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Updated Saturday, March 13, 2010 10:50 am TWN, By Michael Warren, AP

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Strong quakes torment Chile as president sworn in

Thursday's quakes terrified many who have been living in and around quake-weakened homes since last month's massive temblor. Tall buildings swayed and windows rattled in downtown Santiago. In Talca, supermarkets closed for fear of looting. And just before Pinera visited coastal Constitucion, the survivors and volunteers building 60 emergency shelters fled uphill in a panic.

The strongest of the aftershocks -- magnitude 6.9 -- was Chile's most powerful since Feb. 27, and occurred along the same fault line, said geophysicist Don Blakeman at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.

Chile's navy and emergency management office were much criticized for failing to issue a tsunami alert that might have saved hundreds of lives from the towering waves that followed the initial quake. This time, the alert went out -- Pinera said an overabundance of caution was called for.

"Everything stopped -- my meetings with business owners, work, life, everything has been paralyzed," said Mayor Gaston Saavedra of Talcahuano, where waves shoved huge shipping containers into downtown buildings last month.

Pinera repeatedly called for courage as he toured Constitucion, where he left 130 flowers along the riverbank for the dead and missing caught in the tsunami. He signed an order giving one-time cash handouts of US$76 each to 4.2 million disaster survivors, and said he would send laws creating subsidies and tax-deductible donations to congress in the morning.

The billionaire investor, Harvard-trained economist and airline executive is known for his impatience with bureaucracy and ill-prepared aides. He quickly returned to Santiago, where he spoke from a balcony at the La Moneda presidential palace before meeting into the night with his ministers.

"We are certain that we can overcome this adversity," Pinera said, invoking the spirit of a man in coastal Pelluhue who was captured in an iconic Associated Press photo pulling a dirty and torn Chilean flag from tsunami wreckage. "Let's rebuild on rock, and not sand."

Pinera had vowed to spend billions to make Chile "the best country in the world," accelerating economic growth, creating 1 million jobs and combating crime while maintaining popular social programs that gave Bachelet 84 percent approval ratings.

His victory ended 20 years of center-left governments that followed Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, and put Chile's business elite squarely back in power. But he lacks a legislative majority, and reconstruction will be very expensive.

Still, Chile's rainy-day fund has US$11 billion in overseas liquid investments, and more than US$3.5 billion in damaged property is not only insured, but reinsured abroad. "Because Chile is a country where markets work and people insure themselves, all of a sudden you have the equivalent of US$3.5 billion in foreign aid coming in," said Raul Rivera, president of Chile's Innovation Forum.

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