SANTIAGO (Reuters) ? A Chilean teenager died early on Friday a day after being shot following massive protests in the capital against President Sebastian Pinera, police said, the first fatality in months of social unrest.
Police identified the youth as 14-year-old Manuel Gutierrez. Local media said he was shot in the chest near a security barricade as protesters battled police overnight in Santiago, in the aftermath of a 48-hour strike against unpopular Pinera marked by violent clashes and sporadic looting.
Local radio said witnesses blamed police for firing the shots during the incident in a pocket of night-time unrest in a modest neighborhood in the south of the capital. Police denied officers were to blame, saying they had not used fire arms.
"The death of any citizen is a very serious situation," said Rodrigo Ubilla, undersecretary at the Interior Ministry. "We should all be sad today because we have not been able to move forward peacefully."
"The solutions to big problems in this country do not lie in throwing stones, bombs and attacking people; the solution lies in talking," he added. Ubilla put the youth's age at 16.
Led by students demanding free education, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in recent months to call for greater distribution of the income of a copper price boom in the world's top producer of the metal.
On Thursday, youths blocked roads, threw rocks and set fire to piles of trash at intersections in Santiago and other cities to block traffic. Police used water cannon and tear gas to defuse the latest social unrest against conservative billionaire Pinera's policies.
While Latin America's model economy is seen expanding 6.6 percent this year and is an investor magnet thanks to prudent fiscal and monetary policies, many ordinary Chileans feel they are not sharing in the economic miracle.
Investors, long used to economic stability, are weighing risk, although markets have taken the protests in stride.
LAME DUCK?
Pinera is not likely to be ousted, despite the social upheaval, but some see him as a lame duck less than half way into his term. The slump in Pinera's support is seen hindering him in Congress, and delaying passage of capital market reforms aimed at turning Chile into a financial hub to rival Brazil.
Even a major cabinet reshuffle last month, the second since Pinera took power in March 2010, has failed to quell unrest, and the youth's death could stoke protest violence and raise the specter of more cabinet changes.
"The scenario is very unpredictable," said Claudio Fuentes, director of social sciences at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago. "There could be new ministerial changes," he added, expecting the government to hold off pending opinion polls.
The government said more than 1,300 people have been detained since Wednesday and several police officers were badly wounded -- two of them shot -- as violence flared when dozens of shops and supermarkets were looted and buses damaged.
Organizers said around 600,000 people joined Thursday's protest across Chile. Reuters reporters estimated crowds in the capital alone at around 200,000 people.
Operations at some of the world's biggest copper mines were not affected by the protests, which also seek to pressure the government into raising wages and revamping the constitution and tax system.
Previous governments have faced one-day national strikes but this was the first 48-hour stoppage since the 1973-1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. A recent poll showed Pinera as the least popular president since Pinochet's rule.
The unrest has been a lightning rod for wider protests from environmentalists to copper miners
Workers at some of the world's biggest copper mines have staged strikes of their own to demand a bigger share of windfall copper profits. Workers at BHP Billiton's Escondida, the world's No.1 copper mine, halted a two-week strike earlier this month that stoked global supply fears.
(Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Vicki Allen)
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