Word: pinochets
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...Santiago's Plaza Italia was peaceful, orderly and well organized by five of the nation's leading opposition groups. All that did not prevent the government of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte from launching one of its most vivid displays of brutality since Chileans began staging monthly "days of national protest" against the Pinochet regime four months ago. As some 3,000 demonstrators chanted, "He's going to fall, he's going to fall," riot police armed with truncheons, tear gas and water cannons fell upon the demonstrators and beat them savagely. "This is madness, madness!" objected...
...Pinochet no doubt wishes that the widespread opposition to his ten-year reign could be obliterated. Instead, the movement has been steadily gaining in strength, fueled by the government's inept management of the economy (15% inflation, 34.6% unemployment) and its indifference to civil and human rights. Especially troubling to Pinochet is the growing cohesiveness of the Democratic Alliance, a loose federation of the nation's five major opposition parties. The most recent demonstration was part of a protest organized by the Democratic Alliance to mark the tenth anniversary last Sunday of the military coup that ousted...
...violence ended a promising attempt by Jarpa to deal with the opposition on a more conciliatory basis. A former senator of the right-wing National Party, he was appointed by Pinochet last month in a Cabinet shakeup. Jarpa met twice with Democratic Alliance leaders to discuss such demands as changing the regime's ruinously monetarist economic policies and allowing elections well in advance of 1989, when Pinochet's term is scheduled to end. Jarpa agreed to suspend a 1973 emergency state law that imposed a nationwide curfew and to begin inviting over 1,000 leading political figures...
...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...