Thirty years ago. as latin america was sic- cumbing to the debt crisis, few nations suffered as much as Chile.The country still bore the scars of the bloody military coup that claimed the lives of former president Salvador Allende and some 3,000 supporters a decade earlier. The debt crisis hit when the economy was undergoing wrenching change from the radical free-market policies pursued by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The results were painful: Economic output collapsed by 14 percent in 1982, unemployment soared to more than 30 percent, nearly half the population lived below the poverty line, and the current-account deficit was running at a rate of 12 percent of GDP.
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