Lat/Am Daily » Chile

‘The Torture Coloney’

Peter Krupa — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:27:31 +0000

For your Wednesday evening reading pleasure, a very long, very strange article on Colonia Dignidad, a German colony founded in Chile by a child molester/Nazi named Paul Schaefer. In addition to being the personification of the evil cult leader, Schaefer – who died last week in prison – got into evil politics as well, torturing people on behalf of Pinochet.

The whole thing’s too weird and creepy to excerpt. Just print it out.

(H/T BoingBoing.)

Kissinger and Operation Condor

Peter Krupa — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:21:15 +0000

The good folks at George Washington University’s National Security Archive project report that recently-declassified memos show U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Prize winner Henry Kissinger directly ordering underlings to cancel warnings against launching Operation Condor to military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay .

Four days later, a car bomb killed former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his secretary Ronni Karpen Moffitt as they drove through Washington, D.C.

Frankly, I don’t find these documents as scandalous as the NSA does, although the AP says controversy over this particular point of history has been raging for some time. Avoiding warning other governments against committing atrocities is not nearly as outrageous as directly participating in or encouraging those atrocities. I suppose the implication is that if you avoid issuing warnings, you’re probably involved somehow.

What is interesting to me is the tone of the State Department communications. To wit:

What we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved.

Really? That’s what you’re concerned about? The “reputations of the countries involved?” I would have been concerned about the people to be extra-judicially tortured and murdered.

Anyway, it’s not like we needed further proof that Kissinger is a war criminal. Can you un-nominate someone for a Nobel Peace Prize?

The collapse that shouldn’t have been

Peter Krupa — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:14:27 +0000

Oops?

One of the most dramatic images from the Feb. 27 Chilean earthquake is that of the Alto Río building in Concepción, split in half, lying on its side. Eight people died in that building, and the broken structure served as an emblem to the world of the earthquake’s incredible power.

Except, Alto Río was a glaring exception. Amazingly, almost nothing else straight-up collapsed from the 8.8 earthquake, and certainly nothing else that had been built in just the last few years.

People immediately sensed this was odd. So did the company that built the building – Constructora Socovil – which stealthy transferred its assets to three other corporations to avoid losing them in a civil trial. The sneakiness caused a scandal that culminated in the resignation of the regional head of the Chilean Construction Chamber.

Now with a report out from the Chamber saying that the building could have been damaged, but shouldn’t have fallen, the civil complaints have begun in earnest, with 72 apartment owners suing the company for fraud. At least five families are bringing murder charges against Socovil as well.

The collapse of Alto Río was bad. But it’s a stark reminder that absent Chile’s generally effective building codes and enforcement, the earthquake would have been much, much worse.

(Image courtesy nazgulhead.)

Rockin’ and a rollin’

Peter Krupa — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:49:10 +0000

This is what a 2-minute long, 8.8-on-the-Richter-Scale earthquake looks like on the 12th floor of a hotel in Valvdivia, Chile. Sweet Jesus.

Harder than it looks

Peter Krupa — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:26:32 +0000

Chile is good at a lot of things, but it turns out tallying up death tolls is not one of them.

First we were told it was over 800. Then the government revised it down to 279 because a municipal government had counted a bunch of missing people as dead. Then the death toll went back up to 700 when many of those missing were added to the list of the dead. Then it went back down to 452 from 497 (wait, what?) with 96 people still missing. And now Diario del Sur is reporting that the official official list of the dead – with ID numbers and death certificates – is 342, revised down from 359 after it was discovered that 17 names on the list (PDF) were duplicates.

The official number is sure to go up again as more missing people are added to the list of the dead, but maybe they could just stop releasing numbers until they get the whole thing sorted.

Shopping spree

Peter Krupa — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:44:10 +0000

These ones are on sale.

Two reports were issued recently on Latin American arms purchases. Venezuela has recently given the impression of being particularly spendy on new weapons, perhaps because ex-military man Chávez likes to talk about guns and things. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, however, everyone’s going shopping. Brazil is the region’s biggest buyer of arms, followed by Chile.

The thing that gets me is that in addition to the usual jet fighters and whatnot, everyone is buying tanks. From the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s report:

A number of states in South America are investing in tanks and armoured vehicles. In September 2009 Venezuela received $2.2 billion in credit from Russia, which will be used to purchase an unknown quantity and type of air defence systems, artillery and armoured vehicles, as well as 92 T72M1M tanks. In 2009 Brazil began to take delivery of 220 second hand Leopard1A5 tanks from Germany, while Chile completed the acquisition of 140 secondhand Leopard2A4 tanks, also from Germany. In late 2009 Peru announced that it was planning to sign a deal for 80 MBT2000 tanks from China.

I guess it’s no crazier than Chile spending US$2.71 billion in 18 F-16s, or Brazil picking up a French nuclear submarine, but at least those weapons have some sort of broader range, added value, use in “diplomatic” displays of force, what-have-you. But tanks?

They’re pretty much only good for parades. Or arms buildups.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Faceoff

Peter Krupa — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:12:42 +0000

Bolivan President Evo Morales is in Chile this week for Sebastian Piñera’s swearing in as that country’s new president. The two are facing off this afternoon on the football pitch. From EFE:

The game, which was organized by the Chilean Ex-Professional Football Players Union, will include the participation of former renowned Chilean players, including Marcelo Salas, Carlos Caszely, Elías Figueroa, Rubén Martínez, Mario Soto, Pedro González, and Leonel Herrera, among others.

Piñera better bring his A-game: Morales lives and trains in La Paz, 3,640 meters above sea level. On the other hand, Piñera owns part of a professional football team, so maybe he’ll bring some ringers.

Here’s hoping for a match between Chávez and Uribe.

Piñera clearing the air

Location, location, location

Peter Krupa — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:22:36 +0000

I’ve experienced several earthquakes during my years in Costa Rica. I think the strongest was the Cinchona quake. At the time it hit, I was having lunch at a restaurant. The quake came on slowly, laterally, and went on for some time. I remember looking out the trembling window and seeing parked cars bouncing back and forth on their shocks.

Even though it killed dozens of people and displaced an entire town, to me it felt like a curiosity. That quake was 6.1 on the Richter scale. I said to myself, “Not so bad.”

So compared to that experience, when another earthquake hit Costa Rica on Friday night, I thought for sure it was a 6, or at least a 5.5. It only lasted six seconds, but it felt like a truck hit the building. Everything jumped. There was a low roar. It scared the bejesus out of me.

Come to find out, it was only a measly 4.4. So why so scary?

Everyone likes to talk about the Richter scale, partly because journalists love numbers, so that’s how quakes are reported. But how an earthquake really feels depends on much more than a number.

There are all different kinds of faults, and each produces different motions. A strike-slip fault will produce side-to-side motion, which is devastating for buildings. A thrust fault produces up-and-down motion, which causes wicked tsunamis. (Incidentally, Haiti’s earthquake was caused by the former, Chile’s the latter.)

Also important is the distance you are from the source of the earthquake, both its depth and the map location of the epicenter. And there’s the rub. The epicenter of the 6.1 Cinchona quake from last year was 30km away. However, my dinky 4.4 from Friday night was basically right underneath me, and only about 7km deep.

That changed everything. And it helps explain why the Chile quake was less destructive than the Haiti quake. The Chile quake was 21 miles deep and 200 miles from Santiago. But put it 16 miles outside of town and only 8 miles underground, like the Haiti quake, and I don’t care what kind of building codes you’ve got, you’re gonna have a catastrophe.

I bet you think this earthquake’s about you

Peter Krupa — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:42:40 +0000

Don't you? Don't you?

It’s always embarrassing to watch Americans reduce human affairs to a handful of particular assumptions based on their own culture wars and then apply them to the rest of the world. Such has been the case with – unbelievably – Chile’s Feb. 27 earthquake.

It started with a ridiculous Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that the low earthquake death toll owed itself to the miracle of Chicago-school economic theory as implemented by Pinochet. This argument should be ignored, or at best, laughed off. Do not feed the trolls.

Instead, it has caused an earnest and vociferous reaction from the other team, which, using common sense, historical knowledge, and actual data, makes a pretty good case for the Chicago school having nothing to do with it.

Still, it’s exhausting. The same Cold War characters have been having the same binary good/evil arguments in the United States for half a century now. This wasn’t an accurate way of understanding the world during the Cold War, and it’s not an accurate model for understanding history now.

The thing is, the world does not exist according to the prevailing intellectual currents in the United States of America. Chile is a whole country, full of people who do things and have thoughts and organize themselves into groups for the accomplishing of particular goals. They have history which, though at times influenced by U.S. intervention, is their own.

Whether or not the Chileans got ideas from the United States, or were pressured by the United States, or were defended by people on the left from the United States, is irrelevant to the way Chile is today. The relevant part is how Chile reacted to those pressures and influences, and in that sense, the Chileans are the masters of their own destiny. They built their own country, the richest in the region, and they’ll rebuild it.

Americans – babyboomers, in particular – are accustomed to a world that revolves around them. Increasingly, it doesn’t. Better get used to it.

Oops. (Also: Yay!)

Peter Krupa — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:10:43 +0000

Chilean officials have significantly revised downward their estimate of the death toll from last Saturday’s earthquake. It was over 800. The new death toll estimate is 279.

Carmen Fernández, the director of the emergency management agency, known as Onemi, said in an interview that in several badly damaged municipalities, officials had erroneously included the names of people who were missing on the lists of those who had been killed.

I guess that means the death toll could still rise substantially. For now, though, I’m sure those 500 people are happy to be officially alive.