Word: juntas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ambassador of the Chilean Military Junta to the United States was recently invited to Boston by the Pan American Society. This visit included a luncheon at the Harvard Faculty Club on October 23, 1980. We feel it important that the Harvard Community should be aware of the economic and political atmosphere prevailing in Chile today after seven years of military dictatorship...
...growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product in Chile was 1.5 per cent (The World Bank Report; August, 1980). This figure should be contrasted to that of the 1960s (4.5 per cent) when Chile was under a democratically-elected regime. More importantly, these numbers contradict those claimed by The Junta, widely publicized in several government-paid advertisements in American newspapers. According to the Chilean National Institute of Statistics, the rate of unemployment has increased from 5.7 per cent in 1970 to 12.5 per cent in 1980. Of those who are employed, thousands earn no more than $480 (US) per year...
...political climate in Chile is no better than the economic one. All political activity, except that sponsored by The Junta, has been banned since 1973. The Chilean Commission of Human Rights reported that over a thousand persons were arrested and detained during the first six months of 1980, and another 500 during the month of July alone. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International reported that arrests and torture have risen dramatically since last May, and that, again, many professors were dismissed from university positions on the basis of their political views...
Under this increasingly repressive situation, the Pinochet regime held a constitutional plebiscite on September 11, 1980 with the aim of legitimizing authoritarian rule. This vote was nothing short of a distortion of basic democratic principles. The Junta rejected the idea that alternative constitutional proposals appear on the ballot. The government required that every Chilean over 18 vote; if not, they would be imprisoned. There were no voter registration lists. If a person left his or her ballot blank, it was counted as a pro-government vote. Finally, all votes were counted by The Junta in secret with no independent observers...
Though Pérez Esquivel is only the second Argentine ever to win the Peace Prize (the first was Foreign Minister Saavedra Lamas in 1936 for having settled the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay), the reaction of the junta was singularly graceless. Claiming that the award had "taken the country by surprise," the military leadership charged that Pérez Esquivel's activities "were effectively used, regardless of his intentions, to make the movement of various terrorist organizations easier...