Tens of thousands of students and teachers took to the streets in Chile's capital Santiago Thursday in a growing confrontation with the government over education spending that has already results in four months of marches. The demonstration, which organisers said gathered up to 180,000 people, was part of the biggest protest movement Chile has seen since General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship came to an end in 1990.
But Chile's current President Sebastian Pinera, a center-right billionaire who came to power in March last year, was stubbornly rejecting the protesters' demands. This week he shrugged off calls for the school year be rearranged, and said that 70,000 high school students pressing that point who refused to sign on for remedial tests to make up course credits had simply wasted a year.
That angered students and teachers, and gave new impetus to the protests, which had been dwindling in the past few weeks after months of marches and sit-ins. The breakdown of talks between the students and the government last week also contributed.