Government Junta immediately banned the socialist, Marxist and other leftist parties that had constituted former President Allende's Popular Unity coalition and began a systemic campaign of imprisonment, torture, harassment and/or murder against the perceived opposition. Eduardo Frei, Allende's predecessor as president, initially supported the coup along with his Christian Democratic colleagues. However, they later assumed the role of a loyal opposition to the military rulers. Though they soon lost most of their influence they were subjected to the same treatment that the UP members had been before them. During 1976–77, this repression even reached independent and Christian Democrat labour leaders who had supported the coup, several were exiled. Christian Democrats like Radomiro Tomic were jailed or forced into exile. Retired military personnel were named rectors of universities and they carried out vast purges of suspected left-wing sympathisers. With such strong repression, the Catholic church became the only public voice allowed within Chile. By 1974, the Commission of Peace had established a large network to provide information to numerous organisations regarding human rights abuses in Chile. As a result of this, Manuel Contreras, Director of DINA, threatened Cardinal Silva Henriquez that his safety could be at risk if the Church continued to interfere which in turn resulted in death threats and intimidation from agents of the regime. A key provision of the new constitution of 1980 aimed at eliminating leftist factions, “outlawed the propagation of doctrines that attack the family or put forward a concept of society based on the class struggle”. Pinochet maintained strict command over the armed forces thus he could depend on them to censor the media, arrest opposition leaders and repress demonstrations. This was accompanied by a complete shutting down of civil society with curfews, prohibition of public assembly, press blackouts, draconian censorship and university purges. Human rights violations The military rule was characterized by systematic suppression of all political dissidence. Scholars later described this as a "politicide" (or "political genocide"). Steve J. Stern spoke of a politicide to describe "a systematic project to destroy an entire way of doing and understanding politics and governance." Estimates of figures for victims of state violence vary. Rudolph Rummel cited early figures of up to 30,000 people killed. However, these high estimates have not held to later scrutiny. In 1996, human rights activists announced they had presented another 899 cases of people who had disappeared or been killed during the