Chileans filled a plaza in the center of the capital Tuesday in the 12th day of demonstrations that began with youth protests over a subway fare hike and transformed into a leaderless national movement demanding greater equality and better public services.
Piñera, a billionaire businessman who sees the private sector and economic growth as the keys to national success, may be hoping that his relatively minor concessions will calm the streets as protests approach the two-week mark, said Lucia Dammert, a sociologist and political scientist at the University of Santiago."It's really unclear what the government's strategy is. They find themselves facing a situation they weren't prepared for," she said.
Many protesters want a new constitution to replace the one that was written in 1980 under military dictator Augusto Pinochet and that creates the legal basis of Chile's market-driven system. That idea began to gain momentum Tuesday when the leader of one of the three parties that supports Piñera in congress came out in favor of reforming the constitution.
The opposition parties were holding meetings Tuesday to begin moving forward on constitutional reform. Piñera's proposals to calm the protests so far"are window dressing, because none of the things we've been fighting for has really been achieved," said Catalina Alfaro, 55, who hasn't been able to join the protests because she has been busy running a bakery she owns in western Santiago.
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