JONATHAN FRANKLIN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Dateline: Santiago, Chile

(Photo: Saint Huck)A Chilean artist using the name “Fried Potatoes” [Papas Fritas] spent a year as he planned a unique revenge on a notorious for-profit University. Saying he was “collecting material for an art project”, the 31-year-old visual artist, snuck into a bank vault at Universidad del Mar and pilfered original copies of tuition contracts.

“Fried Potatoes” – whose real name is Francisco Tapia - then burned the university documents, making it extremely difficult for creditors to collect. “It’s over. You are all free of debt,” he exclaimed in a 5-minute video released earlier this month. Speaking to indebted students, he said, “You don’t have to pay a penny.”

Tapia’s move is just the most radical of an ongoing 3-year movement by Chilean students to reform Chile’s mediocre public education system. With monthly street marches – and four student leaders elected last November to parliament – the students have built a potent citizen’s movement rarely seen in post-Pinochet Chile.

Recently elected socialist President Michelle Bachelet supports the students and earlier this month increased the corporate tax rate to finance their main demand: free university education for all. On Wednesday, as Bachelet gave her state of the union address that outlined a multibillion dollar educational initiative, students protesting outside the congressional hall scattered ashes from the burned documents in symbolic protest against for-profit educational scams.

The ashes from the student debt – which Tapia hyped as being worth as much as US$500 million – have been converted into a mobile art exhibit built into the sides of a Volkswagen camper van. The back window of the van holds a video screen so that Tapia’s impassioned message can be played to crowds of curious onlookers.

Buzzflash commentaries like this one aren’t funded by corporate advertising, but by readers like you. Can you help sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation?

The van, ladened with ash, has toured the streets of Santiago and Valparaiso, and even went on display at the GAM – a prominent Santiago art gallery and cultural center. When Chilean detectives, wearing head to toe white body suits, arrived in mid-May and confiscated the fine gray dust as evidence, they too were incorporated into the exhibit’s PR blitz and listed as “media partners.”

Tapia’s target, Univesidad del Mar, located in the swanky seaside resort of Renaca, was less a university and more like a money laundering operation according to a government investigation. The University was shuttered last year, accreditations stripped away and thousands of students left with half a diploma and full load of student debt. Until now.

With his orange knit cap, extra large sunglasses, and sporting a shaggy beard, Tapia became an instant cultural celebrity. He was compared to everything from Robin Hood to a “twenty something Bin Laden lookalike.” Chilean satirical magazine “The Clinic” put him on the cover and pop singer Anita Tijoux applauded his move.

Lawyers in Chile say that destroying the documents does not rescind the debt obligations but make it extremely difficult to prove the debt exists. Only by formally testifying in court and acknowledging the debt would students now be forced to pay, said Mauricio Daza, a Chilean lawyer.

Daza also argued that the debts were of questionable legality even before “Fried Potatoes” destroyed them. “These debts are product of a fraud by the owners of the university over a long period of time,” said Daza. “They pretended to have a non-profit [University] but really it was all a coverup for getting money from the students and the state and transferring those resources into the pockets of the university owners.”

Chilean students brought up the accusations of for-profit education schemes during huge street protests in 2011. As hundreds of universities and high schools were seized and occupied by teenage students, legislators began to investigate the charges. Eventually the students were proven right, university leaders were jailed and institutions shut down.

Tapia said his plan hatched after reading press accounts that Universidad del Mar students were being forced to pay debt even after the university was shut down.

In a communiqué he delivered to a Chilean court, Tapia explained and defended his action. He claimed to have smuggled the documents to Santiago, where he began to investigate the credit files, case-by-case, student-by-student. By day Tapia would investigate the financial situation and life struggle of a single student. Then in the evening, he would destroy the documents related to that particular debt. “Every night, like a ritual, I burned the documents that detailed the debt.”

University spokesman confirmed the documents had been stolen but refused to quantify how much the papers were worth.

Former Universidad del Mar students have celebrated the unorthodox protest. “This is spectacular, this is the only victory we have had in economic terms,” said Raul Soto, a spokesman for the former students. “This gives us the peace of mind that we are not going to still be in debt to Universidad del Mar.”

Also see: "Chilean Robin Hood? Artist Known as 'Papas Fritas' on Burning $500 Million Worth of Student Debt" on Truthout.