Word: chilean
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...putsch's early and darkest days, Jara was rounded up and held in Chile Stadium in the capital, Santiago. After he was tortured and killed, his body was tossed into the streets. Frei Montalva originally backed Pinochet's rule, but by the 1980s opposed it. According to the Chilean judge, three men tied to Pinochet, including a doctor, secretly injected Frei Montalva with toxic mustard gas and thallium while he was in the hospital for stomach surgery. (See Hillary Clinton's TIME 100 tribute to Chile's President Michelle Bachelet...
...Chile's Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks. Their assaults - torching forests, hijacking forestry trucks, seizing rural ranches - have created Chile's worst security crisis in decades. (See a story about a 120-year-old Mapuche warrior, from TIME's archives...
...accused by anonymous and masked witnesses. It also imposes longer prison sentences and augments the powers of the police and judicial system - never a comfortable prospect in a country that is still shaking the ironfisted ghosts of the Pinochet regime. "This law is an abomination," says Richard Caifal, a Chilean human-rights lawyer, "and the government is using it in a discriminating way, only against Mapuches...
...referring to is the central Araucania region, where Chile's 700,000 Mapuches (4% of the country's 17 million people) were forced to settle after the military finally "pacified" them in 1881. Until then, the Mapuche had resisted efforts by the Inca empire, Spanish colonizers and the new Chilean republic to subjugate them. Many Mapuche leaders still argue the country should return their ancestral lands in regions like south central Chile; but they're also angry about vast tracts they say were illegally taken from them in Araucania, near the city of Temuco, for forestry operations. This year militants...
Meanwhile, dozens of Mapuche communities have joined forces to create the Mapuche Territorial Alliance, which among other demands calls for the group's political independence from the Chilean state. Whether or not that's a viable proposition, the coalition may well prod the government to a more serious dialogue over the land issues. "Otherwise," says Caifal, "we are creating a [Mapuche] generation that has grown up in a climate of violence, and that offers a bad future for the country." Especially if it means raising ghosts from the past...