Tension is growing in the Central House of the University of Chile, which has been taken over for more than twenty days by students mobilized in solidarity for Palestine. The last crossing with the Rector’s Office took place today, when an email requested the eviction of the room where the students spend the night, who in turn accuse slander and no response to their demands.
The eviction email
For Ismael Aguayo, one of the spokespersons for the camp in Casa Central, the context of the message is a fundamental factor to interpret its intention. “The email arrives within the framework of the last march through Palestine on June 8, which had a lot of people. And it arrives just at the moment where we send an open request,” he indicated.
The aforementioned petition is an update of the original petition – since since the beginning of the protests, the students were discovering many more agreements with Zionist entities in Israel, and there was a need to update it -, and it was sent at 8 am on Monday the 10th. of June.
Only a couple of hours later, the Director of the Directorate of Student Welfare and Development (the interlocutor between the spokespersons of the camp and rectory), Pamela Díaz-Romero, sends an email with the subject “Return of the Eloísa Díaz Room”, where she points out that “in response to the events recorded in recent days, which include verbal attacks on officials” and “the use of the heritage building for the display of messages that violate the dignity of people (…) we request the immediate removal of belongings that they maintain in the Courtroom (Eloísa Díaz).”
The Eloísa Díaz Room is an important element within the camp, because only two spaces are enabled for the shooting: the central patio, and the aforementioned room, where the students spend the night.
The canvas of discord and accusations of slander
The display of messages “that attack the dignity of people” to which the rectory refers is probably to a canvas displayed in the Central House in the mobilization of Saturday, June 8, where the message “To break the Zionist relationship, 76 years” appeared of colonization, 80% of the population displaced, 40,000 dead in 8 months!!” next to the illustration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kissing Rector Rosa Devés.
The canvas generated the repudiation of government authorities such as Foreign Minister Alberto Van Klaveren who expressed “all my solidarity with the rector” and the Minister of Women Antonia Orellana, who pointed out in a post that “resorting to sexist caricatures is exhausting the possibility of debate, which characterizes the University of Chile and openness that Dr. Devés has always shown.” Sayings that were replicated massively by the media.
However, the spokespersons of the camp responded with a statement, and defended themselves by pointing out that “The image of Rosa Devés is used as a representative symbol of the Rector’s Office, it was never our intention to attack her personally in her position as a woman in charge of the most important University in the world.” country”.
They even detailed that the image of Netanyahu trying to kiss Rosa Devés is “a reference to other political satires that have historically been symbols of freedom of expression through art as a criticism of the authorities. Mainly it is a reference to the famous mural that Dimitri Vrubel painted on the Berlin Wall in 1990, under the title ‘My God, help me survive this mortal love’ and which refers to the kiss between the two communist (MEN) leaders, Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in 1979.”
In this way, they argued that “we do not agree that feminism and the rector’s position as a woman are used as a tool to victimize herself and mask her complicit position in the genocide of Palestinian children, men and women. Not because the rector is a woman is exempt from responsibility and from responding to our requests. Thus, the criticisms would be exactly the same if the rector’s gender were different.”
Regarding the verbal attacks reported in the email, spokesperson Aldo Villalobos is clear: “We rule out any physical and verbal attacks on officials, there is no serious accusation, they are slander to delegitimize the mobilization. From the first day we have been willing to listen to and respect the officials of the Headquarters so as not to hinder their workday.”
The lack of response to the request and the absences of the rector
The real problem for the spokespersons of the mobilization is that the rector’s office has never had a meeting with them to respond to the ten-point request, and that the rector answers “through alternative means such as YouTube or the El Mercurio column that the rector published.” said Ismael Aguayo. And he added: “They are worried about diverting the focus from the petition and talking about their own institutional agenda regarding the genocide in Palestine.”
Furthermore, they point out that they have not even seen the rector camping, as was pointed out by multiple news items during the first week of the takeover of Casa Central, which indicated that the rector had been sleeping for a week inside the university to avoid the takeover.
Felipe Uthman, another of the spokespersons for the camp, explained: “We have control of the door for registration of entries, and we never saw the rector in the Central House. When we accessed the second floor – where the rector’s office is located, we did not see any type of activity either.”
Among the news that was published about Rosa Devés’s “camping”, there is no photograph.
The students set the deadline for a rector’s response to their request until 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, June 13.
