Who is camila vallejo

Vallejo pronounced Va-yay-ho was herself ambushed with tear-gas after a student meeting. These weren't like the student protests occurring simultaneously in Britain: they were more radical, far more popular, and demonstrably more effective. It forced several concessions from the Chilean government, and ousted two ministers from office. And at its centre was Vallejo, "a Botticelli beauty" — in the words of the novelist Francisco Goldman — who at 23 became both a nose-ringed national treasure and a megastar of the international left.

When she visited Mexico in June, crowds stood in the rain to see her. It feels strange to see her in a more becalmed context. We meet on a grey day in a conference room at the University of East London, buried among the scrapyards and dual-carriageways of the Docklands. Outside, aeroplanes screech across the runway opposite every other minute. Inside, three-dozen jetlagged student leaders from across the globe — drained by two days of solid conferencing — slide in sleepily, some several minutes late for her speech.

Vallejo calmly waits at the back. It's a strange place to find a revolutionary. What is she fighting for? Free education, first and foremost. But Vallejo's demands go further. Her generation is pushing for a wider reimagining of Chilean neoliberal society — a society that they argue has not changed enough since the days of Augusto Pinochet, and which has created one of the world's largest gaps between rich and poor.

I don't speak Spanish, and Vallejo doesn't speak English, so our every utterance must pass through the stoic Leal. Everything gets confused, and I don't feel I'm meeting the Vallejo whose fluent and arresting presence you can find so easily on YouTube.

There are many other comrades who should also be there and learn what the struggle in that space means, because you see great class contradictions there.

Running in my place will be another comrade from the Communist Youth Daniela Serrano , who has a particular history of struggle, who is also from the student world. Unlike other student leaders such as Gabriel Boric and Giorgio Jackson, who rejected traditional parties from the beginning, you have always been a member of the Communist Party.

What is your history with the party? I became a member in , before the student movement of For me, the Communist Youth was a school. There, I forged my main convictions. It was with the convictions given to me by my political militancy that I entered the student movement and tried to represent it, largely as a spokesperson. I was not going to abandon those convictions just in order to enter Congress.

My most direct family was communist, but they formed me more in values of solidarity rather than political militancy as such. I decided to join because of the experience I had at the University of Chile. The Communist Youth was the organization that I found most serious and responsible, the product of its history and proposals.

Being a leftist implies accepting hard truths: Economic inequality, climate change, patriarchy. Their intelligence is moving and surprising. My daughter knows what I do. But for the moment, she understands that there are things that need to be changed, that there are people who suffer from hunger.

Children nowadays are very careful with animals, even with insects, they question adults a lot about protecting the environment. Brazilian students now parade her as a VIP guest at their marches, the Chilean president invites her to negotiate a settlement and when she calls for a show of strength hundreds of thousands of students throughout Chile take to the streets. As an adept and wildly popular social media phenomenon, Vallejo has risen to become the most recognisable face of the student protesters.

Throughout the six-month revolt, Chilean students — in many cases led by and year-olds — have seized the streets of Santiago and major cities, provoking and challenging the status quo with their demand for a massive restructuring of the nation's for-profit higher education industry.

In support of their demands for free university education, since May they have organised 37 marches, which have gathered upwards of , students at a time. Police repression has been frequent. Vandals who often use the cover of student marches to attack banks, pharmacies and utility companies are met by an armed force of riot police who routinely attack pedestrians and tear gas crowds of innocent civilians.

What began as a quiet plea for improvements in public education has now erupted into a wholescale rejection of the Chilean political elite. More than high schools nationwide have been seized by students and a dozen universities shut down by protests. Classes for tens of thousands of students have been suspended since May, and the entire school year might have to be repeated. We are at a crucial moment in this struggle and international support is key. As a daughter of members of Communist Party of Chile and activists in the Chilean resistance during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, she connected with leftist students and got involved in politics after starting her geography studies at University of Chile.

Soon after entering the university, she joined the Chilean Communist Youth. Vallejo was councillor of the University of Chile Student Federation in , and was chosen as its president in November , becoming only the second woman to hold this post in the year history of the student union.