World Notes Chile

The two funeral corteges, the coffins draped with red hammer-and-sickle flags, met at Santiago's Plaza de Armas and then together made the slow journey to the ceme tery. Chile's banned Communist Party last week paid respects to two of its activists, who, together with a third man, had been found two days earlier in a field on the city's outskirts, their throats slit and their bodies mutilated. The funerals drew a sympathetic crowd of about 20,000 people. Unlike the previous day, when clubs and water cannons were used against demonstrators, this time police stood on the sidelines.

The Chilean police said that the murders of the three men, two of them schoolteachers, were the work of the Communists themselves; opponents of the regime of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte contended that government-backed death squads were responsible. A possible government aim: to force the Communists to end their backing of an urban guerrilla organization that in the past two weeks has staged bomb attacks against four banks and a newspaper in Santiago. The government quickly moved to end speculation about its involvement in the murders by promising a far-reaching inquiry.