Valparaíso
wildfire: Raging forest fires engulf Chilean city BBC,
25
December, 2019
At
least 120 houses have been destroyed by fast moving forest fires in
the Chilean city of Valparaíso, prompting a mass evacuation.
All
the city's firefighters have been deployed to tackle the fires in the
Rocuant and San Roque areas.
Power
was cut to about 90,000 customers in the area as a precautionary
measure.
Valparaíso
Mayor Jorge Sharp told Canal 24 Horas that the fires had been started
"intentionally". There have been no reports of any
casualties.
"At
the moment, emergency teams from all over Valparaíso are working,
using land and air resources, in two areas in the higher part of the
city," the mayor said.
#Chile | A heavy fire is reported in Valparaiso, so far 15 house destroyed. The most affected sectors are Cerro San Roque, Cerro Rocuant, Cuesta Colorada and La Isla.
The
mayor added that strong winds and high temperatures were exacerbating
the situation. Valparaíso is one of Chile's largest cities and a
major port on the Pacific.
Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionValparaíso's firefighters are trying to contain the firesImage copyrightREUTERSImage captionFirefighting helicopters have also been deployedImage copyrightREUTERSImage captionResidents have desperately tried to salvage their personal belongings in the festive period
Chilean
Agriculture Minister Antonio Walker later arrived in the area. He
admitted that the firefighters were struggling to contain the fires.
Nearly
120 hectares (445 acres) of grassland have already been ravaged by
the fires.
Valparaíso,
in central Chile, is a popular tourist destination in South America.
Chile’s
embattled president has been forced to cancel two major international
summits after government concessions failed to defuse weeks of
violent protests that have seen thousands of arrests, left at least
20 dead and sent shock waves across Latin America.
Chile
protesters: 'We are subjugated by the rich. It's time for that to
end'
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Sebastián
Piñera made the announcement on Wednesday morning, telling reporters
Chile would no longer be able to host November’s Apec trade summit
and the COP25 UN climate conference the following month.
World
leaders including Donald Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had
been due to attend the first event while climate champions including
the teenage activist Greta Thunberg were expected at the second.
Piñera
blamed the “difficult circumstances” Chile was facing for the
decision and said his government’s primary concern had to be “fully
restoring public order, security and social peace”.
“This
has been a very difficult decision – which has caused us great pain
– because we understand perfectly the importance [of the events]
for Chile and for the world,” Chile’s centre-right president
said.
“When
a father has problems, he must always put his family before
everything else. Similarly, a president must always put his own
countrymen ahead of any other consideration,” Piñera added.
Patricia
Espinosa, the UN’s climate change executive secretary, said the UN
was “exploring alternative hosting options” for the climate
summit after being informed of the decision in a letter from Chile’s
environment minister.
Piñera
said he had warned other world leaders of the cancellation.
Chile’s
protests began in mid-October as a student-led fight against a 3.7%
hike in metro fares. But those demonstrations quickly swelled into a
much broader mutiny against inequality, the cost of living and police
repression.
According
to Chile’s Human Rights Institute, 3,535 people have been arrested
since 17 October while 1,132 people have been taken to hospital –
38 of them with gunshot injuries.
On
18 October Piñera declared a state of emergency after violence broke
out on the streets of the capital, Santiago, later declaring the
country “at war” with “evil” delinquents.
After
such moves failed to quell the unrest, Chile’s president tried to
placate protesters with a conciliatory televised address in which he
asked forgiveness for the “shortsightedness” of the country’s
political leaders.
Piñera
also unveiled a string of progressive economic reforms, a cabinet
reshuffle and the decision to end nightly curfews in an effort to
calm tensions.
But
those concessions appear not to have been enough. Daily street
marches continue to call for Piñera’s resignation. Schools and
offices are functioning sporadically. Lines at supermarkets have
eased but little remains of the routine that just two weeks ago led
Piñera to declare Chile an “oasis” in an increasingly volatile
region.
On
Saturday an estimated 1 million people poured on to the streets of
Santiago for a peaceful protest that was reputedly the country’s
largest since the dying days of Gen Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship
in the late 1980s.
“It
is absolutely logical for no one to come. We’re in no shape to
receive presidents at the moment. I support the decision,” said
Marcia Ruiz, a 56-year-old protester who was outside La Moneda,
Chile’s presidential palace, on Wednesday.
“The
president lost control of this on day one,” Ruiz added. “It’s
sad.”
The
last-minute decision to cancel the UN summit is a blow to global
efforts to tackle the climate emergency and will fuel fears that a
vicious cycle is emerging in which divisions between and within
countries make it impossible for states to act together to deal with
the underlying causes of unrest.
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It
is also the second setback for international climate talks in less
than a year. Brazil had been due to host COP25 but pulled out last
year after the presidential election victory of the far-right
populist Jair Bolsonaro, who has pursued an anti-globalist agenda.
A
UK government spokesperson said: “We understand Chile’s decision
to withdraw from hosting COP25. We will work closely with Chile and
other important partners to help ensure that the crucial work due to
be undertaken at COP25 is not affected. The UK government remains
committed to bringing world leaders together to tackle climate change
in Glasgow in 2020.”
Miguel
Crispi, a sociologist and founder of the Chilean political party
Democratic Revolution, said: “The cancellation of #COP25 is very
bad news. It was a great opportunity to debate the climate crisis.
This means the government is assuming that they can’t guarantee
public order from now until December – and that is also worrying.”
Peter
Hartmann, the director of CODEFF Aysen, an environmental group
organizing to protect the wild ecosystems of Chilean Patagonia, said:
“It’s a shame because the summit was an opportunity for Chile to
be more coherent in their environmental outlook and to bring
international attention to the environmental issues in Chile.”
Many
activists will now be cancelling flights and hotels in Santiago but
several groups are already on their way.
School
climate strikers from Europe are in the middle of the Atlantic on
their way to South America. “We just heard COP25 has been
cancelled. We will have a meeting about this now on board, please
keep us updated and any ideas are welcome. They can cancel the COP
but can’t cancel the movement!” the group tweeted.
Many
are surprised with what happened in Chile, how is it possible that
this happens in the perfect society of Latin America ?, The
Switzerland of America ?, the cradle of Latin American liberalism ?,
the capital of Latin American development ?, the closest idea of Eden
accessible to the Venezuelan emigrant ?, the surprise has been so
great that the mysticism of this example of neoliberal perfection has
fallen apart, a free fall from the mythological Olympus to the harsh
reality, the reality of Chile being nothing more that a Chimera, an
advertising product for ideological marketing to a false ideology, a
mirage of corporate mass media that has baptized it as an “economic
miracle”, creating in the mediated opinion the false expectation of
living or emigrating to an oasis in the in the middle of a desert of
delayed populistic third-world excrement. Chile was for many, the
closest thing to living the American dream.
Chile
lives after a fiction, a screen full of reflectors and neon lights, a
fantasy of an idyllic world of American consumption, where social
degradation is hidden, where injustices, unemployment or
underemployment or outsourcing, or rather, precarious employment is
the norm, where the gap between the elite and the dispossessed
classes is embarrassing, being in reality the most unequal country in
the entire hemisphere, where all the injustices that may exist
accumulate together, where their common citizens in order to live and
enjoy the most elementary services, have to borrow and and end
immerse in huge debts. In short, Chile is the realm of pyrotechnic
happiness, where in turn a veiled feeling of hopelessness reigns,
which in these days simply has come out naked into the light as a
sign the relief for the long accumulated rage and impotence.
In
Chile, by fire and blood, a theoretical system was imposed,
ideological in quotation marks, the application of the most extreme
radical “Liberalism” was implemented. That humane Chile, which
was able to give birth to civilizing lights of the quality of Neruda,
became a kind of rats laboratory, where some technocrats practiced a
social experiment based on a logic dictating human beings to cease
being human, and became a bit, a fact, an irrational consumer, a
number, where only the individual interest of a few was pursued , in
a desire for irrational insatiable accumulation through the extreme
merciless exploitation of an entire population, at whatever cost
necessary, like to slaughter, exterminate and make human lives
disappear systematically, all in order to achieve numerical goals in
a macro-economic format. This means that the Chilean letters as that
of the sublime songs of Violeta Parra, or the perfection
of the use of the castellian language by Andrés Bello, they were
all turned into numbers to be used to to fill in excel tables,
to the extreme in which as of today in the whole world of traditional
Spanish speech no one can understand them when they try to
communicate.
People
are surprised that a crazy, irrational and illogical system explodes
in front of their own eyes, when the foolish thing was rather that it
did not explode, how can someone in their right mind believe that a
system that underlies a world of limited resources and behaves as if
nothing were ever to be exhausted will not explode?, how would a
system or model based on inequality not explode?, people feel,
have feelings, love, suffer, dream, come to this world to live, not
to consume, much less suffer for it, a healthy-minded being enjoys
the joy of others in their environment, a psychotic one is who
enjoys the pain and suffering of others, inequality only generates
anger, misery and hopelessness , and only a sadist can be happy at
the expense of misfortune and disenchantment of others, nobody in
their right mind can like being abused, cheated, exploited, all this
is unnatural, being the natural thing that people who are under such
situation to rebel, to violently explode against such a condition, no
one will like the injustice of being charged for everything, of being
taken to the blood for enjoying a service, of being squeezed to the
last penny you generate for Goodwill of your work, and in turn, with
sadistic and stubborn alevosia, in front of your eyes, exempt taxes
from the richest, that is what happens in Chile, and that is why what
has now happened, is not because of the 30 pesos fare rise to
use the underground, is for a cluster of things, and in fact the
price of the subway ticket was simply the drop of water that exceeded
the patience of Chilean society, not more; to believe it is all about
the subway is simply a way to banalize and try to ridicule the
discontent of an entire people.
The
neoliberal model does not work, and it will never work wherever it be
implanted, it will always generate social discontent, for the simple
fact of being antihuman, it is an irrational, illogical system, that
works in reverse, a model that concentrates wealth and distributes
the poverty cannot work, a system that releases the burdens and
responsibilities from those who have the most, and puts all the
burdens on the backs of those who have less, will never be able to
work, unless people are forced into this, by using a rifle on the
temples, no other way. Neoliberalism is a sick, sadistic, unethical
system, it stands against nature, it is a failed model, which in a
democracy could never thrive, this is only possible in a world of
slaves, if a government applies terror to its citizens, that’s it.
The
leadership of this sick model wants to cover the reality as when
trying to cover the sun with a finger, blames the responsibility of
its debacle to external factors, to a foreign government that can
barely stand up by itself, and wants to disclaim the
responsibility of their own mistakes , arguing childishly aboiut a
conspiracy of a highly secret character that seeks to establish
“socialism” on earth. This means to try to convince an already
politically grown up society to believe a ghost story in plain 21st
century, fighting with imaginary ghosts, or simply going crazy
they declare war on the ether, when in reality they are declaring war
on their own people, a people who they fear to look directly in the
eyes, and definitively realizing with it, that no people in this
world will accept the imposition of the neoliberal model in a docile
way.
Now,
let’s also not oversize what happened in Chile. Chile rises, the
people rebel, but their rebellion is in the making, it has been a
simple step, a call for attention to the world, but as such it does
not have the strength yet to achieve a structural immediate future
change. Its over-dimension is media created, precisely induced
by the government itself, which is applying a strategy to anticipate
future events, remember that the implementation of neoliberalism in
Chile was possible through Shock therapy, and what the government is
doing today is to continue applying the same continuous therapy on
this people. Would you believe that a minor group of common
criminals, unarmed, or rudimentary armed that loot, require a state
of exception to be controlled and repressed ??? Do you know
what does this means at all? Legally, it means to close the rule of
law, to cut off the basic fundamental rights of any free society in a
temporary manner, being it an exceptional way, a state supposedly in
extreme concussion. Now, some looting, some pans, and a mobilization
that can not be called massive, does it justify it? curfew
being required ???, or the use of military men with war rifles and
tanks ?????, is it just not true …… it is more than clear, that
the pantomime Government of the democracy that Chile has, is not
worried at all about the looting, nor the common crime, that
the use of civil security agencies would have been more than enough
to control. But such as what this government did goes further than
that, and has another more perverse purpose, which it is to apply
State Terrorism. They want to scare, psychologically repress an
entire population. Use it against those who plunder, against those
who legitimately protest, even those who abstain, ii is aimed against
Chilean society in general. This is the War that Piñera poses, jus
to show everyone as a general threat, and that the Pinochet
dictatorship is alive and behind the shadows, and that if they rebel,
they will be massacred as yesterday. The Chilean government is
applying psychoterror to its people, as a way of social control, it
is that simple; the sociologists and social psychologists who work
for Piñera apply the following thesis, “only when a society lives
terrified and forced to think merely of its survival, can it approve
measures that are clearly harmful to it,” the Pinochet dictatorship
as in the past and in full force until today, needs terror, because
nobody accepts on their knees a model that privileges the elites over
the great majority.
Chile
was the laboratory of what Naomi Klein called the doctrine of shock
and it was tested over forty years ago, it was a psychosocial
operation involving a successive series of clashes (coups, terror,
collective massacres, ideological extermination, economic measures
and military interventions , all mixed at the same time), in order to
control the population, doing what we could call a kind of social
lobotomy, erasing people’s minds to recreate them from scratch,
through a neo-eunuch human being the which submissively could accept
the implantation of a system against nature, neoliberalism. What
happens but is that human creation is the work of God, and is above
any human social experiment, and sooner or later, the Chilean sapiens
would return from there, and now that they themselves point at each
other, that the Chilean people have awakened, the Chilean Sapiens,
the southern man or woman of flesh and blood has awakened, has
regenerated, and returned for their privileges.
How
much passivity can support the social body of a country like Chile
where everything has been privatized?, or Colombia, where in less
than three years more than 600 people were killed? Or from a
society like Argentina, whose childish and innocent political
decision to vote on the right has condemned them again to travel the
painful path of indebtedness that they have already suffered three
times? they have been inoculated, they may let you down, but
nevertheless, the vocation of intrinsic justice of the human being
will always seek its course.
I
know that my detractors will try to disqualify me and banalize my
opinion, bringing up, the precarious situation that Venezuela suffers
today, trying to endorse incoherence to my words, when making a
comparison of this with Chile, but there are huge differences around
the nature of social protests registered in both nations. In
Venezuela, the street riots recorded in 2014 and 2017 were financed,
promoted and advised directly by Washington, this is not a fantasy of
foreign intervention as Chile suggests today, it is something real
and incontrovertible, the facts and evidence are irrefutable, I am
aware of the legitimacy that every State has in conserving itself
through the application of repression, but in Venezuela the
repression always remained within the internationally accepted
parameters, the protest was not of social nature as in Chile, but
political, clearly seditious, collaborative directly to foreign
interests, it was not the State as it does in Chile who intended to
impose terror, but, it was the protesters who wanted to impose it,
(remember the burning of people alive, the guayas, the snipers, and
the use of explosives), both manifestations have diametrically
opposed objectives, in Venezuela it was aimed at installing a
neoliberal government, the type of Chile’s, seeking beligerantly to
reimplant the IMF in Venezuela, while on the contrary, in Chile they
struggle to free themselves from it. Chileans do not
necessarily seek to make a copy a of the Venezuelan government, but
they claim to enjoy elementary rights and services that every normal
and free society should enjoy. In Venezuela the middle class
protests, all those who consider themselves to be part of the elite
whether realistically or not, in Chile are the popular classes
who protest and part of the middle class rationally conscious
of its reality, the Chilean protest is clearly vindictive, the
Venezuelan is clearly seditious, in Venezuela the armed forces are
clearly people, and they do not represent in themselves an occupation
force that is at war against its own people, instead the
Chilean armed forces are clearly elitesque, their high commanders
belong exclusively to the wealthy class, and represent for their
people an army of occupation that is at war, and that has his own
people as an enemy.
This
is the truth of Chile, and every honest, ethical person, with
principles, dignity and honor, knows very well that I am not lying,
if they want to have a reliable proof of this reality, of the
validity of Pinochet as an evil spirit, as a living dead, just watch
the following video …
Unusually warm temperatures in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego province, an area called the gateway to the Antarctic region, led officials to declare Tuesday a holiday and residents to the shores for recreation.
The area, which is undergoing summer, reached a temperature of 87 degrees Fahrenheit in Rio Grande Monday, about 1,400 miles south of Buenos Aires.
Some people changed daily habits due to the heatwave in the area this week.
Some unusual activities "for these latitudes" have been seen, like sunbathing and swimming along the coast of the Argentine Sea and the Beagle Canal in Ushuaia, Sureno reported Tuesday.
Officials in Tierra del Fuego province declared Tuesday a special day off for government workers because structures are not built for warmer weather. Only skeleton groups worked at government agencies, Sureno's report said.
The highs this week in Tierra del Fuego were well above summer averages, which are around 50 degrees, La Nacion reported. Swimming in the Beagle Canal is also very unusual, it added.
The entire country is seeing higher temperatures this time of the year, which correspond to summer in the southern hemisphere.
Tierra del Fuego, which has a population just over 152,000, is an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, with Argentina occupying its eastern part. It's located about 620 miles from the Antarctic Peninsula through the Drake Passage.
The Antarctic is an area claimed by different countries that mostly harbors research ships.
Its the headline of 2019: "Record" high temperatures causing massive forest fires in Chile as government declares a 'state of catastrophe'
Chile on Tuesday declared a 'state of catastrophe' in three regions ravaged by forest fires that have killed two people and razed 10,000 hectares of land.
Declaring catastrophe in parts of Biobio, La Araucania and Los Rios paves the way for the armed forces to take part in the efforts to battle the blazes, said acting Interior Minister Rodrigo Ubilla.
He told reporters that the fires have "increased significantly," prompting officials to take more drastic measures.
"High temperatures, strong winds and low humidity have been factors" in sparking and spreading the fires, said Ubilla.
Over the coming days, "record" high temperatures are expected to spread the fires, he warned. President Sebastian Pinera on Monday cut short his vacation to inspect La Araucania, a region located some 679 km south of the capital Santiago.
"We won't abandon you," Pinera told local residents.
Two people were killed by the fires in La Araucania and 38 others have been moved to temporary shelters after their homes were destroyed.
During this summer season in the Southern Hemisphere, Chile has seen 92 forest fires, 45 of them are still active, another 45 have been brought under control, and two were successfully put out, the Interior Ministry's emergency management service reported.
On
this day in 1973 the democratically elected president of Chile,
Salvador Allende, was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet. In the
aftermath, 3000 leftists
were murdered, tens of thousands tortured and hundreds
of thousands
driven from the country.
Since
it doesn’t serve to justify further domination by the powerful few
in the Canadian media will commemorate the ‘original 9/11’. Even
fewer will recognize Canada’s role in the US backed coup.
The
Pierre Trudeau government was hostile to Allende’s elected
government. In 1964 Eduardo Frei defeated the openly Marxist Allende
in presidential elections. Worried about growing support for
socialism, Ottawa gave $8.6
million to
Frei’s Chile, its first aid to a South American country.When
Allende won the next election Canadian assistance disappeared. Export
Development Canada (EDC) also refused to finance Canadian exports to
Chile, which contributed to a reduction in trade between the two
countries.This suspension of EDC credits led Chile’s Minister of
Finance to criticize Canada’s “banker’s
attitude”.But
suspending bilateral assistance and export insurance was not enough.
In 1972 Ottawa joined Washington in voting to cut off all money from
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the Chilean government.(When
Allende was first elected western banks, including Canada’s,
withdrew from Chile.)
From
economic asphyxiation to diplomatic isolation Ottawa’s policy
towards Allende’s Chile was clear. After he won office in 1970
Allende invited Pierre Trudeau to visit Santiago. Ottawa refused “for
fear of
alienating rightist elements in Chile and elsewhere.”
Days
after Pinochetousted Allende, Andrew Ross, Canada’s ambassador to
Chile cabled External Affairs: “Reprisals and searches have created
panic atmosphere affecting particularly expatriates including
the riffraff
of the Latin American Left to
whom Allende gave asylum … the country has been on a prolonged
political binge under the elected Allende government and the junta
has assumed the probably thankless task of sobering
Chile up.”
Thousands were incarcerated, tortured and killed in “sobering Chile
up”.
Within
three weeks of the coup, Canada recognized Pinochet’s military
junta. Ross stated: “I
can see no useful
purpose to withholding recognition unduly. Indeed, such action might
even tend to delay Chile’s eventual return to the democratic
process.” Pinochet stepped down 17 years later.
Diplomatic
support for Pinochet led to economic assistance. Just after the coup
Canada voted for a $22 million ($100 million in today’s money)
Inter American Development Bank loan “rushed through the bank with
embarrassing haste.” Ottawa immediately endorsed sending $95
million from the International Monetary Fund to Chile and supported
renegotiating the country’s debt held by the Paris Club. After
refusing to provide credits to the elected government, on October
2nd, 1973, EDC announced it was granting $5 million in credit to
Chile’s central bank to purchase six Twin Otter aircraft from De
Havilland, which could carry troops to and from short makeshift
strips.
By
1978, Canadian support for the coup d’etat was significant. It
included:
+
Support for $810 million in multilateral loans with Canada’s share
amounting to about $40 million.
+
Five EDC facilities worth between $15 and $30 million.
+
Two Canadian debt re-schedulings for Chile, equivalent to additional
loans of approximately $5 million.
+
Twenty loans by Canadian chartered banks worth more than $100
million, including a 1977 loan by Toronto Dominion to DINA
(Pinochet’s secret police) to purchase equipment.
+
Direct investments by Canadian companies valued at nearly $1 billion.
A
1976 Latin America Working Group Letter noted that “Canadian
economic relations, in the form of bank loans, investments and
government supported financial assistance have helped consolidate the
Chilean dictatorship and, by granting it a mantle of respectability
and financial endorsation, have encouraged its continued violation of
human rights.”
Canadian
leftists were outraged at Ottawa’s support for the coup and its
unwillingness to accept refugees hunted by the military regime. Many
denounced the federal government’s policy and some (my mother among
them) occupied various Chilean and Canadian government offices in
protest. The Federal government was surprised at the scope of the
opposition, which curtailed some support for the junta. A 1974
cabinet document lamented that “the
attention…
focused on the Chilean Government’s use of repression against its
opponents has led to an unfavourable reaction among the Canadian
public–a reaction which will not permit any significant increase in
Canadian aid to this country.”
The
Pierre Trudeau government sought to placate protesters
by allowing 7000
refugees from
Pinochet’s regime asylum in Canada. But, they continued to support
the dictatorship directly responsible for the refugee problem.
We
should commemorate Canada’s role in the ‘original 9/11’.
Yves
Engler’s latest
book is Canada in Africa: 300 years of Aid and Exploitation.
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