History of Chile him to Spain. Thereafter, Pinochet returned to Chile in March 2000. Upon descending the plane on his wheelchair, he stood up and saluted the cheering crowd of supporters, including an army band playing his favorite military march tunes, which was awaiting him at the airport in Santiago. President Ricardo Lagos later commented that the retired general's televised arrival had damaged the image of Chile, while thousands demonstrated against him. The "Concertación" coalition has continued to dominate Chilean politics for last two decades. In January 2006 Chileans elected their first woman president, Michelle Bachelet, of the Socialist Party. She was sworn
Chile bombings from 2005 bomber Pitronello was tried, but convicted only of lesser offences and sentenced to house arrest. Hans Niemeyer, a Chilean sociologist and anarchist, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for planting a bomb in a bank in November 2011. Authorities were investigating links between anarchist groups in Chile and Europe. Two Chilean anarchists who had been tried and acquitted in Chile were later arrested in Spain, and charged with planting a bomb in a church in Zaragoza in 2013, an attack claimed by a group named after Mateu Morral, a Spanish anarchist who attempted to assassinate the King of Spain in