Tens of thousands of Chilean workers, students and teachers participated in a 48-hour general strike initiated by the country’s main labor federation to call “for a different Chile.”
Student protesters in Chile say they’ll keep up the pressure on the government at least until Sept. 11, the anniversary of the bloody coup that started the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Workers at Chile’s Escondida copper mine voted to end a 15-day-old strike despite failing to win their demand for a bonus of 5 million pesos ($10,562). Union officials admitted the members were worn out after two weeks without pay.
Street-fighting erupted in Santiago, with tear-gas and mass arrests, after the government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera refused to issue permits for student marches, using a decree from the Pinochet era.
Acting on a court order, police destroyed homes that 500 squatters had improvised out of canvas, cardboard and sheet metal when they occupied land near the provincial capital, San Miguel de Tucumán.
Four people were killed when provincial police forcibly evicted some 700 families from land they had been occupying in the northwestern Argentine province of Jujuy.
Greenpeace charges that operations by the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation in the Argentine Andes at the border with Chile have already significantly damaged three small glaciers.
Tens of thousands of Chilean students and supporters held their fourth massive demonstration demanding a reversal of the system of privatized education instituted under Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Chilean president Sebastián Piñera is backing a bill that would legalize civil unions for the country’s same-sex couples, but LGBT activists are pushing for full marriage equality. Cuba meanwhile held its first-ever Pride march.
Tens of thousands of Chilean students, parents and teachers took to the streets in the latest protest against the privatized education system set up under the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship.
An appeals court in Puerto Montt, Chile, ordered a halt to all construction and permitting processes for the controversial HidroAysén five-dam mega-project while a case against the project is pending.
Tens of thousands of students, teachers and supporters protested Chile’s education policies with a huge demonstration in Santiago that the press called “the most massive march since the return of democracy” in 1990.
