Quakes Rock Chile as President Is Inaugurated

(March 11) -- Conservative tycoon Sebastian Pinera was inaugurated as Chile's president today as a cluster of aftershocks, including a powerful 6.9 tremor, rocked the already earthquake-battered country. A tsunami alert was issued, forcing coastal residents to flee to higher ground, and Congress was evacuated moments after the ceremony, according to media reports.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage. In his first official statement as president, Pinera appealed to Chileans to remain calm and follow the recommendations of authorities, the Santiago daily newspaper La Tercera reported.

The strongest of the day's aftershocks registered magnitude 6.9 and struck just as dignitaries arrived for the inauguration, The Associated Press reported. It wasn't strong enough to cause dangerous waves beyond Chile's central coast, the U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

Buildings in the capital swayed, windows shook and dignitaries arriving for the ceremony smiled nervously at the congressional building in coastal Valparaiso. Bolivian President Evo Morales seemed briefly disoriented, and Peruvian leader Alan Garcia joked that it gave them "a moment to dance," the AP said.

The 6.9 quake struck at 9:39 a.m. EST and was centered in the Libertador O'Higgins region, about 90 miles southwest of the capital Santiago, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Earlier, the USGS had given it a preliminary strength of 7.2. It was the strongest aftershock yet to the magnitude 8.8 quake, which struck Feb. 27 and killed nearly 500 people. It was not quite as strong as the magnitude-7 quake that shattered Haiti last month.

"It seems like it just won't end," one Chilean resident, Enrique Alvarado, wrote on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The National Office of Emergency issued a "preventive alert" for tsunamis, urging coastal residents to move to higher ground.

"Sirens and firefighters are warning of a tsunami, there's traffic everywhere," wrote another Twitter user, Edison Oliva, who said he was in Bahia de Talcahuano. "The sea is calm but people are still climbing into the hills."

Pinera, a billionaire businessman, succeeded Michelle Bachelet as the country struggles to recover from the February quake.

Bachelet thought she'd spend her last two weeks in office on a farewell tour of the country. Instead, she visited scenes of disaster – towns crushed by toppling apartment blocks or flooded by a tsunami in the moments after the quake.

At first, there was finger-pointing over a failure by Bachelet's socialist government to issue a prompt tsunami warning, and two of her administration's officials were sacked or resigned. Homeless quake survivors complained that distribution of emergency food aid and supplies wasn't swift. Soldiers were deployed only after looters spent two days ravaging Concepcion, the closest large town to the quake's epicenter.

Sharp criticism also came from Pinera, whose inauguration ended 20 years of left-center rule. He has promised to overhaul Chile's emergency response system. "When there is an earthquake of this magnitude -- when one knows that it will interrupt basic services like power and water, and that it will generate fear, and also generate vandalism and looting -- public order has to be guaranteed from the first day," Pinera told a Chilean radio station earlier this week. "Here we lost a lot of time in establishing the state of catastrophe."

But Bachelet's popularity nevertheless soared to an 84-percent approval rating. A former pediatrician, Bachelet is part of a political dynasty ousted in Chile's 1973 military coup. Her father, an air force general, died after being tortured in prison by his former comrades. Bachelet herself was jailed and beaten, then sent into exile. She earned a medical degree and returned to Chile to work in an impoverished clinic, then eventually become health minister, defense minister and president. She was Latin America's first female defense minister and the continent's only female president who was not the widow of a former leader.

Chile's constitution barred Bachelet from seeking another term as president.

Bachelet's high approval rating has been pinned on what experts say were several smart moves after the quake -- like insisting that foreign aid target specific needs, putting the military in charge of logistics and quickly patching up roads and bridges -- that allowed her government to deliver 12,000 tons of relief supplies in just 10 days. Chile's main north-south highway was fixed a day after the disaster, allowing a convoy of 100 tractor-trailers to journey from the capital Santiago southward to the worst-hit towns.

It's a tough act to follow for Pinera, a Harvard-trained economist and former senator.

Pinera is rated by Forbes magazine as one of the world's richest men, having made his fortune in the credit card business and owning an airline. His election marked a shift to the right in Latin America, where a generation of center-left and socialist leaders like Bachelet have been in power.

Chile is the world's biggest copper producer, and even though its mines mostly survived last month's quake, the country's wine, fishing and paper pulp industries all have facilities in south-central Chile that were seriously damaged. Analysts estimate those losses could shave half a point off Chile's economic growth this year.