedient movement for more than two days, after secondary school students called on passengers to evade paying for the subway to protest against the planned fare hike by 30 Chilean Pesos (about $0.04) per ride. To prevent a large number of passengers from riding the subway for free, local authorities decided to shut down a number of stations, enraging others who just needed to use the subway to return home after work.
"By the time I had to use the subway on Friday, the station I always used was closed. There were hundreds of people protesting. If they kept the station open, nothing would have happened. But the police were there. So people were calling them [the officers] names and said: 'We need to use the subway!' But they wouldn't let people in," Hale told Sputnik.
Just when Hale decided to take a bus to go to another subway station close by, the police started to fire tear gas into the angry crowd gathered outside the closed station.
"While I was waiting for the bus, the police started to teargas people. There were still many children and old people around. I remember people rushing into buses to take cover from the tear gas. There was this little boy, maybe about four years old, was crying and covering his eyes, because he also was hit by the tear gas," she said while stressing that the angry crowd was simply chanting against the police, without other violent acts, when tear gas was fired.
Tensions between the protesters and the police escalated quickly shortly afterward. According to footage from local media, entrances of the Plaza de Maipu were completely ransacked with windows smashed and escalators destroyed.
Violence continued to worsen on Friday night when a number of subway stations were lit on fire, a public bus was burned and several shops were looted. In response, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera declared a state of emergency in the early hours of Saturday, introducing curfews at night and mobilizing the nation's military as part of the efforts to restore order.
To pacify the protesters, the president suspended the plan to raise subway fares in Santiago. But the concession did little to please the angry demonstrators, who continued to march into the streets demanding authorities to address other social and economic injustices.
According to Santiago's Mayor Karla Rubilar, at least 11 people have been killed in the unrest so far, as many of the deaths occurred when supermarkets were set on fire by looters.
What started as protests against a proposed subway fare hike in the nation's capital rapidly expanded into nationwide chaos, as violent protests erupted in a number of other cities including Valparaiso and Concepcion, where states of emergency were declared.
For young students in Chile, the protests against the proposed subway fare increase simply ignited their accumulated grievances over a series of social issues.
"This detonated a social bomb that has long threatened to explode. The political landscape in Chile has been very complicated in recent times due to a series of social demands: improvements to the pension system, salary improvements, free education, etc. The subway business ended up being the tip of an iceberg," Leonardo David, a 24-year-old law student from the city of Concepcion, told Sputnik.
David painted a bleak picture about the current situation facing young students like him in Chile.
"As a student, my greatest anger is related to the current economic reality of Chile, in which job opportunities are scarce, wages are precarious, and on the other hand, we have very high living costs, at levels of first world countries. This is serious considering that the cost of living must be added to the monthly living costs. In Chile, even state universities are not free and many students are forced to borrow from the bank to pay for their studies, through abusive contracts, with shameful interests and a debt that can be extended for up to 20 years," he said.
To finance his law degree, David took a loan of about $27,900 which would take him more than ten years after graduation to pay off, as an average monthly salary for college graduates stood at around $600.
Political analysts suggested that the growing social grievances in Chile came as a result of the privatization of the country's economy.
"The protests, from a wider perspective, are against the free market economy that has been applied in Chile in the last 20 years. Massive amounts of privatization have continued, for example, in the areas of water, gas and electricity. This is a combination of anger against this free market economic model. This is what the students, who are now being supported by broader sections of the population, are rebelling against," Rodrigo Acuna, an independent researcher on Latin America politics and Associate Lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia, told Sputnik.
The expert pointed out that voters in Chile were disappointed in the Pinera administration as the president failed to fulfill some of the campaign promises after taking office in March 2018.
"The difference is, under President Pinera, these policies [of privatization] have intensified. That's something Pinera supporters did not expect to occur. They believed because he is a multimillionaire and one of the wealthiest men in the country, he was going to spread that wealth with the way he managed his businesses and provide prosperity to the country. But that actually hasn't been the case. What has occurred is that more privatization has continued and living standards have not increased," he said, noting that the anger from the general public spilled well beyond the students who were against the subway fare hike.
For a nation deeply scarred by the horror and cruelty under the military dictatorship during former president Augusto Pinochet's time in office, the scenes of soldiers and armored military vehicles in the streets brought back those bitter memories.
"As a country, we have a big trauma when it comes to [seeing] military in the streets. My grandfather was tortured during the military dictatorship. When he found out that the soldiers with full-on combat gears were in the streets, he was really nervous. He didn't even want to turn on the TV or hear people talking about it. A lot of people like my grandfather began to have panic attacks and anxiety attacks. They didn't want to go outside and often said:' we need to store food and water, because we may have to face another dictatorship,'" Hale, the university student from Santiago, said.
Hale's grandfather was working with a group of doctors in September 1973, when a large military envoy stormed his offices, accusing him of hiding weapons to support a planned communist uprising against the government. As a result, her grandfather was tortured after being taken to the national stadium while many of his colleagues were imprisoned for many years.
"There're so many pictures [on social media] comparing what happened in 1973 to what's happening now because the military were shooting people and asking them to do humiliating things," Hale said.
Amid rising violence in different cities in Chile, President Pinera declared the nation is "at war against a powerful enemy" during a televised speech on Sunday when he extended a state of emergency to more cities.
The government's heavy-handed response to the protests drew criticism from young students like Hale.
"The president's slogan [during his election campaign] was 'better times," which promised 'if you vote for me, you're going to have better times.' But we've only been protesting for two days. And he couldn't handle two days of protests and just declared a state of emergency and threw the military into the streets. He even said on TV 'we're at war.' But how can you be in a war, if only one side is armed? Did he just declare war against the people of Chile?" Hale said.
David, the law student from Concepcion, argued that the rising violence acts from protesters were triggered by the government's harsh responses.
"I would like to point out that what is currently happening in Chile is an exaggerated and unjustified state response to a situation that began to be quite simple and harmless. The government decided to invoke a law created to combat terrorism when what initially happened was a simple mass evasion of payment in the subway. This generated discomfort among citizens for the criminalization of a social demonstration," he said.
The mindset from the era under the military dictatorship may have played a role in the way Chilean police handled protesters, Acuna, the political analyst, explained.
"The idea that high school students should be repressed by the strongest, the toughest and the most militarized sections of the police force is something has been continuing. The way the Chilean police handle protests has not really changed in its fundamental basis since the dictatorship. While Chile has an electoral system and it claims to be a democracy, the establishment is quite intolerant of peaceful protests," he said.
Acuna argued that certain government agencies in Chile including the police and the military had not been truly reformed since the end of the dictatorship in the country.
After witnessing heavy-handed responses from the police with her own eyes, Hale, the student from Santiago, decided to join the protests in the hope of avoiding the nation from descending into another dictatorship.
"Think about it, people haven't seen military in the streets since the 1980s! People need to be aware of the current situation [in Chile], so we can avoid another dictatorship. We're protesting because we want change and we want this country to be safe from another dictatorship. As young people, we know we have to leave a better country for our children and we also owe it to our parents and our grandparents," she said.
As more heavily armed soldiers were being deployed into the streets in Chile, young students, like Hale and David, continued to try to make their voices heard through posts on social media.
Venezuela votes for Constituent Assembly
Interview with Al Jazeera on the disputed election for the Constituent Assembly. Interview published on 31 July 2017. It can be viewed here.
"El Chapo" recaptured, but it's not the end of the narcotraffic empire
Interview with SBS Spanish after Joaquín El Chapo Guzman, boss of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested in Mexico and sent back to the prison he broke out of. Interview published 11 January 2016. It can be listened to here.
The state of exception in Venezuela
Interview with SBS Spanish after the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, declared a state of emergency in his country to face the economic crisis and alleged foreign intervention plans. Interview published on 20 May 2016. Click here to listen.
And that's when Fidel left, and what did he leave in his wake?
Interview with SBS Spanish after the death of Cuban leader Dr Fidel Castro. Interview published on 27 November 2016. Click here to listen.
What is America's stake in the unfolding Venezuelan protests?
Interview with The Wire on how three Venezuelan ambassadors were expelled and what interest the United States has in the outcome of ongoing protests in Venezuela. Interview published on 26 February 2014. Click here to listen.
Colombian Government and the FARC rebels begin to talk peace
Interview with The Wire on how after more than 40 years of turmoil, the Colombian Government and the country’s rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, will open peace talks in order to attempt to end the conflict. Interview published on 18 October 2012. Click here to listen.
Hugo Chavez, the unlikely president
Interview with Rodrigo Acuña on the ABC's Radio National Rear Vision program 7 October 2012. Click here to listen to the program. Full transcript below as published on the ABC.
Sunday 7 October 2012 12:05PM
It was hard to find a more polarising figure than the former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Hollywood types like Sean Penn and Oliver Stone were proud to be his friends, and yet others accused him of being more of a threat to the United States than Castro or Bin Laden ever were. Within Venezuela also, he aroused strong feelings - his humble beginnings and welfare spending won him loyalty from the poor, but others were disturbed by the increasingly authoritarian nature of his government. Now he has died, aged 58. From the Rear Vision archive, we look at his surprising rise to the top and his turbulent decade in power.
Everyone has an opinion about Chavez. To his detractors he is becoming increasingly autocratic, even messianic; for many others it’s either untrue or irrelevant beside the enormous benefits he has brought to the country and their lives. One thing everyone agrees on is that he’s different. While all previous presidents came from the same elite class, he didn’t.
Covering the Honduran coup
Interview with Al Jazeera’s Listening Post program in London on how the coup in Honduras has been covered. Published on 31 July 2009. Click here to view.
Media coverage of the rescue of Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt
Interview with Al Jazeera’s Listening Post program in London on media coverage of the rescue of Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt who was held captive for several years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Published on 5 September 2008. Click here to view.