In the Santa Elvira area of the municipality of Cerro Navia, more than 200 families are under acute threat of eviction. In concrete terms, this means that they are at risk of the old Chilean state and its police invading the Santa Elvira neighborhood, dragging people out of their homes, beating them up and demolishing their entire neighborhood.
What is the foundation for this crime? In 2019, families and neighbors from Cerro Navia occupied the Santa Elvira area of their community, land that mostly belongs to the Guzmán-Nieto family, which is part of the Chilean bureaucrat bourgeoisie. This piece of land has not been used for 20 years and the families from Cerro Navia are occupying it out of sheer necessity, because there was just not enough living space available. The Guzman-Nieto family owns most of the land in the entire Santiago Metropolitan Region. However, the plans of the bureaucrat bourgeois family in Santa Elvira do not take into account the family's needs and housing requirements. Instead, several hotels are to be built in the area as part of a fundamental structural project to develop the area near the airport in the interest of bureaucratic capitalism.
The family structures that have been built up over the years are to be destroyed.
On October 2nd, last year, the Supreme Court in Chile issued an eviction order for all residents of Santa Elvira to leave the 11-hectare area and "dismantle", that is, destroy their own homes. We see very clearly how the struggle for land and the semi-feudal character of the country runs through the entire society of oppressed nations. This contradiction can be expressed in the poor and landless peasants fighting against exploitation by "agribusinesses" - the modern form of large landowners - or in the poor peasants, artisanal miners and other sectors of the people resisting imperialist mining. The same contradiction can be observed in the situation in Santa Elvira, where sections of the Chilean bureaucrat bourgeoisie want to evict over 200 families from their hard-won and much-needed land in order to realize construction projects that shall serve the development of bureaucratic capitalism.
The deadline for compliance with the eviction order expired on April 24. Now the families are facing the danger of being evicted by force. We will report on further developments in the near future.
