Who is camilla vallejo

It is not a purely personal issue. I believe in the importance of opening up spaces in Congress for more comrades. There are many other comrades who should also be there and learn what the struggle in that space means, because you see great class contradictions there. Running in my place will be another comrade from the Communist Youth Daniela Serrano , who has a particular history of struggle, who is also from the student world.

Unlike other student leaders such as Gabriel Boric and Giorgio Jackson, who rejected traditional parties from the beginning, you have always been a member of the Communist Party. What is your history with the party? I became a member in , before the student movement of For me, the Communist Youth was a school. There, I forged my main convictions.

It was with the convictions given to me by my political militancy that I entered the student movement and tried to represent it, largely as a spokesperson. I was not going to abandon those convictions just in order to enter Congress. My most direct family was communist, but they formed me more in values of solidarity rather than political militancy as such. I decided to join because of the experience I had at the University of Chile. The Communist Youth was the organization that I found most serious and responsible, the product of its history and proposals.

Being a leftist implies accepting hard truths: Economic inequality, climate change, patriarchy. Their intelligence is moving and surprising. My daughter knows what I do. But for the moment, she understands that there are things that need to be changed, that there are people who suffer from hunger. Children nowadays are very careful with animals, even with insects, they question adults a lot about protecting the environment. So, what I do is just talk to her.

Not from an adult-centric point of view, but as equals, just using simple words to explain to her why we have problems in our environment, why there is a depletion of our natural resources and our water.

I talk about people: there are people who heavily exploit natural resources, for example forests, and then sell the wood and the money they get from that sale ends up in the hands of a few, and not of all those who have worked in said exploitation. I explain to her that we have a way of organizing society that unfortunately benefits the few who cut down trees, extract copper and minerals from our country — and that not only most people but also the environment is affected.

On 7 December , Vallejo was defeated in her bid for re-election, but despite not being the president of the Student Federation any longer, she continued to appear consistently in the media to defend the student movement and the rights of workers. Vallejo has been labelled by the media as the most important and influential Communist personality of the 21st century in Chile. Utopia Camila Vallejo. Vallejo was quick to retort that public gatherings need no authorisation and that the police had illegally attacked students standing in a park.

Vallejo, an eloquent and attractive young woman who exudes self-confidence and style, took the violence in her stride and focused on what she sees as the positive achievements thus far. There is not a lot of empathy for the other," said Vallejo in her office, decorated with a large photograph of Karl Marx. The youth has taken control… and revived and dignified politics. This comes hand in hand with the questioning of worn-out political models — all they have done is govern for big business and powerful economic groups.

In just a matter of months, Vallejo has been catapulted from anonymous student body president to Latin American folk hero with more than , Twitter followers.

Type her name into Google and there are more than , results just from the past 24 hours. Brazilian students now parade her as a VIP guest at their marches, the Chilean president invites her to negotiate a settlement and when she calls for a show of strength hundreds of thousands of students throughout Chile take to the streets. As an adept and wildly popular social media phenomenon, Vallejo has risen to become the most recognisable face of the student protesters.

Throughout the six-month revolt, Chilean students — in many cases led by and year-olds — have seized the streets of Santiago and major cities, provoking and challenging the status quo with their demand for a massive restructuring of the nation's for-profit higher education industry. In support of their demands for free university education, since May they have organised 37 marches, which have gathered upwards of , students at a time. Police repression has been frequent. Vandals who often use the cover of student marches to attack banks, pharmacies and utility companies are met by an armed force of riot police who routinely attack pedestrians and tear gas crowds of innocent civilians.

What began as a quiet plea for improvements in public education has now erupted into a wholescale rejection of the Chilean political elite.