标题: 2021.12.02 一个口袋妖怪角色如何改写智利的未来 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-3-22 09:15 标题: 2021.12.02 一个口袋妖怪角色如何改写智利的未来 EYEWITNESS: CHILE
How a Pokémon character is rewriting Chile’s future
Giovanna Grandón had no interest in politics. Then she put on a Pikachu costume
Dec 2nd 2021
BY ANA LANKES
When Giovanna Grandón, a 46-year-old school-bus driver, shimmied down the streets of Santiago in a Pikachu costume two years ago, she had no idea how drastically her life was about to change. A few weeks earlier, her seven-year-old son Diego had accidentally set in motion a chain of events that would propel his mother to fame and give her the job of rewriting Chile’s constitution.
Diego had been playing on his father’s phone one evening while his parents had dinner with friends, and had ordered more than $700-worth of gadgets and Pokémon merchandise, most of them featuring Pikachu, the yellow mouse-like character from the Japanese animé franchise. His parents sold most of the items to their neighbours but decided to keep one purchase, an adult-sized inflatable Pikachu costume, thinking they might wear it for Halloween.
His mother couldn’t wait that long. Six days before Halloween, she decided that Pikachu would make the perfect outfit to wear to a protest: on October 25th 2019, more than a million people marched through the streets of Santiago, railing against Chile’s government. The catalyst for the demonstration – the biggest in the country’s history – was a hike in metro fares, but discontent had been building for years.
Chile became a democracy in 1990 after Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. But in recent years, trust in institutions has nosedived, especially among the young. Corruption scandals discredited politicians; many people felt the government was not doing enough to address severe inequalities. Although Chile’s economy has grown, heavily privatised education, health care and pension systems have exacerbated discrepancies: life expectancy for a woman born in the poorest part of Santiago is nearly 18 years lower than for a woman born in the richest one, according to a study in the Lancet in 2019.
Videos of her dressed as Pikachu, dancing to the beat of pots and pans, went viral
Grandón aimed to “bring some joy” to the protest, and she succeeded: videos of her dressed as Pikachu, dancing to the beat of pots and pans, went viral, especially one where she tripped over a kerb and picked herself up. Hundreds of thousands of people watched the clip on YouTube and she got 10,000 Instagram followers in less than a week. On a subsequent protest, one banner read: “If Pikachu fell over and kept on dancing, how can we not go on marching?”
The demonstrations continued for weeks, some turning violent. Many of Santiago’s metro stations were set alight; shops and even churches were looted or vandalised. Sebastián Piñera, Chile’s president, declared a state of emergency and sent the army onto the streets for only the second time since the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Protestors were shot at and sprayed with tear gas – hundreds were injured. The Chilean police were condemned around the world for using excessive force.
Yet “Tia Pikachu” (Auntie Pikachu), as Grandón became known, kept dancing. Despite repeated drenching by water cannons and being shot in the foot with a rubber bullet (it left a hole in her shoe), she continued to take part in protests. Once, she was walking down the street with a friend wearing an inflatable dinosaur costume, when six armed police officers tackled her to the ground and spritzed her in the face with pepper spray. She has had to buy four more Pikachu costumes since the first one because each has been “destroyed by pacos [a derogatory term for police]”.
In an attempt to quell the protests, the Chilean government made a promise: it would throw out the country’s much-reviled constitution, drafted by technocrats in 1980, for a new one written by publicly elected delegates. For 30 years the constitution had been a focal point for social discontent: it made it hard for left-wing governments to pass new laws, gave the army seats in parliament until 2005 and made Pinochet a senator for life (a post he held until his arrest for crimes against humanity in 1998). “This was a constitution conceived in sin,” says Rossana Castiglioni, an academic from Santiago, summing up the problem many Chileans have with the constitution.
Excited by the prospect of reform, Grandón used her new-found fame to drum up support for a people’s constitution. She painted her school bus yellow and stuck a Pikachu snout on the front, travelling across the country to soup kitchens, schools and public plazas, where Grandón’s fans would come to meet her, often in fancy dress.
In a referendum in October 2020, more than three-quarters of the population voted to redraft the constitution. The referendum showed how divided the country was: almost all those who rejected the proposal lived in the three richest neighbourhoods in Santiago. When they heard the result, many Chileans danced and partied on the street.
When a friend of Grandón’s first suggested she should run for the constitutional delegation which would rewrite Chile’s future, she refused. “I told him no, I am not educated, I grew up in a squat, people like me don’t go into politics,” she said. “But he [said] that’s what this is about, you bring knowledge from the street.” She decided to give it a shot, and joined List of the People, a coalition of independent candidates.
“I told him no, I am not educated, I grew up in a squat, people like me don’t go into politics”
She describes her campaign as “a call to change the system: that the most humble people should not vote for the richest and the most educated, but rather that the humble should vote for the humble, someone like me who knows about real life in Chile.” “People didn’t want the same politicians as [before],” she said. Many voters pledged their support after finding out she was an independent.
Grandón beat a celebrity therapist and the head of Chile’s federation of trade unions. Even her adversaries were impressed: a police officer who stopped her last year to check her identity card called her “the walking revolution”.
The modest two-storey house where Grandón and her family live is in Peñalolén, a poor area of Santiago half an hour’s drive from where the convention of delegates is debating the new constitution. We sit on her patio as she takes a rare break while two of her four children play “SpongeBob SquarePants” games on a console inside (at one point, someone shouts “Mom! We just discovered a secret universe behind the rock!”). Around our feet yaps Grandón’s miniature schnauzer, Princess Peach, whose temperament is far from regal.
The family has lived in the house for ten years. Grandón and her husband, Jorge, were at school together; they got married while they were still at school, without telling their parents. They needed to earn money fast, so Grandón worked as a street-vendor, selling shoes, watches and cds. Jorge got a job as a security guard, later packing that in to work on his wife’s market stall. They would steal kisses on street corners in their spare time. They only revealed their marriage to their parents after a year.
The couple worked seven days a week, from 5am till 10pm (they finished at 6pm at weekends). “These are the sacrifices the poor must make,” says Grandón. For two years they lived in a shed with a dirt floor in her in-laws’ garden. Later they decided to invest all their savings in two school buses, which each of them would drive. Grandón’s mother was the bus conductor, making sure the children behaved themselves.
The business brought in around 1m pesos a month ($1,230), more than the minimum wage but tight for a family of six. Still, they were able to build a second floor on their house and a fence around the property; Grandón made the kitchen units herself. The couple bought furniture and ornaments in the flea-market where they used to pitch their stall: Turkish hanging lamps, cream sofas, little glass tables and small wooden baskets.
“I hope people realise now that you can really change things at the ballot box”
Like many Chileans, the couple is in debt. They recently took out a $7,000 loan to pay for therapists and extra tuition for two of their sons who have learning difficulties, and to fund university fees for their 26-year-old daughter. Private education is popular, even among less well-off families in Chile, because state provision is so poor. The government spends less on each school child than in most of the oecd, a club of mostly rich nations.
A large middle class has emerged in recent decades, but it is precarious: illness or losing a job can soon throw a family back into poverty. When schools closed during the pandemic, the Grandóns’ business was battered. The authorities came to repossess the couple’s belongings because they didn’t pay their electricity bills on time. They had to withdraw money from their pension to get the cash. Even now, their income hasn’t recovered as some parents, scared of covid, are keeping their kids off school – and the couple’s buses.
Two years ago the family was so fed up they considered leaving the country for Uruguay, which is like Latin America’s Switzerland – one of its richest, most equal and best-functioning societies. “There are no opportunities in Chile,” Grandón says. “You have to break your back to get by here. We never saw anyone sleeping on the street in Uruguay.”
It took Grandón a long time to make the link between her personal struggles and politics. Before 2019 she had voted only once in her life, for an outsider presidential candidate. “I wasn’t very interested in politics. I had to focus on my work, on my day-to-day.” She wasn’t alone in feeling apathetic. According to one United Nations study, between 1990 and 2016 Chile saw the largest drop in electoral participation of any country apart from Madagascar. The protests – and the politicians’ response to them – made Grandón realise “there was hope that things could finally change.”
Grandón is not the only convention delegate without a background in politics. More than half of the 155 seats went to independent candidates; established parties mustered only 62 seats, and another 17 were reserved for representatives of indigenous people, who make up around 12% of the population. Grandón’s colleagues include a professional chess player, a deep-sea diver, a mechanic, a shaman and a costume designer. Chile’s parliament had stipulated that there should be an equal number of male and female delegates – in the end so many women were elected that administrators had to positively discriminate in favour of men.
The convention got off to a rocky start when it first met on July 4th. “Nobody on the left reached out to anyone on the right,” says Patricio Fernández, a centre-left delegate. “They didn’t even share glances. It was as if the right were poisoned.” But as delegates got to know each other, the mood gradually softened. Fernández has spotted left-wing independents having lunch with right-wing delegates.
Rewriting the rules that govern a country is complicated. Delegates are split into commissions, each of which looks at a different aspect of government. Grandón sits on the commission for fundamental rights, charged with deciding whether Chileans should have a constitutional right to services like education, housing and health care. Other delegates are discussing granting greater autonomy to indigenous groups, and the advantages of shifting from a presidential to parliamentary system.
The convention has eight months left to complete a draft constitution, which will be put before voters in another referendum later next year. Grandón is nervous that the public mood has changed. “People’s memory is short – we experienced euphoria around the constitutional referendum, but few people go out to protest anymore.”
These days Grandón has mostly abandoned her Pikachu costume for ordinary clothes, and with it some of her previous popularity. When I met Grandón at work, our conversation was interrupted by an old man shouting: “Bureaucrats, liars, corruptos, donkeys! We don’t need you technocrats, cynics, hypocrites, Pinochetistas!” In October, when Grandón did a meet-and-greet in Santiago, people in the crowd hurled stones and spat at her, accusing her of being a sell-out for being willing to work with right-wingers. “They are jealous,” says Grandón. It’s worse, she says, for her husband and daughter, who run her social-media accounts and see cruel comments: “I’ve been called everything – I get lots of ‘fuck yous’ and people calling me a vieja culiada [old bitch].”
She suspects right-wing propaganda has harmed the convention’s reputation. The List of the People, the ticket on which Grandón originally ran, has also been beset by scandal: one of its leaders lied about having cancer, and its presidential candidate was disqualified after committing electoral fraud. Grandón is now fully independent.
Chile’s future is on a knife-edge. On November 21st, José Antonio Kast, a far-right candidate who opposed rewriting the constitution, won the first round of Chile’s presidential election. Grandón, who compares Kast to Donald Trump, is confident that he will lose the presidential run-off on December 19th. “I hope people realise now that you can really change things at the ballot box.”
Grandón sees her role as making sure that Chile’s politicians honour the work of the convention. “If they don’t implement what we wrote, we will carry on this fight using the law.” Despite some vocal criticism of the delegates’ project, she still believes that the vast majority of people want change – and want Chile finally to abandon the legacy of its long dictatorship: “They don’t live a privileged lifestyle, like those on the right. There are more of us who want to construct a new country.”■
Ana Lankes is The Economist’s Argentina and Chile correspondent
