3 Killed in Chile Unrest; Regime Censors Radio

Reacting sharply to a national strike, Chile’s military regime Wednesday censored opposition radio stations and charged strike leaders with promoting disorder in their demand for a return to democracy.

At least three persons, including a 13-year-old girl, were shot and killed by troops in slums around the capital, where residents barricaded streets with burning tires Wednesday night and littered highways with twisted nails to stop traffic.

Shopkeepers and truck and bus drivers most strongly supported the call to stay home by a broad-based assembly of professional and union organizations. Organizers called the first day of a scheduled two-day strike “a massive and peaceful success.”

In Santiago, union leaders estimated that 85% of the city’s 9,000 buses and the majority of Chile’s 60,000 trucks stopped Wednesday. About half of Santiago’s 250,000 shop workers stayed home, spokesmen for their union said.

Most Businesses Operated

The bus shortage lifted Santiago’s leaden smog and lent a weekend feeling to a capital city heavily patrolled by troops and militarized national police. Trucks and taxis were scarce and thousands of shops were shuttered. However, despite absences fueled by the transport strike, most industries, large businesses and the government operated normally.

“Today’s success reinforces our peaceful struggle through civil disobedience against a dictatorship,” said Juan Luis Gonzalez, the surgeon who heads the 22 associations calling themselves the Assembly of Civility. “It is the beginning of the beginning.”

The government of President Augusto Pinochet did not comment on the strike’s impact, but it reacted harshly, arresting a handful of strike leaders and silencing four opposition radio stations.

Wednesday night, the government charged Gonzalez and 16 other strike leaders with five counts each of violating national security laws for inciting disorder, plotting against the government, and attempting to paralyze the country. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail. The 17 are still at large.

Three Slain by Troops

Witnesses told Chilean reporters that Nadia Fuentes, 13, was shot by members of a military patrol as she walked home from a bakery in the La Florida district on the southwestern fringes of the city. An unemployed 24-year-old bookkeeper leading protests and a 21-year-old worker who violated a curfew before dawn Wednesday also died of gunshot wounds.

Two university students seized by a military patrol were wrapped in blankets and set afire, their relatives charged. Both were reported in critical condition.

Police firing tear gas and water cannons skirmished with small groups of protesters in downtown streets under bright winter sunshine in the afternoon, and arrested an undisclosed number of persons. Nine bombs blamed on Communist guerrillas exploded around the capital without causing injury, police reported.The leaders of associations representing truck owner-drivers, teachers and students were arrested.

The government ban forbidding news reports on the four opposition radio stations came as commuters scrambled to find a way home Wednesday night.

Silenced Stations Listed

Silenced until further notice were the independently owned opposition stations Radio Santiago and Radio Carrera, as well as Radio Chilena, which is owned by the Roman Catholic Church, and Radio Cooperativa, voice of the Christian Democratic Party, Chile’s largest. Radio is a principal source of independent news in Chile, since television and nearly all newspapers hew closely to the government line.

Before the government ban, the stations had closely followed events in Santiago and also reported minor incidents and slowdowns, particularly a shortage of transportation, in other major cities, including the port of Valparaiso, and the southern city of Concepcion.