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.
Four Mapuche activists imprisoned in Chile’s central Araucanía region have ended a liquids-only hunger strike they started on March 15 to protest convictions in what they considered an unfair trial.
The government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner finally agreed to negotiate seriously with Qom (Toba) protesters after 16 community members started an open-ended hunger strike in Buenos Aires.
Two Chilean Mapuche prisoners were admitted to a hospital after 72 days of a liquids-only hunger strike. Corrections authorities denied that the prisoners’ lives were in danger.
A court in Argentina sentenced eight former army officers to life imprisonment for their role in the Margarita Belén massacre, named for the town where 22 unarmed political prisoners were tortured and killed on Dec. 13, 1976.
Argentine federal authorities arrested three pilots and a retired naval official on charges of having participated in “death flights,” in which disappeared dissidents were dropped alive into the sea during the military dictatorship.
Protesters clashed with police in Chile’s southern Patagonia region after the government approved construction of the HidroAysén multi-dam hydroelectric mega-project that will flood 5,700 hectares of farmland and forest.
A group of Mapuche rights activists interrupted Easter mass at Santiago’s Metropolitan Cathedral to call for the release of four Mapuche prisoners who have been on hunger strike for more than a month.
A federal judge in Argentina sentenced Gen. Reynaldo Bignone, the last president in the country’s 1976-1983 military regime, to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
Former Argentine general Eduardo Cabanillas was sentenced to life in prison for running the Automotores Orletti secret detention center in Buenos Aires during the period of military rule from 1976-83.
