As you probably don't know since I am not very active in this wiki in general, I am from Chile, a country which is under severe political/social unrest at the moment. Due to reasons related to my studies, I was (and still am) abroad at the moment this started, but most of my family and friends are still there. This led to a strong feeling of uselessness/worthlessness, in a "I'm safe here, away from everything that's happening, taking the easy way out. What can I do to help? Nothing?" sense.
Of course, this is not really a good mindset, but as the news of police brutality and repression came this feeling became stronger. I mean, when you hear that 400 people have had some degree of eye injury and partial loss of vision because the police doesn't know (and doesn't care) how to use nonlethal weaponry properly, that on the early days of the unrest several hundred cases of sexual abuse and torture cropped up, it's hard to be optimistic— these were things that weren't done so blatantly since the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship. Of course, the riots have been quite damaging as well (get a lot of angry people in an environment where they are sure nobody will hear them because nobody cares about their demands, and add serious incompetence from the government in handling the situation, and…) but that certainly does not justify things that can only be called state-sponsored human rights violation.
I was really, really scared on the first days of this, when things started. What would happen to my family, and my friends? What if they got caught in the middle of a riot, or if some overzealous policeman decided that they looked suspicious? Things have calmed down somewhat in the time since October, and some glimpses of potential improvement have appeared, such as a motion to change the current Constitution (which was one of the last "legacies" of Pinochet, designed to make the act of promoting and implementing most social reforms, e.g., healthcare or retirement, as hard as possible) and other important issues were addressed seriously for the first time in MEKHANE-knows-how-many years.
But the root of the issues still stands, and I don't expect the social unrest to fully end anytime soon. Thus, I still feel that I am doing nothing to help, to a degree. So, I've come to the conclusion that the best I can do is to raise awareness of Chile and of its current situation in any way I can— one of them being the creation of a SCP file both set in Chile and related to its local culture and mythology. This SCP, by design, couldn't have been set anywhere else. And so, writing this was also a coping strategy for me. I hope that this doesn't dampen any possible enjoyment you might've derived from it (I understand that politics, moreso those related to social issues, are extremely touchy subjects specially on the internet) but I wanted to give my rationale behind this article and my reasons for writing and posting it. Thanks for reading this.
If you are interested in knowing more about the ongoing situation, this Cracked article might be a good place to start, despite any personal opinions one may have about Cracked itself, heh. The Twitter account of the National Institute of Human Rights is also a good resource if you can read Spanish.
(account deleted)
