MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chilean students end strike

Chilean high school students agreed Friday to end their nationwide strike and the protests they have kept up for a month demanding a better quality of education, and announced they would return to class next week.

"We'll go back to class, and the schools will be vacated starting today," Juan Carlos Herrera, one of the spokesmen for the ACES student association, said at the end of a meeting held in a Santiago school.

At the meeting the students agreed to take part, although with a critical point of view, in the Advisory Council on education formed several days ago by the nation's president, Michelle Bachelet, who did not, however, accede to the students' demand that they make up a majority on the panel.

Bachelet offered six of the 66 places to high school students, and the ACES must now designate their representatives.

Herrera said that ACES delegates will join the Advisory Council with positions of the same status as those of university students and educators.

The committee, according to Bachelet, should work out in the space of three months the reforms to the Constitutional Organic Law of Education, or LOCE, that according to high scholars and numerous experts has given rise to a growing inequality of education between rich and poor.

LOCE was imposed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet on March 10, 1990, the day before he left power, and its principal characteristic is that it gives the market the dominant role in determining educational priorities.

Herrera was proud of the long protest, "with the formation of an organic movement nationwide and achieving the economic goals we addressed," such as the waiver of fees for college-entrance exams and student IDs and free public transit for students from the poorest families.

The demonstrations, which intensified after May 19 when students occupied hundreds of schools nationwide, included two days of national protest during which thousands were arrested, dozens were injured and material damages were widespread.

In the last few days, however, the movement ran out of steam due to internal disagreements, fatigue of the teenagers occupying the schools and the growing desertion of institutions whose students decided to go back to class.

The return to classes will start next Tuesday, since Monday is a holiday in Chile.