Deaths reported in day of Chilean protests

Press, 16 June 1983, Page 10

Deaths reported in day of Chilean protests

NZPA Santiago Two people, one a six-year-old boy, were killed and at least 350 people were arrested in the Chilean capital, Santiago, yesterday in street protests during a mostly peaceful “day of national protest” against military rule, said the Associated Press, quoting two radio stations.

Radio Cooperativa and Radio Chilena quoted family and hospital sources as saying that Patricio Yanez and Leopoldo Segovia, aged 20, had died of bullet wounds in separate Santiago slums that were scenes of the night-time clashes. They said that the boy had been standing in the doorway of his home when he was shot.

Earlier the police charged into crowds along Santiago’s main avenue and onlookers said that many people had been injured. Several people also had been detained during the clashes on the Alameda. Thousands were on the avenue after being stranded in the city by a cut in bus services.

The Interior Minister, General Enrique Montero, said earlier that 58 people had been arrested during the day. The day of protest, the second in just over a month and organised by trade unions to demonstrate opposition to the Government’s economic policies, as well as to demand a rapid return to democracy, was described by the President, General Augusto Pinochet, as the work of Communists. General Pinochet, in power since the Marxist

President, Salvador Allende, was ousted in a military coup in September, 1973, said in northern Chile that there would be no change in the Constitution that does not envisage a return to democracy before 1989. “These protests, which are not original nor Chilean, are a Communist ploy,” he said. In other incidents, residents of one of Santiago’s most affluent suburbs said that riot police had fired tear-gas grenades at cars moving in a slow convoy. A radio station reported that tear-gas had been used in blocks of flats where housewives had banged saucepans in a show of opposition to the Government.

Many pupils stayed away from school. About 1000 students occupied a university library on a campus in the east of Santiago and pelted police buses with stones when the police fired tear-gas grenades in a bid to dislodge them. The clashes at the library were the most serious of several incidents, mainly at university buildings, where

students gathered and shouted slogans calling for a return to democracy. The police earlier used water-cannon to disperse about 100 law students who tried to march to the centre of Santiago after a demonstration at their faculty, where they burned textbooks, a copy of the Constitution, and a dummy of General Pinochet.

Although the police were apparently under orders to act with restraint, several people had been detained in the incidents and many had been injured in scuffles at the university building and in demonstrations at the central law courts, onlookers said.

Others staged a sit-in at the Catholic cathedral in Santiago.

A Government statement issued earlier in the day listed 10 attacks against public transport on Tuesday, including three bomb blasts which interrupted rail traffic to the south for several hours. Union leaders issued statements deploring the bomb attacks and urging peaceful protests.