TRAPPED in a VIOLENT RIOT in CHILE

[00:00:03]Oh, [ __ ] Get the [ __ ] out of here, [ __ ] This is Negro Matapacos, a legendary stray dog who became a symbol for a revolution. A revolution that got pretty intense, which I saw with my own eyes.

[00:00:22]I think this may be my cue to get the [ __ ] out of here.

[00:00:30]Holy [ __ ] And apparently, this is nothing compared to how it was before. So, you could imagine the level of chaos that ensued when this whole thing started. Doesn't this look like a war-torn country right now? Like, at least this area. Yeah. And this area used to be like you know, tiendas. How do you say that?

[00:00:50]Stalls. Like stalls, yeah. Shops and stuff. Shops. Oh.

[00:00:58]Have you ever watched the country lose its mind in real time? Not on the news or on TikTok, but right in front of you.

[00:01:05]Smoke in your lungs, pepper spray stinging your eyeballs, mobs throwing stones and bottles at police, people running, police charging, and the country you call home suddenly feels like a war zone. I got pepper sprayed, some of my camera gear got stolen, and at one point I genuinely thought the police were going to beat the absolute [ __ ] out of me. Dude, I barely got away.

[00:01:27]It was scary. But somehow, this was only the beginning. Because this was Chile, one of the most developed countries, if not the most developed country in South America. And it all started with something that sounded almost ridiculous. A small increase in train fares. But that tiny spark lit something much bigger. Train stations were burnt to the ground.

[00:01:47]Churches went up in flames. People lost their eyes. Police were attacked in the streets. And the whole country cracked open like there was something ancient and furious hiding underneath it.

[00:01:58]>> [music] >> The people were sick of it. No more. I went there thinking I was filming a protest, but what I found was civilization breaking down right in front of me. The mask was pulled off.

[00:02:10]Ironically, people put on masks to hide their identity, but you know what I mean.

[00:02:15]>> [laughter] >> The proverbial mask was getting torn down and society was crumbling. Now, I'm going to avoid politics as much as possible because getting emotionally involved in one side or another is a very easy way to get emotionally farmed and get controlled like an NPC puppet.

[00:02:33][ __ ] politics. Let's talk humanity.

[00:02:35]Let's talk experience.

[00:02:39]>> [music] >> I went to Chile in January 2020 looking around and thinking, "Wow, civilization is way more fragile than most people want to admit." This is the last year.

[00:02:53]Cuz from the outside we all like to pretend that chaos happens over there.

[00:02:57]And post-COVID and everything that's going on in the world since 2020, I think we've all had a reality check of how slippery society can be from just even just one event.

[00:03:10]But it's never one event, is it? It's a the straw that broke the camel's back.

[00:03:14]It's years and sometimes even generations of corruption and greed and violence and just [ __ ] that happens and eventually people It's like a pressure cooker. People have enough and we just blow.

[00:03:26]We'll just explode. History shows that the same thing over and over again.

[00:03:31]Civilization doesn't usually collapse because everyone suddenly goes insane.

[00:03:35]It collapses because the social contract gets quietly pissed on for years. And then one day someone lights a match.

[00:03:43]In Chile that match was quite small, a 30-peso increase to the Santiago Metro fare. That's only a few cents.

[00:03:52]And on paper it seems just ridiculous.

[00:03:54]Why would everyone lose their [ __ ] over that? Living expenses were already so high and people just getting their wallets quietly siphoned, you know? And it it gets This was the moment that was like, "Nah, that's it." Train stations literally got inflamed.

[00:04:11]There was chaos on the streets. Even the university that I went to got completely destroyed.

[00:04:19]Inside is like even worse, huh? Yeah.

[00:04:22]Fight with love. Fight with love. That's so wow.

[00:04:27]Churches, buildings, police vehicles, riots, looting, the whole Dude, it was like a almost apocalyptic. It was teetering along that line. Like, "Oh, dude, are are we going to get through this?" Chile is supposed to be the stable one. Like, believe it or not, Chile is the country in South America where all other countries migrate to. It's the most economically stable. But basically, people had enough.

[00:04:53]People were angry. Angry about pensions, health care, education, wages. And when students started jumping the metro barriers in protest, the government treated it like a law and order problem.

[00:05:03]And right away, they didn't just get police, they got military. And that's the thing about pendulums.

[00:05:08]The more you push, the harder it swings back. And it was this constant battle between I guess the people, the protesters, and the police and military.

[00:05:17]All right, so this is one of the trucks that ran over the dude last week and which caused a even bigger riot, so.

[00:05:25]Yeah, that would kill someone. But man, I was seeing like cuz I was in like the front lines of the protest and it was [ __ ] insane. And I was seeing like 30, 40-year-old lady teaching like a 10-year-old child how to use this high like this really powerful laser so you can like, you know, point it at the cops' eyes and stuff like that. Yelling, "Fuck you, you piece of [ __ ] cops. I hope you all [ __ ] die. And like you can see it scattered across this whole city on with graffiti like a good cop is a dead cop. Yeah. There'd been a lot of things that the cops and the military have done and they're not cool. They're not cool. Like they [ __ ] it up like so badly that Like what? Like what? Give us an example.

[00:06:09]All right. So I I guess just like beating up people for not for nothing but sometimes they they have done it like this guy for example is like you know with with something that says whatever and he's like walking and screaming [ __ ] and suddenly there are like five or six cops that beat him and start to punch him and hit him with their sticks that they have you know in the floor and it's like and they didn't even get arrest him. If you're going to hit someone in order to get him and put him in jail, all right, that's fine. They hit him and they kept going. There's this whole thing about people losing their eyes and it was so common. Then of course protesters retaliated, attacked police, police attacked protesters and the whole country felt like it slipped into this nightmarish fever dream. And the scariest part?

[00:07:00]It didn't feel impossible. It felt human because every society has a breaking point. You push people hard enough, humiliate them long enough, make them feel like a game is rigged badly enough and eventually the polite little citizen becomes something else.

[00:07:16]A protester, a rioter, a revolutionary or just a desperate person who has finally had enough. And that's what shocked me the most.

[00:07:23]Not that Chile fell into chaos, but how quickly the normal world disappeared.

[00:07:29]One minute you're walking through a city, next minute there's smoke in the air, sirens screaming, people running, police charging and you realize the thin line between civilized society and total madness is basically just trust.

[00:07:43]And once trust dies, the animal comes out.

[00:07:47]>> [music] >> I remember going during the day to Plaza Italia. This is where the the center of all the chaos was happening.

[00:07:55]>> though I didn't get like, you know, direct contact with the gas, you can like you can feel it in your nose.

[00:08:01]That's what it was. I think I I had it yesterday, man. It's like it's like I snorted a line of chili or some [ __ ] Pretty much.

[00:08:15]Oh, [ __ ] Oh, [ __ ] Get the [ __ ] out of here, [ __ ] Oh, [ __ ] Of course, a normal person would be like, let's stay away from that trouble, but you know, I'm a documentarian. I like to film the chaos and see where this goes. So, I went back at night. That's when the protests really goes up a notch.

[00:08:51]Now, we're ready.

[00:08:53]There we go.

[00:08:55]You can definitely still smell and taste it through the bandana, so this ain't really doing [ __ ] Ah, I left my gas mask with Philippa.

[00:09:20]>> [music] [music] >> Yes, yes. Okay.

[00:09:37]So, the cops, they're coming from that way >> [music] >> and that way. So, and rumors has it that they're going up there.

[00:09:45]So, we're going to go there. That's the escape route.

[00:09:49]Let's do this.

[00:09:56]I think this may be my cue to get the [ __ ] out of here.

[00:10:00]Don't check the marijuana. Oh, [ __ ] They're coming in.

[00:10:18]Oh, [ __ ] >> [music] >> I know I'm risking it by getting this shot.

[00:10:40]I may have pushed it a little bit because [ __ ] hell, that was a close one, man.

[00:10:45]All the cops started to trap us.

[00:10:48]And uh Ah, shit's [ __ ] man.

[00:10:52]If I fell or if I took one misstep, I would have gotten [ __ ] up, dude. I can totally understand why some people do this stuff, though. It's [ __ ] exhilarating, but yeah, I didn't want to like I didn't throw any rocks at cops. I didn't do anything. I was just there as a an observer.

[00:11:07]But, I can totally understand why some people would do this.

[00:11:12]If I was a kid, I'd probably be right right there with them, so. Honestly, when I went there, my my overall emotion was just sad. It It was sad seeing my home country descend into this level of chaos cuz people are angry.

[00:11:26]And Chile is a very polarizing country.

[00:11:30]It's like there's barely any nuances.

[00:11:32]Either complete anarchist, burn the system down. So, the extremist solution is to just take the system, put it into the trash. So, they just want to all this [ __ ] to go down. And what are they What are they doing? It's like just throwing rocks to the the forces that are protecting the government. I guess they say if we if the cops don't exist, we can attack directly to the government.

[00:12:01]And we can kill them or we can threat them in order for them to go away and we can rule ourselves. And by the way, this sounds really extreme, but a lot of them genuinely wants all cops to be dead.

[00:12:14]>> Yeah. Yeah. Kill them. Yeah, man. In cold blood. Right.

[00:12:18]And that's not something weird, like All the like ultra-right conservatives, I had an uncle actually say that they should just get the military and kill all those [ __ ] Sick of all the riot. You know?

[00:12:31]So, like the opinions and the emotions are are very strong and polarizing.

[00:12:37]And yeah, it kind of it sucks seeing Chile go to this level. And well, of course, I'm wearing this bandana. I've got the mask on. I look I look like one of them.

[00:12:49]I look like one of these bloody protesters, but I'm I'm just filming, dude. I'm Hey, I just film I just film. No me tocas, por favor.

[00:12:58]But I look like one of them, right?

[00:13:00]So, of course, if the police see me, I'm either going to get arrested or [ __ ] beaten down.

[00:13:05]And it gets to the point where it's like, all right, they start closing in.

[00:13:11]This was organized. They were onto us, and then everyone just ran. At the beginning, they were marching slowly, right? With the shields, and then all of a sudden, like it was this organized formation, then they started running. So, it went from do do do do do do do do do do do do do and we're like, oh [ __ ] run!" And I just got away somehow.

[00:13:33]Ah, I took my mask off, pretended I'm a just a normal civilian, and of course I look at my camera bag and my microphone got stolen. I was like, "You sons of [ __ ] we're supposed to be in this together."

[00:13:45]As far as they knew, I was one of them, but of course some people take advantage. There's a lot of There's a lot of thievery in South America. It's just how it is. It's in the blood, mate.

[00:13:54]What can we say? That was a half joke. I got away and it was a [ __ ] scary, dude. And after that, I'm just like, "You know what? I think that's enough."

[00:14:04]Chile has had a rough history.

[00:14:07]Especially with Pinochet and the dictatorship and you know, basically there's like a handful of elites that own everything. I think we even got privatized water. It complicated, you know? Then COVID hit shortly after I left and that shut everything down. Chile's never really recovered the same way. And I went again actually this year, 6 years later, and I think it's slowly recovering, but again, who knows? But I learned that Chile experience for me was almost like a a prophecy. It was a sneak peek of what was going to happen to the rest of the world. And so, this isn't unique to Chile, but it is an interesting pattern to see unfold. I've seen so many things play out in the way that's like, "Huh, I never thought that we would descend to that, but [ __ ] Humans are very easily controllable. We're very easily manipulatable. Manipulatable, is that a word?

[00:15:02]We can get manipulated very easily.

[00:15:04]>> [laughter] [snorts] >> And if you're not careful, things can fall. So, you got to I don't know. I don't know I don't even know what the message of this video is. Maybe I shouldn't try to make a a moral lesson.

[00:15:14]Like, mhm.

[00:15:15]Can't we all just get along? I think it's gotten better since. And humans are resilient. We recover.

[00:15:22]Sometimes we need to just let it out. Anyways, let us know in the comment section below an example of your country descending into madness or an example. I'd love to know. And if you enjoy these kind of stories, subscribe to this channel, like this video, and I'll catch you on the next one.

[00:15:37]Actually, check out this video. It's pretty cool. Much love. Bye-bye.