Update on protests in Chile and Lebanon

Tens of thousands of protesters in Lebanon have attempted to form a human chain running across the entire country to symbolise newfound national unity.

Demonstrators planned to join hands from Tripoli to Tyre, a 170km (105-mile) chain running through the capital, Beirut, as part of an unprecedented cross-sectarian mobilisation.

Tension has mounted in recent days between security forces and protesters, who have blocked roads and brought the country to a standstill to press their demands for a complete overhaul of the political system.

  Guardian

Maybe we need to take their lead.

The news out of Chile is not good.

[Christopher] Madrid, a 25-year-old student, was shot last Monday by Chilean army troops as he marched in a street protest near the Catholic University in central Santiago.

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“The soldier was about 40m away. He looked at me and fired,” said [...] Madrid, pointing to the patch above his right eye. “I swung away and the bullet grazed [my forehead] and came out, left a scar of four or five centimetres.”

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“There was a journalism student who was beaten so badly she could not talk, or remember her name. Her whole body was bruised after being kicked and clubbed,” said Felipe Hernández, a law student. “We had a woman yesterday with a broken jaw – the soldiers broke it with a rifle butt.”

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“Lots of people were going down with head wounds,” explained Madrid as he waited impatiently in Posta, a dilapidated health clinic where dozens of gunshot victims were being treated, including a close friend, shot three times in the head and once in the leg with “balines” – marble-sized bullets that are rarely fatal but can puncture a lung or take out an eye.

Shots in the head can be fatal, no matter what the projectile.

Meanwhile, in the streets the shootings continue unabated. “So many protesters are being shot in the eye,” a healthcare worker told the Chilean investigative news site CIPER. At the eye trauma unit of Posta, where protesters with eye injuries are taken, “the situation is atrocious,” she said. “Many patients have their eyes shattered. We have never had so many ruptured eyes at once. The rubber bullets and the buckshot don’t kill, but they pierce the eye. All the patients have a poor chance of regaining vision. Many eyes have been lost.”

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The lack of basic medical treatment for the largely working-class victims of gunshot wounds was notable inside Posta, as staff described shortages of supplies in the public health facilities and emphasised the gulf between services at this run-down structure and the gleaming private clinics just 10km away.

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Resources are so limited that physicians and nurses must decide whether to withhold supplies for patients near death in favour of those with a better chance of survival.

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President Sebastián Piñera had declared that the authorities “are at war” with those who are marching, but yesterday he announced a cabinet reshuffle and said he would ease the military-enforced curfew.

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Chilean TV news broadcasts have so censored images that the stations have been surrounded by angry crowds. The once esteemed Televisión Nacional de Chile was forced to protect its headquarters with platoons of heavily armed soldiers to prevent protesters from seizing their broadcast facilities.

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[T]he official figure stands at 470 people shot.

Santiago Chile:

"Hundreds of thousands" is a better heading.