Arresting development in Chile

[struggle4progress]

Tom Burgis
14 - 6 - 2005

Chilean congressmen, academics and peaceful activists are unaccustomed to imprisonment since Augusto Pinochet relinquished Chile’s presidency in 1990. But when carabineros descend on environmental protesters in Santiago, the parallels are disquieting. Tom Burgis reports.



A campaign that began with endangered swans and grew into an indictment of Chilean democracy was stonewalled on 10 June when police rounded up demonstrators in the Chilean capital, Santiago. Scores of protesters – among them politicians, unionists, lecturers and leading environmentalists – were arrested for “disturbing the peace” as they approached the presidential palace to deliver a letter demanding the closure of a controversial wood-pulp plant in the southern city of Valdivia. All were later released without charge.

“Everything was peaceful until the carabineros - sent in, I imagine, by someone in the government - arrived, triggering violence. It’s incomprehensible, the attitude the government took today. It is a crime against freedom of expression, against the constitution,” said Nelson Avila, a Radical Social Democratic Party senator among those detained. <snip>

http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-protest/chile_2598.jsp