Geography Archives: Chile

Chile’s neoliberal government is close to securing a new law that expands the right of security forces to use firearms against the population. The Naín-Retamal Law, a proposal of the executive branch, was today approved by the Senate for a third and final reading.  

Every dawn, during my daily walk to the foothills of the Andes, I pass by the Tobalaba Aerodrome, a facility that caters to a wide variety of private aircraft. In a year marking the 50th anniversary of the coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, that airport arouses less affable feelings.

Rodolfo Reyes, a lawyer and nephew of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, charged on Tuesday that the reports from two laboratories in Canada and Denmark confirm the assassination of the Nobel Prizewinner for Literature with a biological weapon.

Nine political prisoners of the Mapuche people in southern Chile have been on hunger strike since November 27. Now, their protest has reached a dangerous and crucial moment.

On the morning of September 21, 1976, a car bomb took the lives of Orlando Letelier, Minister of Foreign Relations and Ambassador to the U.S. under Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old fundraiser for the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-wing think-tank in Washington, D.C.

The Chilean people demonstrated at the ballot box against the proposal of the new Constitution of Chile, with an unappealable result, according to the final official bulletin of the Electoral Service of Chile (Servel) with a 62% rejection of the constitutional project against a 38% of approval; the vote was mandatory, hence the participation has exceeded 13 million voters.

The President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, during his campaign promised to reform the country’s uniformed police.

Gabriel Boric, president-elect of Chile, considers that the leftist governments headed by President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua “have failed.”

Doctor Sepúlveda Allende’s open letter to Boric is translated and reproduced.

At 35 years of age, Gabriel Boric is the youngest president-elect (he will be 36 when he takes office on March 11) and the most voted in Chilean history, with an unprecedented 55% of electoral participation.

The search for the new era in Chile has two important avenues: the writing of the new constitution, which is what the 155 members of the Constitutional Convention are doing, and the presidential election to be held on November 21, 2021.

In Chile, community food networks and mutual aid tell us that the revolution starts close to home writes Jumanah Younis

Independent and progressive candidates won more than a two-thirds majority in the Constitutional Convention, a body responsible for writing Chile’s new constitution.

The Chilean ambassador to Brazil, Raúl Rettig, sent an alarming cable in March 1971 to his foreign ministry titled “Brazilian Army possibly conducting studies on guerrillas being introduced into Chile.”

Daniel Jadue is the mayor of Recoleta, a commune that is part of the expanding city of Santiago, Chile. His office is on the sixth floor of a municipal building in whose lower reaches one can find a pharmacy, an optical shop, and a bookstore run by the municipality that are dedicated to providing fairly priced goods.

The Chilean media were quick to label the October 2019 popular uprising an ‘estallido social’, a social explosion. As the cry of ‘Chile despertó!’­– Chile woke up!–rang out in the streets, the refrain in television studios was that ‘no one saw this coming’.

Like in Bolivia, the strength of public opinion in Chile was so immense that the government, led by Chile’s richest man Sebastian Piñera, immediately conceded.

Ahead of the Chilean national plebiscite, scheduled for October 25, we answer some of the key questions regarding the upcoming popular referendum.

Chile has responded to anti-neoliberal protests with brutally violent repression. 10,365 people have been detained; 3765 treated for wounds in hospitals; and 2122 shot, 445 in the eye according to a conservative estimate by the state-backed National Institute of Human Rights.

Chile is today in the midst of an unprecedented constituent process 30 years after the return of democracy, where the possibility of a new constitution has opened a discussion about what sort of country we want, and which rights should be enshrined in the drafting of this fundamental document.