Chile: Street Fight

Pinochet-withstands a protest

Armed with homemade Molotov cocktails, guns, wooden sticks, nails and even arrows, slumdwellers near Santiago prepared for clashes with police. Some Chileans turned their homes into hospitals, bracing for severe government reprisals. Doctors and nurses stood ready to attend the injured.

As the people prepared, so did the government. It imposed a 48-hour curfew to limit street demonstrations. Ironically, the curfew made Chile’s 24-hour general strike last week far more effective than widespread street rioting would have been. Fed up with the ten-year-old regime of General Augusto Pinochet, thousands of Chileans kept their children home from school to protest their country’s 30% unemployment and 30% inflation. Public transportation was scarce, and a majority of truckers stayed off the roads. After the Santiago Retailers Association joined the protest, most stores closed their doors. At nightfall, the streets of Santiago were filled with the sound of banging pots and pans as Chileans leaned out their windows, just technically in compliance with the curfew laws designed to keep them off the streets. Said Gabriel Valdes, president of the Democratic Alliance, a coalition that includes political parties from the Republican right to the Socialists: “The people have demanded, as never before, that Pinochet and his regime must leave the government once and for all.”

The street demonstrations produced considerable violence but only a few casualties. When hundreds of rock-throwing students tried to rally in downtown Santiago, police dispersed them with water cannons, tear gas and clubs. By the end of the week, seven demonstrators had died, about 30 had been wounded and 400 had been arrested in eight cities. Police and soldiers did not roam the streets shooting and clubbing protesters at random, as they had done during the past five protests since last spring. Still, the death toll from all these demonstrations stands high, at 75.

Despite the overwhelming opposition to Pinochet’s regime, it is unlikely that he will be persuaded to step down soon. He has, if anything, become more determined to keep a tight grip on the country in the face of growing internal and external criticism. There are signs that his once unswerving military support has been reduced to a small core of hard-line generals. Various governments around the world have openly criticized him in recent months. For Pinochet, the most stinging criticism comes from the U.S.: only minutes before the protest began, the State Department sent a telex to the Chilean government urging it to enter into a dialogue with its opposition. So far Pinochet prefers to conduct his dialogues alone.