translated from Spanish: The teacher charged with damage to the Metro spoke: “The tourniquet was already broken when I hit him”

Roberto Campos, the teacher formalized for the damage to the tourniquets in the Santiago Metro, referred for the first time to the process he is going through and that he kept it for 56 days in pre-trial detention in the High Security Prison. As told CHV, on 17 October, the day the events occurred, he joined the mobilizations after leaving work. “I vacated at six-thirty and went. I decided to go because I had to take the subway and I meet a lot of people protesting and there was a person who took a short-line and started destroying the validators. Then someone else followed, then another person and I was the last person to join that group,” he said. The facts, the professor claimed occurred when he took “a sheet that is on the doors of the Metro exit, which is like a plaque like the consistency of a ruler and I hit the tourniquet. And the tourniquet was already broken when I hit him.”” If you see the video well, when I hit it with that plastic plate, this plate is destroyed at one point, because it was weak,” he said, assuring that he did the least damage to public transport furniture.” I didn’t dare take a short-line to break the tourniquet. I never would have done it, I never would have been the first to do that. (…) I was the last person to get in and I was the one who did the least damage. And I’m the one who’s paying the worst consequences. I paid 56 days in prison,” he added. For Roberto this situation was not consistent with the facts in which he incurred. And he reflected on the situation and, in particular, on the impact it had on those who took part in the demonstrations. “I became a symbol of this social movement along with Gustavo Gatica and others,” he said, clarifying that his act is “obviously not right. The way is not violence. And as for his reasons for having been involved in the incidents, he insisted that at the time “I felt anger, for social injustices, because being a teacher is not easy, I have no basic social rights, such as health and everything that has happened with the pros fesors, the historical debt, which surely when Jubilee I will earn the minimum wage and it was all those injustices that at that time obscured me,” he acknowledged. However, he reiterated that “I should never have done that, but I got carried away because at that moment the euphoria of all the audience that was there… I joined. It could have happened to anyone,” he concluded.

Original source in Spanish