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CHILE: Chile's student movement radicalized six months of the presidential

Roadblocks, barricades on fire, traffic jams, clashes with police ... Chilean students have intensified their movement in recent weeks by multiplying protests and occupying including schools and universities

Latest, Wednesday, June 26. Tens of thousands of young people marched in Santiago and in Concepcion, southern Chile, while others occupied schools and universities in the capital. Dč s the first hours of the day, they erected barricades around settlements, causing huge traffic jams in the streets of the capital of six million an hour point.

The most serious incidents occurred near the University of Chile, where protesters clashed with hooded police who used tear gas and water cannons . Protesters also attacked the town's shops, destroyed public furniture and threw hundreds of Molotov cocktails.  

Students evicted before the primary vote

Chilean police had to intervene, Thursday, June 27, to expel students from twenty schools in Santiago they occupied for weeks and that will serve as polling station Sunday for primary pre , Presidential November 17. The Government took the view that the occupation of schools is an obstacle to democracy and could deter voters go to the polls

One hundred people were also arrested at the end of the march on Wednesday, according to official figures from the Office of the Governor of Santiago. The Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick lamented during a press conference, the incidents, saying they "is not students but die , offenders and violent extremists who act in an organized manner. " For his part, the spokesman Isabel Salgado students demanded the resignation of Education Minister Carolina Schmidt, currently on holiday in Italy. "We are now mobilized for years without any response" from the government, said Ms Salgado.

Bachelet promised a "free education"

It is the sixth step from the beginning of the year to protest against the education system inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Since 2011, Chilean students staged nearly a hundred events and ask the government of Sebastian Pinera - the first right-wing president since the end of the dictatorship in 1990 - a reform education system, expensive and inefficient, according to them.

Favourite for the primary center-left coalition, as well as the November presidential election, the former president of the center-left Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) promised to work to establish a free education in the country, ranked last of the 34 member countries of the OECD (0rganization of Economic Cooperation and Development) in terms of inequality.