Tens of thousands of students, teachers and supporters protested Chile's education policies with a huge demonstration in Santiago on June 16 that the local daily La Tercera said was "the most massive march since the return of democracy" in 1990; the University of Chile radio station called it "historic." The Carabineros militarized police gave a crowd estimate of 80,000, while organizers said 100,000 people had attended. Thousands more held marches in the cities of Concepción, La Serena, Temuco and Valparaíso. The nationwide protest followed several days of student strikes at dozens of high schools and universities.

On June 9 four Mapuche activists imprisoned in Chile's central Araucanía region decided to end a liquids-only hunger strike they started on March 15 to protest their convictions in what they considered an unfair trial. The prisoners—José Huenuche Reimán, Jonathan Huillical Méndez, Héctor Llaitul Carillanca and Ramón Llanquileo Pilquimán—stopped the fast after relatives, human rights organizations and members of the Catholic church made an agreement to form a Commission for the Defense of the Rights of the Mapuche People to promote and defend indigenous rights.

As of May 23 negotiations were continuing between the Argentine federal government and representatives of the indigenous Qom community of the Toba ethnic group over disputed land in the northern province of Formosa. The government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner finally agreed to negotiate seriously on May 2 after 16 Qom community members started an open-ended hunger strike in Buenos Aires and well-known activists like Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, 1980 Nobel peace prize winner, took up the cause.

Two Chilean Mapuche prisoners, Ramón Llanquileo Pilquimán and José Huenuche Reimán, were admitted to a hospital in Victoria, Malleco province, Araucanía region, on May 26 after 72 days of a liquids-only hunger strike. Corrections authorities denied that the prisoners' lives were in danger; Araucanía health secretary Gloria Rodríguez said "the Mapuches are being monitored permanently," without offering an opinion on their condition.

A federal court in Resistencia, capital of Argentina's northern Chaco province, sentenced eight former army officers to life imprisonment May 16 for their role in the Margarita Belén massacre, named for the nearby town where 22 unarmed political prisoners were tortured and killed on Dec. 13, 1976. The 22—including several women who were raped before being shot to death—were members or sympathizers of the Montoneros guerilla group. The military had long maintained that the victims were armed rebels who had ambushed a patrol. But testimony and forensic investigations determined they had been rounded up unarmed and driven to the outskirts of town, where their remains were buried. Five of the bodies have still not been found.

Argentine federal authorities on May 12 arrested three pilots—two still working for Aerolíneas Argentinas, the other retired from the navy—along with an attorney and a retired naval official, who are accused of having participated in "death flights" during the military dictatorship's "dirty war" against leftist dissidents in the 1970s. In this secret program, "disappeared" dissidents were taken from the notorious secret prison at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) and dropped from the air alive into the sea. Among the prisoners believed to have been killed in this manner are the founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Azucena Villaflor de de Vincenti, and her comrades Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, María Ponce de Bianco, Angela Aguad and the French nun Leonie Duquet, who were abducted in early December 1976. Their bodies were found washed up on a beach at Santa Teresita days later. In 2005 the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team identified the bodies and certified the cause of death. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo group was established to demand the reappearance alive of "disappeared" dissidents. (La Nacion, Buenos Aires, May 13)

A complex multi-dam hydroelectric scheme that environmentalists say threatens a pristine area of fjords and valleys in Chile's remote Patagonia country was approved May 9 by an 11-to-1 vote of the Aysén Environmental Review Commission, a body appointed by the central government to oversee the project, after a three-year assessment. The 2,750-megawatt HidroAysén project includes five dams—three on the Río Pascua, and two on the Río Baker, Chile's largest river by volume of water. The dams would flood at least 5,700 hectares (22 square miles) of forest and farmlands in southern Chile's Aysén region, including part of Laguna San Rafael National Park.

A group of activists for the rights of indigenous Mapuche Chileans interrupted the Easter mass at Santiago's Metropolitan Cathedral on April 24 to call for the release of four Mapuche prisoners who have been on hunger strike since March 15. The activists, led by the prisoners' spokesperson, Natividad Llanquileo, waited until a few minutes after the homily to begin their protest; they shouted slogans and unfurled a banner that read: "Freedom for the Mapuche political prisoners." Carabinero police agents arrived and dispersed the demonstrators; two were detained but were released later.