Word: frei
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There was none of the jostling, banner-waving excitement of a normal Chilean election. The festooning posters that usually blot out Santiago were scarcely in evidence, and even the slogans were muted. That is the way Eduardo Frei, Chile's new Christian Democratic President, wants it. Next week, when 2,920,000 voters choose a full Assembly and half of the Senate, the issue, as Frei somberly puts it, is whether or not they will "make a Parliament for Frei"-in other words, make it possible to carry out the platform on which he was elected last September...
...head-to-head campaign against Chile's powerful, Communist-dominated leftists, Frei (pronounced Fray) was swept into office with 54% of the vote, the greatest plurality in Chilean history. He won partly because of his own magnetism, partly because of his ambitious ideas to cure Chile's many economic and social ills. Yet in office he has been stymied by a lame-duck Congress in which his Christian Democrats control only 24 of 147 Assembly seats and nine of 45 seats in the Senate. His opponents in six other parties have blocked him to the point where...
From Right & Left. Frei proposes a state bank to force down the high interest rates charged by Chile's private banks and thus help rein in inflation (up 38% in 1964), land reform to distribute unused or badly administered estates to 100,000 landless peasants, tax reform to raise rates on middle and high incomes, school reform to upgrade Chile's lagging primary and secondary schools. He wants to deflate the government's ballooning bureaucracy and amend the constitution to protect workers' rights to join unions. His most controversial proposal is the "Chileanization" of the country...
Chile's imaginative new President Eduardo Frei may not be able to get a single key bill through his lame-duck Congress, but he has certainly stirred the country's youth to unaccustomed activities. To help make good his election promise of "no child without a school," Frei has recruited an unpaid hammer-and-nail corps of 1,500 university students to build schools in out-of-the-way places that have rarely seen a government mission of any kind. Local communities provide building materials, plus food and lodging for the student workers. The students expect to complete...
With his government stuck on dead center, Frei went on nationwide radio and eloquently drew the battle lines for the March 7 elections. "This country cannot wait indefinitely," said the President. "It is faced with problems of dramatic urgency. We cannot play politics, because the game costs lives and misery. I have not come merely to occupy a position. I have come to carry out a task, and I will appeal to the people as a supreme arbiter...