Summary Chilean police deployed water cannons and fired tear gas to disperse student protesters.
SANTIAGO (AFP) - Chilean police deployed water cannons and fired tear gas on Thursday to disperse student protesters after a march to demand education reforms from President Michelle Bachelet.
Skirmishes broke out involving hooded protesters and police at the end of a mostly peaceful demonstration through Santiago involving tens of thousands of students.
During an intense campaign that ended in a landslide victory in December, Bachelet promised free university-level education and to end state subsidies for private, for-profit colleges, which have put higher education out of reach of the poor.
But students Thursday -- in their first protest since Bachelet took office -- repeated the same demands they had rallied for over the past three years, leery of what they fear is their requests not being met.
Around 40,000 people participated in the protest, police said, while organizers of the march, which brought together university and school students, said there were more than 100,000 participants.
Student leaders who had met he education minister, said the few reform details made public so far do not make clear whether their demands will be met.
"This is a government that is not laying out clear steps to change the course of education in Chile, that is not acting on the very catchlines and slogans it took from the social movement, and it is against this that the students are marching," Melissa
Sepulveda, president of the student federation at the University of Chile, told AFP.
The students were also asking for improved public education in general, another Bachelet campaign promise.
A small police force watched on as the students marked their route, which included the Palacio de La Moneda, the government seat that conservative president Sebastian Pinera forbade them from passing two years ago.
Bachelet, who promised free university education in the next six years, has already sent Congress a tax reform that aims to raise $8.2 billion to finance that and other measures.
Ongoing student protests have occurred in Chile since 2011, when masses of students began rallying against one of the world's most privatized and segregated educational systems, a vestige of the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
