Girls in a classroom in the República de Ecuador school in Viña del Mar, Chile. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
VALPARAÍSO/VIÑA DEL MAR, Chile , May 27 2014 (IPS)

The decentralisation of Chile’s public schools, which were handed over to the municipalities to run in 1981, gave rise to a de facto segregation that has cast a shadow over several generations of Chileans.

Patricia Durán and Erna Sáez are the head teachers at two municipal schools in the region of Valparaíso, on the Pacific coast 140 km northwest of Santiago.

They both rise before dawn and have long working days as the principals of primary schools serving students between the ages of four and 14.

But the realities they face every day could not be more different.

Durán’s school is attended by 167 girls and boys, 90 percent of them from poor, marginalised families. The San Judas Tadeo school is located on a steep slope of the San Juan de Dios hill in Valparaíso, the regional capital.

“In many cases their fathers or mothers are in prison or are drug addicts or alcoholics, and the only hope these kids have for the future is the education we can give them,” Durán said.

“Social risk and vulnerability are fought with affection,” Durán told journalists from several South American countries who visited the school, invited by IPS.

“We are very concerned about keeping the school clean for them, because we know that in their homes they often do not even have access to the most basic hygiene,” she added.

The school is open from 8:00 to 19:00 and serves the children breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack, financed by the national office for school aid and scholarships, JUNAEB.

The school is mainly made of wood and sheet metal, the materials used in poorer constructions in Chile; the classrooms are small and every single inch is in use. But the staff makes sure that everything is tidy, colourful and bright.

The playground of the San Judas Tadeo primary school on the San Juan de Dios hill in Valparaíso, Chile. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

Fifteen minutes from the hill, in the centre of Viña del Mar – a city described as the tourist capital of Chile – Erna Sáez heads the República del Ecuador school, attended by some 500 girls, around half of them from lower-income families.

“At 7:30 in the morning, the inspector stands in the doorway to check that all of the girls are well-dressed, with their hair brushed, and clean,” says Sáez, who adds that none of the students come from families so poor that they actually go hungry.

Nevertheless, 260 meals are served in a cafeteria furnished with colourful chairs and tables. Classes are given in two shifts: from 8:00 to 12:00 and 12:00 to 4:00, and the students are bussed to and from school.

The big two-story building was completely rebuilt after the 2010 earthquake. It is a solid brick and mortar building with large, brightly lit classrooms, a huge computer lab, a science lab, a large playground and a gymnasium.

Both schools have libraries, but the different sizes and number of books are another reflection of the gap between the two schools.

In Chile the breach, however, is not between poorly financed public schools and well-funded private educational institutions. Both of these schools are public, but they depend on municipalities with highly unequal access to funds.

Viña del Mar benefits from the abundant revenue brought in by tourism, and the city has a 15 percent poverty rate. In the neighbouring Valparaíso, meanwhile, 22 percent of the local population is poor, compared to the national average of 14 percent.

Valparaíso is the city with the largest number of slums in the country, and fully one-third of Chile’s slum-dwellers live in the region of Valparaíso.

And of 50 countries measured in 2010 in terms of social segregation in schools by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) International Institute for Educational Planning, Chile was the most unequal, assigned 53 points – far higher than neighbouring countries like Uruguay (38), Brazil, Argentina (39) and Colombia (40).

In 2006, tens of thousands of students took to the streets, leading a wave of protests that posed a serious challenge to the government of moderate socialist President Michelle Bachelet during her first term in office (2006-2010).

They were demanding a reform of the educational system implemented by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which transferred the administration of public schools from the Education Ministry to the country’s 345 municipalities, and permitted the creation of state-subsidised private schools.

The student movement is demanding that public primary and secondary schools be put back under the control of the central government.

Bachelet, who was sworn in for a second term in March this year, is facing the challenge of reforming an educational system that is the main source of social discontent, and which prompted students around the country to pour into the streets again, in even larger numbers, under the administration of right-wing former president Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014).

In nearly every country around the world, the state is the main provider of education, as a public service.

But in Chile, any private individual or institution can open a school, wherever they want. And if they are able to draw students, the state has to pay them a subsidy per student.

Subsidised private schools with large student bodies can be profitable, because they also charge parents tuition.

Several different kinds of education coexist in Chile: private education, subsidised private education – both for-profit and non-profit – and municipal public schools.

The allotment of funds to municipal schools not only depends on the coffers of each municipality, many of which are severely cash-strapped, but also on aspects like student attendance levels.

When attendance is poor, funding shrinks – and this has serious repercussions for the poorest areas.

This kind of free market education has undermined and broken down public education, as demonstrated by the following chart:

Click to enlarge

But it is not clear that privatisation of the educational system has improved the quality of education, several experts said at a May 22-23 seminar for journalists organised by IPS (Inter Press Service) in Santiago, with support from the Norwegian government.

What does stand out is the growing segregation that marks the system, said Juan Eduardo García Huidobro of the Alberto Hurtado University’s Centre for Educational Research and Development (CIDE), who presided over the Education Advisory Council during Bachelet’s first term.

The San Judas Tadeo school clearly needs more funds. The staff makes an enormous effort to keep attendance rates up and ensure that the students reach a minimally acceptable level on the assessment tests – something that appears to be easier to achieve in the school in the nearby Viña del Mar.

The bleak landscape left behind on La Cruz hill, one of the hardest-hit by the blaze that started on Saturday Apr. 12 in the Chilean city of Valparaíso. Credit: Pablo Unzueta/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
VALPARAÍSO, Chile , Apr 15 2014 (IPS)

The blaze that tore through the Chilean port city of Valparaíso revealed the dark side of one of the most important tourist destinations in this South American country, which hides in its hills high levels of poverty and inequality.

The fire that broke out Saturday Apr. 12 and was still smouldering two days later claimed at least 12 lives, completely destroyed 2,000 homes, and forced the evacuation of 10,000 people.

The flames covered at least six of the 42 hills that surround this city of 250,000 people, which is built in the form of a natural amphitheatre facing the Pacific ocean.

Jorge Llanos, 60, lived on the Cerro El Litre, one of the hills lining the city. Early Saturday he set out for his job at the market at Quilpué, near central Valparaíso, where he has a vegetable stand.

“I was coming back home on the bus when I saw the inferno. I got off and from the street I looked up at the hill: ‘My house!’ I shouted. When I got there, it was too late,” he told IPS.

Since the night of the fire, Llanos has been staying at a school that is operating as a shelter.

On Monday, he climbed the hill to look at his house. “There’s nothing there…I lost everything,” he said, sobbing.

Valparaíso, 140 km northwest of Santiago, is built on a bay surrounded by hills and mountains where most of the city’s inhabitants are concentrated. It is this South American country’s second-largest port.

The hills, which start to rise just one kilometre from the coast, are densely populated with brightly coloured wooden houses. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) declared the city a World Heritage Site.

Valparaíso is also a cultural centre in Chile. Nobel Literature laureate Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) built one of his three houses there, and it is the site of the National Council of Culture and the Arts.

It has also been the seat of Congress since the return to democracy after the 1973-1990 dictatorship, when the old legislature in Santiago was replaced by the new building in Valparaíso, to decentralise the branches of government.

But 22 percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty line, compared to a national average of 14 percent.

Valparaíso is also one of the areas in Chile with the largest number of families living in slums.

According to the Fundación Un Techo Para Chile (A Roof for Chile Foundation), Valparaíso is the city with the most slums in Chile, and the region of Valparaíso is home to one-third of all families living in shantytowns.

In terms of inequality, this city also holds the record: while the average monthly income of the poorest 10 percent of the population is just 270 dollars, the monthly income of the wealthiest 10 percent averages 7,200 dollars.

“The enormous blaze that has affected this city has brought to light the terrible vulnerability of the families living in slums, who were hit the hardest,” the director of Un Techo Para Chile – Valparaíso, Alejandro Muñoz, told IPS.

The fire, which spread from forested areas at the top of the hills down into poor neighbourhoods of mainly wooden houses, “completely destroyed four slums,” he said.

This was the worst fire ever in a Chilean city in terms of the area affected – some 900 hectares – but not with respect to the number of victims.

In 1953, for example, 50 people were killed in a fire, and in 1960 a blaze destroyed the flat part of the city.

Muñoz pointed out that Valparaíso is a World Heritage Site, and Viña del Mar, a nearby coastal resort, is known as the “garden city”. But “a harsh and sometimes difficult to understand reality hides behind the hills of both cities – that of slum-dwelling families,” he said.

Lorena Carraja and her 80-year-old parents have been staying since Saturday at an improvised shelter set up on a tennis court. In the cold, bleak camp, she described the moment when the flames reached her home.

“It was a veritable inferno; we were completely surrounded by fire which in one second spread from one side to the other, with strong winds that carried the flames from hill to hill. It was horrible, terrifying, I had never seen anything so huge in my whole life, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” she told IPS.

But in the end, Carraja, 50, didn’t lose her home, although she did lose many of her belongings. “It doesn’t matter, everything can be replaced; thank God we’re alive,” she said.

Then she sighed and described, with a catch in her voice, how she heard “people screaming, children crying, while people were fainting.”

Cities in Chile were built with little urban planning, experts say. And families seeking a chance at a better life have flocked to the outer edges of large cities like Valparaíso.

But “the central and local governments have not taken an interest in the arrival of marginal populations to the cities, and there hasn’t been systematic concern in this country for the people who come to the cities,” Leonardo Piña, an anthropologist at the Alberto Hurtado University, told IPS.

“Valparaíso is no exception,” he said.

Piña added that the houses on the hills around the city “were built one on top of the other, and while it is exotic and seen as extraordinarily beautiful, to the point that it was named a World Heritage Site, that hasn’t meant that the concern has gone any farther than just giving it that label.

“The disaster has shown how bad the neglect is,” the anthropologist said.

The UNESCO declaration drew heavy flows of investment to Valparaíso from the Inter-American Development Bank, and the implementation of an ambitious Programme for Urban Recovery and Development generated high expectations among the people in this port city.

However, the 73 million dollars invested in the programme between 2006 and 2012 failed to make a dent in the poverty and marginalisation.

Piña said the main thing missing were policies that would effectively bring basic services to the poor, in order to make it possible for them to have a decent standard of living.

A long, intense drought, high winds, and unusually high Southern Hemisphere autumn temperatures came together to make it “the perfect fire,” said the regional governor of Valparaíso, Ricardo Bravo.

Experts agree that what is needed now is relief for the victims of the tragedy.

But later what will be required is political will to reduce the poverty in the “crazy port,” as Neruda referred to the city in his poem “Ode to Valparaíso”, written in the watchtower of La Sebastiana, his house built like a ship. The city, he wrote, would soon forget its tears, to “return to building up your houses, painting your doors green, your windows yellow.”