Outbreak takes toll on gatherings to protest causes
Only weeks ago, thousands of Chileans were filling the streets of Santiago for regular Friday protests against cost-of-living pressures, uneven growth and rising inequality. The left-leaning demonstrators demanded everything from the resignation of the president to the end of capitalism.
Then came the novel coronavirus. And just like that, large gatherings were banned and the demonstrations died.
“The virus is just what the government needed,” said Antonio Cueto, a volunteer rescue worker who provided medical assistance to protesters. “It’s saved them for a bit.”
Across the globe, the coronavirus outbreak is slamming the brakes on dreams of social change, halting a season of civil unrest from Hong Kong to Lebanon to Chile. Stay-at-home orders issued by authorities, often enforced by police officers or soldiers and backed up by detentions, along with activists’ own calls to stand down in the name of public health, are zapping the momentum from pro-democracy movements, civil rights marches and protests for everything from women’s rights to more drastic steps to fight climate change.
Yet instead of killing these movements outright, the pandemic is compelling them to evolve. Some are adopting creative tactics for protest in the era of social distancing.
In Hong Kong, eight months of political unrest over Beijing’s tightening grip on the semiautonomous territory had begun to dwindle in size and ferocity in the face of a resolute government response when the outbreak hit. There, the coronavirus provided a new opportunity for the movement to prove its value beyond street protests and slogans.
Rather than continuing to plug mass demonstrations, anti-government activists have used the networks they built during months of organizing to import more than 100,000 medical masks and distribute them to people in need. They’ve taken to social media and message apps such as Telegram to post recommendations and reminders on avoiding the coronavirus.
Labor unions that popped up during the unrest started flexing their muscles. A medical workers’ strike in February, for instance, became a major embarrassment for the government, eventually prompting Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam to shut a majority of her territory’s borders with mainland China — a step she was previously unwilling to take.
“Of course the strike was about employee welfare, but it was also grounded in the idea that the Hong Kong government is still too beholden to Beijing,” said Antony Dapiran, the author of City on Fire, a book on the Hong Kong protests. “It was a really interesting case study of how last year’s protest movement had tangible results.”
Despite new social-distancing rules, the Hong Kong protests continue, particularly on days considered significant to the pro-democracy movement. Last week, demonstrators gathered at the Prince Edward subway station to commemorate a violent police crackdown there in August. To get them to disperse, police invoked a new law — a ban on gatherings of more than four people — and warned of fines and jail time.
Tens of thousands of women filled the streets of Buenos Aires in February to support a snowballing bid to legalize abortion in the homeland of Pope Francis. But Argentina has since instituted a national lockdown, and a government poised to introduce a landmark abortion rights bill instead turned to the job of battling the coronavirus.
“The delay now is because of the measures the country needs to take to fight the pandemic,” said attorney Soledad Deza, an abortion activist from the northwestern Argentine province of Tucumán. “Next it will be because the country will need to focus on rebuilding after the pandemic.
“The bitter truth is that, deep down, we don’t know when the right moment will come again.”
In Chile last fall, Fridays became days of protest. The nation of 18 million had been a model of development and an island of stability in South America. Now demonstrations that erupted in October against transit fare hikes broadened to take in a range of grievances. As protesters set buses, metro stations and government buildings ablaze, authorities deployed soldiers in the streets of the capital for the first time since the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ended in 1990.
President Sebastián Piñera promised to suspend fare increases, raise the minimum wage and hold a referendum this month on whether to replace Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution. Still, the protests raged into March.
Then confirmed coronavirus cases shot up from less than 50 to more than 3,000 in a matter of weeks. Santiago’s Plaza Italia, ground zero for the weekly demonstrations, now stands eerily silent. Calls to march have given way to pleas, even by activists, to stay indoors. The referendum has been put off until October.
But activists are also moving to adapt. They’ve been calling-cacerolazos — balcony-bound pot- and pan-banging protests traditional in Latin America — loud enough to drown out music and conversation inside homes. An artist’s collective, Intermediate Depression, published an illustrated “manual for protesting from home” on Instagram, encouraging Chileans to deck their balconies with protest signs, “share [their] favorite songs with [their] neighborhood” and engage in cyberactivism.
“Being safe can’t simply mean abandoning the historic movement we’ve been seeing in our country,” said Emilia Schneider, president of the Student Federation of the University of Chile, which has been heavily involved with the protests.
Virus-proof protesting has, in fact, gone global. Seventeen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — who declared recently that she had symptoms of the coronavirus — has begun calling “virtual strikes” on Fridays. Followers are posting climate change messages on their windows, snapping photos and blitzing social media with hashtags such as #DigitalStrike and #ClimateHowl.
In some countries, zero tolerance during national lockdowns is putting an abrupt end even to scaled-down demonstrations. In India, for example, women protesting an anti-Muslim citizenship law trimmed their monthslong landmark sit-in in New Delhi to just five participants. Still, authorities last week hauled the demonstrators away. Hundreds of similar protests across the country have also ended, either shut down by police or disbanded voluntarily over virus fears.
Repressive and corrupt governments are reaping at least temporary rewards from the pause in protests. In socialist Venezuela, the U.S.-backed movement to oust authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro had already been losing steam when the pandemic hit. Strict new limits on movement, coupled with a decision by opposition leader Juan Guaidó to stop his characteristic street rallies in the name of public health, have crippled the effort.