Chilean Student Movement Awarded For Organizing Nation's Largest Protests Since Pinochet Era

DemocracyNow.org - Today we look at the Chilean students' movement, which led last year's massive citizen democracy movement -- the largest protests since the days of opposition marches to General Augusto Pinochet a generation ago. For more than a year, the movement has rallied hundreds of thousands in the streets of Santiago and other major cities to demand greater access to affordable university education, as well as deeper structural changes in Chile. The country has the highest per capita income in the region, but also one of the most unequal distributions of wealth. We are joined in our studio by two of Chile's most recognizable student protest leaders: Camila Vallejo and Noam Titelman. They are in the United States, in part, to receive the 2012 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, which is given by the Institute for Policy Studies. It is named for the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who were murdered in Washington by agents of the U.S.-backed Pinochet regime in September 1976.

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