Chile's Student Movement Leads the Way: Progressive Prospects for Michelle Bachelet's Second Term
Chile's Student Movement Leads the Way: Progressive Prospects for Michelle Bachelet's Second Term
Friday, 14 March 2014 10:06
By Benjamin Dangl, Toward Freedom
"I want to pay special homage to my father and to all those who gave their lives in the fight to recover democracy," an emotional Isabel Allende said upon taking office as the Senate President this Tuesday. Allende is the daughter of Salvador Allende, the former socialist president of Chile who died during a US-backed military coup in 1973. "I know he'd be proud to see his daughter in this role."
Later that day, Allende, (different from the novelist with the same, who is a distant relative), passed the presidential sash to left-leaning President Michelle Bachelet as she entered her second term in office. The two embraced warmly; it was the first time in Chilean history the sash had been passed between two women.
This historic event marks a crack in the legacy of dictator Augusto Pinochet, an event he and his allies probably believed would never be possible when they oversaw the bombing of Allende's presidential palace, the systematic torture and murdering of thousands of people, and the application of a disastrous neoliberal economy.
Bachelet's return to the presidency, and her promise for structural changes to Chile's educational and political system, is the result of a decades-long struggle to move out of the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship, and is one of the fruits of the more recent student movement for a better society.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22475-chiles-student-movement-leads-the-way-progressive-prospects-for-michelle-bachelets-second-term
Unlike the fascist brats in Venezuela, these students fight for better conditions for those who NEED education, medical care, safe, clean housing, decent wages, etc.