Riot police clashed with thousands of demonstrators in the midst of celebrations in the Chilean capital after the death on Sunday of former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The body of the retired general lay at a humble military school chapel after the left-wing government denied him a state funeral.
The ex-strongman, who evaded years of efforts to bring him to justice in hundreds of cases of murder and torture arising from his 1973 to 1990 regime, died aged 91 in Santiago's Military Hospital a week after suffering a heart attack.
PHOTO: AFP
His passing sparked carnival-like celebrations as thousands of anti-Pinochet demonstrators flocked into the streets of the capital.
But the mood soured when riot police used water cannon and tear gas to block their progress down the capital's main Alameda avenue toward the presidential palace. Some demonstrators fired back with stones and bottles.
Interior Ministry Undersecretary Felipe Harboe said police were forced to intervene when hooded groups infiltrated a crowd of some 5,000 anti-Pinochet protesters who until then had been demonstrating peacefully.
Six police officers were injured and an unspecified number of demonstrators were arrested, officials said. Violence also erupted at demonstrations in the capital's suburbs and the city of Valparaiso.
The government of President Michelle Bachelet -- who, together with her parents, was detained during the Pinochet regime -- said there would be no state funeral or national mourning for the former president.
"The government has authorized flags to fly at half-staff at army facilities," the secretary-general of the government, Ricardo Lagos Weber, said.
Pinochet's body was taken to the chapel at the Santiago Military School late on Sunday. It was to remain there all day yesterday ahead of a funeral with military honors, but without national pomp, scheduled for today.
The death of Pinochet, who came to power in a US-backed military coup in 1973 that toppled the Socialist government of Salvador Allende, struck a deep nerve in a country where many suffered under his regime and others defend it as salvation from the road to communism.
Authorities will make sure that "a climate of calm remains in the country," Lagos Weber said, speaking before anti-Pinochet demonstrations turned violent.
Reactions from abroad were mixed.
The US government, which supported Pinochet's 1973 coup against Allende, expressed sympathy for the victims of Pinochet's regime.
"Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation's history. Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families," Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said.
Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was "greatly saddened" by Pinochet's death, her spokesman said on Sunday.
The daughter of the late Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was ousted by Augusto Pinochet, said yesterday that she was comforted by the fact that the former dictator had died pursued by the courts but wished he had been convicted.
"To the end he was surrounded by lawyers trying to defend the indefensible," Isabel Allende told national radio in Spain.
Salvador Allende, a Socialist, shot himself during the military coup led by Pinochet.
Isabel Allende, a cousin of the well-known novelist of the same name, went into exile in Mexico after the coup but is now a member of Chile's parliament for the Socialist Party, which once again governs the country.
"I would have preferred that the courts finished their work, I wish there had been a ruling, I wish he had been condemned," Allende told TV in Spain, which she is visiting.
"I think it would have been healthier in some way and it hurts me ... because as a country, in the end ... we didn't carry out final justice," she added.
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