Word: pinochets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew last Thursday, 18,000 troops and police battled hundreds of angry Chilean youths in the streets, while thousands of householders leaned from their windows banging pots and pans in a now familiar ritual of protest against the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. When the fighting ceased, 26 civilians, including three children, were dead, more than 100 were wounded by gunfire and an estimated 1,000 were arrested. In the aftermath, Major General Osvaldo Hernandez claimed his troops had been attacked by "subversives...
...said Air Force Commander-in-Chief General Fernando Matthei. In what looked like a possible crack in the military monolith supporting Pinochet, Matthei claimed that "at no moment were there clashes in the neighborhoods that I visited." Almost simultaneously, retired Army General Roberto Viaux Marambio, a right-winger and hitherto firm supporter of Pinochet, issued an open protest against the government crackdown. "I do not want to keep silent lest it imply complicity," said Viaux. "The armed forces have been employed to repress the call of national protest." The signs of dissension in the military came after a week...
...honor Christian Democratic Party President Gabriel Valdés. A former Foreign Minister under President Eduardo Frei, Valdés, 63, used the occasion to unveil a new coalition of Chile's five main parties, excluding the Communists. Calling itself the Democratic Alliance, the group demanded that Pinochet give way to a provisional government leading to elections within 18 months...
...that 1,500 politicians and their supporters had assembled safely in the same room was an event in itself. Officially, political parties are still banned; until a few months ago, such a meeting would have been unthinkable. In uniting the usually fractious opposition, Valdés hoped to convince Pinochet that the alliance offered a valid alternative to a nation staggered with debt and unemployment and locked in an often brutal cycle of protest and repression...
With Valdés calling for dialogue, the stage was now set for the government's response. It came four days later, when Pinochet, 67, stood wearily at attention in La Moneda Palace to the recorded strains of Chile's national anthem. The stocky, graying dictator stared impassively at the ceiling as the names of seven new Cabinet ministers were announced. The ceremony at first appeared depressingly familiar: it was the fifth Cabinet shuffle within 16 months, the 33rd in the decade since Pinochet seized power...