Marching Out Of a Dictator's Nightmare: Student Movement Paves Way For Chilean President
AlterNet / By Benjamin Dangl
Marching Out Of a Dictator's Nightmare: Student Movement Paves Way For Chilean President
The left-leaning leader Michelle Bachelet has pledged to tackle income inequality and make quality higher education free.
March 14, 2014 |
“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 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.alternet.org/world/marching-out-dictators-nightmare-student-movement-paves-way-chilean-president
