Cacerolazo

This one is great although I am not sure what it is all about.  As we were putting the kids to sleep, out of every house and apartment building it sounded like people were banging on pots.  I wish that I could upload an MP3 somehow. At first I thought that somebody won a soccer game and then Rob told me that people with watering eyes were gathered in the Metro (tear gas). Google to the rescue!

A cacerolazo or cacerolada is a form of popular protest practised in certain Spanish-speaking countries – in particular Argentina and Chile– which consists in a group of people creating noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils in order to call for attention. What is peculiar about this type of demonstration is that the people protest from their own homes, thus achieving a high level of support and participation.

The word comes from Spanish cacerola, which means "stew pot". The derivative suffix -azo denotes a hitting (punching or striking) action, and has been extended metaphorically to any sort of shock demonstration.

The next question is "what are they protesting?  There have been a lot of protests about the education system which was probably what was going on downtown near the metro.  Again, google to the rescue:

Through his Twitter account, the president of the DATE, Camila Vallejos, called today to make a "cacerozalo against repression" at 21:00 hours.

The student leader reaffirmed the call for the march at 18:30 in the Plaza Italia, despite the refusal of the authorities.  (probably the tear gas - confirmed on a blog "18.17  The protesters moved onto the streets surrounding the sector, while access to the metro Baquedano are closed.)

Then this morning the students who tried to demonstrate in Santiago were brutally repressed by police, leaving about 200 detainees, the student representative of the University of Chile strongly criticized the repression of the authorities.

"The scenario has led to today makes it seem much like a state of siege," said Camila Vallejos, adding that "the government has tried to separate from our dark past that many remember, you do not want to repeat, but today day we make many allusions to that, as our country was thirty years ago and even though today it is said that a new form of government, seems a very stale, dictatorial, that repeats the same as those authors and protagonists of these acts of repression. "

We don't get this kind of action in South Bend!

Oh - and I just found the Jewish angle.  The Minister of the Interior is an orthodox Jew.  

SANTIAGO .- Multiple rejection reactions in both the Chilean and Jewish community at the Embassy of Israel generated this afternoon said the president of Teachers College, Jaime Gajardo, who referred to the Jewish origin of the interior minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, to question the actions of the authorities to the student demonstrations.

"The methods that are applied today to the movement for public education methods reminiscent of the apartheid Zionist (...) and we want to say that Hinzpeter have any training in any school in Israel because here we are repeating the same methods, "said the representative of the Magisterium. 

More here  if you have any interest.  They are still banging away and now car horns have joined in. This is the stuff of memories???? ;-)