Fell in Love with Fire
:A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile
Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
October 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”
“Yes. And?”
“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”
“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”
“And no one destroyed anything?”
“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”
“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”
“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”
“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”
“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”
On October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.
Everything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.
Santiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.
Chile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.
Stories from the Making of
We decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.
You said, “We should go back.”
I said, “If it were Chile…”
Just two weeks later, it was.
I’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.
We arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?
OK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.
On October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?1 You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”
You—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.
Somehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”
The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.
As we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.
“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”
They did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.
We crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.
I was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.
My friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”
The third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.
Nobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.
Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”
“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”
But I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.
Almost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.
Inside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.
Inside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.
Everyone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.
Here, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.
A few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.
15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.
15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.
And neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”
Brightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.
I had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”
Yeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.
In those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.
“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.
“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”
Over the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.
Since those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.
Please, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.
You can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.
-
Los Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩