Aftershocks rattle Chile during Inauguration

Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images -Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, accompanied by his wife, Cecilia Morel, during his inauguration ceremony at the Congress in Valparaiso on Thursday. 

The new Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, had not even taken office on Thursday when major aftershocks rocked the central coast of this earthquake-ravaged country. But within hours of his inauguration, he appeared on television to announce that troops, relief supplies and even Mr. Piñera himself would be heading immediately to the quake zone.

In rushing to respond aggressively to the tremors, it seemed that Mr. Piñera was trying to avoid the missteps of his predecessor, Michelle Bachelet, whose response to a devastating Feb. 27 earthquake was criticized as halting and ineffective. Mr. Piñera said he would fly to the hardest-hit areas later Thursday, and promised to “deploy all of the troops that may be necessary starting this evening to guarantee calm and public order.”
 

In the legislative seat of Valparaíso, about 90 miles from the quakes, dignitaries who gathered for the inauguration of Mr. Piñera made nervous jokes and glanced at the shuddering ceiling of the National Congress building as the quakes hit, according to news reports.

Mr. Piñera, however, showed no sign of acknowledging the tremors, and continued to shake hands with leaders and supporters before taking the oath of office. But the building was evacuated after the inauguration.

Claudio Santana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images From left, Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay and Rafael Correa of Ecuador during a 6.9 magnitude aftershock during the inauguration ceremony of Chilean President Sebastián Piñera on Thursday.

The United States Geological Survey reported that the first quake on Thursday struck the coast to the west of Rancagua and was quickly followed by one of 6.7 magnitude at 11:55 a.m., and another of 6.0 magnitude at 12:06 p.m. Scores of strong aftershocks have rattled Chile’s interior and its coastline since the Feb. 27 quake, one of the most powerful on record. That quake killed hundreds of people, toppled apartment buildings and bridges, and stirred up powerful waves that erased entire fishing villages hugging the southern coast of the country.

Chile rattled on path to development

Associated Press - Residents of Constitución, a seaside town in Chile that was pounded by a post-earthquake tsunami, wait in line to receive melons Friday.

SANTIAGO, Chile—Chile's earthquake has had an unexpected aftershock—shaking the country's confidence in its march to the ranks of developed nations. For many people here, the massive earthquake exposed deep social and economic fault lines in the country, triggering complaints that poor barrios were hit hardest by the temblor and speculation that rampant looting was partly their revenge on wealthier Chileans.
Sociologist and blogger Lucia Dammert dubbed it "a social earthquake" that revealed "a fractured country, socially divided with a population that feels excluded and as a result acts with a lack of community values."


In Santiago, the capital, wealthy neighborhoods to the northeast suffered little or no damage as a result of sturdy, modern architecture that complies with some of the strictest building codes in the world. Abraham Senerman, architect of a 52-floor building soon to be inaugurated in Las Condes, one of the city's poshest neighborhoods, boasted to local media that the tower survived unscathed. Across town, in the working-class suburb of Pudahuel, Celia Aliaga's three-bedroom home, a former farmhouse made of adobe, crumbled. "This was all I had, and there's nothing for me to rebuild with," said Ms. Aliaga, a 56-year-old housekeeper, who has been sleeping with her family under a tin roof in the backyard since the quake.

The economic divide in Chilean society has been a festering problem even though free-market policies have helped propel the country to an extended period of growth and stability. The richest fifth of Chilean households earn around half of national income, compared to the poorest fifth's 5%. Chile recently became the first South American nation invited to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but a report by the exclusive group of advanced economies noted Chilean inequality remained "very high," by the group's standards. Chile's government acknowledges that inequality remains a problem, and that people in poorer, rural areas did have to wait longer for relief to arrive because of the logistical challenge of reaching them.

Watching televised reporting from Chile, I was struck by the poverty in some quarters. Naively I had assumed that such poverty would not exist there, and I have to wonder why I thought so.

But citing the magnitude of the quake, felt by over 80% of Chile's population, Pilar Armanet, spokeswoman for president Michelle Bachelet, said, "the earthquake was very democratic." She noted that the tsunami that hit people living in poor settlements along the coast after the quake also affected many middle and upper-class vacationers.

This really speaks directly to the lack of understanding and sensitivity in some: what comparison can be made between having one's living quarters and one's vacation? A ruined vacation? Well, go home, and wait for the next vacation.

Still, differences in economic status appeared to go a long way toward determining how well people came out of the earthquake. Santiago officials have denounced some builders for cutting corners in less affluent barrios. In Maipú, a middle-class suburb in southwest Santiago, Mayor Alberto Undurraga spent the past week meeting with residents of two apartment complexes that buckled in the quake and are now condemned to be razed. Apartments constructed by the same builder in more affluent neighborhoods, angry residents point out, didn't collapse. The residents, with the city's help, are now suing the builder and pursuing other legal action via a consumer protection agency. Attempts to reach the builder were unsuccessful.

Further south, near the epicenter, Chileans' economic status also influenced their view of the post-quake looting. Gustavo Rivera, founder of the MultiCentro department store chain, said the looting was fundamentally a problem of public order and the government's delay in sending troops onto the streets. "This is a country that respects authority," he said, as workers swept up glass from the broken windows of a MultiCentro outlet looted in the city of Constitución. "Without authority, it's chaos." He said it was clear that not all the looters were poor people, and some stole non-essential items like TVs and stereos and not just food.

Televised reports did show people hauling boxed goods in shopping carts. So not all looters were desperately seeking food and sustenance. Yet of those that were looting wantonly, what can be said? Simply that they are thieves, degenerates that took advantage of socal chaos to rob and steal? Were that it were that simple.

But other people suggested deeper social inequities lay behind the looting. José Rafael Alegría, a quake victim holding up a sign asking for food on a roadside near Constitución, said profiteering by some merchants after the quake helped explain why poorer Chileans might resent them. He said some merchants had doubled the price of a sack of flour in the disaster's aftermath.

That is not shown, nor discussed.

President elect Sebastian Piñera, who has pledged to turn Chile into a developed nation by 2018, will now have to spend his first two years in office occupied with rebuilding damaged areas, said Otto Granados, a Mexican academic who served in that country's government during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and was later ambassador to Chile.


Mr. Granados said he thinks Chile managed the quake pretty well and that some of the disruption and looting had to do with human nature rather than defects in Chilean society. He cited a Mexican saying: "when the arca [vault] comes open, even the most honest will sin."

WSJ article By MATT MOFFETT and PAULO PRADA

Chile temblor tilts Earth

Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images - Firefighters searched for victims in the debris of a house in Curanipe.

AMERICAS NEWS - MARCH 3, 2010

Temblor Tilts Earth by Inches

By GAUTAM NAIK

The earthquake that struck Chile was so powerful it shifted the planet's axis enough to make it spin slightly faster, meaning our days will be shorter by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to preliminary calculations by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"This is an esoteric effect that physics says has to happen," notes David Kerridge, the British Geological Survey's head of natural hazards, who studies earthquakes. "It's interesting, but it has no particular consequence on anything."

View Slideshow


See details on the deadliest and strongest earthquakes world-wide.

Scientists have long noted that just about any event that shifts a large amount of mass from one part of the planet to another will have a tiny—and sometimes measurable—effect on the Earth's rotation. Such events include changes to ocean currents, big shifts in the atmosphere, earthquakes, and possibly even the creation of more and more reservoirs from the damming of rivers.

The 8.8-magnitude temblor that struck Chile on Saturday is one of the largest quakes in a century. It was the result of an ocean tectonic plate—a shard of the earth's crust—sliding under the South American plate; over time, the two became locked together. When the pent-up energy overcame the forces of friction and the South American plate sprang upward, it unleashed a huge amount of energy in the form of the quake.

The planet was jolted to its roots. A chunk of the Earth's mass was redistributed vertically, which caused the planet's figure axis—on which the Earth's mass is balanced—to move by about three inches, according to calculations by NASA scientist Richard Gross. The net effect of that mass redistribution made the earth spin slightly faster, just as a figure skater speeds up when she pulls in her arms.

"It's important for us to know how the earth's rotation changes," said Dr. Gross, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It helps us figure out where a spacecraft is and to navigate it for a precise pinpoint landing" on Mars, the moon or another planet. Dr. Gross and his colleagues had conducted a similar analysis following the even bigger 9.1-magnitude quake in Indonesia. They found that the 2004 temblor decreased the length of a day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the North Pole by a few centimeters.

For a long time, earthquakes have been gradually changing the shape of the earth as well. Calculations suggested that the earth's oblateness—the way it is flat on top and bulges at the equator—had decreased by a tiny amount following the Indonesian earthquake. In other words, the world is getting slightly rounder.

Dr. Gross said that though the Chilean quake was less powerful than the 2004 Indonesia temblor, it likely changed the position of the figure axis a bit more. (The planet's figure axis is separate from the north-south axis; they are about 33 feet apart.)

The vertical redistribution of mass caused by the Chilean quake had a slightly greater impact in shifting the figure axis because the quake happened near the mid-latitudes, NASA concludes. Plus, the fault in Chile dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle, which again has a greater effect on shifting the figure axis.

The Haiti quake, by contrast, didn't make the Earth wobble in quite the same way, according to Dr. Kerridge. The Haiti quake was caused by one tectonic plate sliding past another, not above or under it. "There was almost no vertical movement there when the quake happened, so you wouldn't expect the same effect," says Dr. Kerridge.

Aftermath

 

From El Universal.com.mx:

SAQUEOS, ROBOS, DESASTRE

Mientras socorristas tratan de rescatar víctimas atrapadas bajo los escombros, decenas de personas saquean supermercados y roban bancos, después del terremoto de 8.8 grados que ayer sacudió a Chile | Ver nota

Terremoto

Earthquake in Chile. Found this graphic on the website if London's Daily Telegraph.

After the Caudillo

President Michelle Bachelet of Chile danced in front of the presidential palace in Santiago last month as part of independence anniversary celebrations.













After the Caudillo (November 18, 2007)


At first, breaking the gender barrier in South America did not go smoothly for Michelle Bachelet.

In 2006, she had just captured the world’s attention, becoming the first woman to be elected president of this deeply conservative country. And she had done it alone, without the famous husbands that had propelled other female presidents in Latin America.

But one month after taking office, Ms. Bachelet faced huge student demonstrations across the country. Her support fell further when a new public transportation system turned chaotic, leading critics to lampoon her with an image of her riding atop a city bus toward the edge of a cliff.

But with only five months until she leaves office, Ms. Bachelet is increasingly likely to be remembered as one of her country’s most popular leaders. Polls this month show her public approval to be above 70 percent, and in recent weeks she has recorded the highest levels since Chile went from dictatorship to democracy in 1990.

Analysts and pollsters attribute her stunning turnaround to her handling of the economy during the global financial crisis and to her decision to save billions of dollars in revenues from copper sales during the last commodity boom. That aggressive saving gave the country money to spend on pension reform and Ms. Bachelet’s ambitious program of social protections for women and children, despite the financial crisis.

Ms. Bachelet resisted the cries of politicians to use revenues from copper sales to try to close Chile’s inequality gap, one of the world’s worst. Instead, during her first three years in office, her government set aside $35 billion in revenue from the boom. When the global financial crisis hit, the value of Chile’s exports sank by more than 30 percent. But by then Chile had nearly $20 billion invested in overseas sovereign wealth funds alone.

Ms. Bachelet, a pediatrician, said, “I believe that if you want to fight inequality you have to do it starting at infancy.”

Opposition politicians who once criticized her social-protection efforts as a retreat to an era of big government are now saying they will try to expand her programs to the middle class.

If it works, it becomes popular. In the US it has happened with Social Security and Medicare.

The Cult of the Caudillo

To understand what is happening in Honduras today, it helps to know a bit more about Latin America’s long love affair with caudillos, how these larger-than-life but power-hungry men damaged their countries, and why so many people are terrified that they are making a comeback.

Acceptable statement, though rather general and sweeping. There is, of course, no denying the reality of the caudillo in Latin American history. Yet it is important to carefully analyze history, and resist the temptation of making shallow analysis.

Caudillismo is so deeply rooted it has spawned its own literary genre. Discerning readers see Fidel Castro as the model for the aging, cow-obsessed strongman in Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” who wanders alone dragging his outsize testicles over the floors of his presidential palace. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel “The Feast of the Goat,” portrayed the precariousness of life in the Dominican Republic under the rule of the predatory and brutal right-wing caudillo, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

My reading of the recent García Márquez biography byGerald Martin informs me differently; the Patriarch may well have been a composite, and in part based on Trujillo. I shall have to clear that up.

In Latin America, the strength of the caudillo weakened the region’s institutions. Political parties centered on caudillos often collapsed after the caudillo’s death and never professionalized. As a result, Latin Americans seem perennially ready to trust their fate to a providential “man on horseback” who comes to their nation’s rescue, rather than on the ability of the nation’s institutions to provide security and prosperity.

My reading of John Lynch's biography of Bolívar left me with the impression that caudillismo prevented the emergence of robust institutions. Rather than a result, people's trust in strongmen was concurrent with weak institutions, corruption, and social divisions.

Caudillos come in all ideological stripes. Mr. Pinochet, whose famous photograph in sinister dark glasses was taken soon after his coup, became the iconic image of the right-wing Latin American military dictator. These days, most caudillos are leftist. Mr. Castro, el Comandante or el Caballo (the Horse), has the dubious distinction of being the longest-lived caudillo in Latin American history, owing his record-breaking stretch in power more to caudillismo than Marxismo. He’s passed on the torch to Hugo Chávez, the populist caudillo from Caracas, Venezuela.

Interestingly, the article is not accompanied by the famed photograph of Pinochet looking thuggish in his dark glasses, but, rather, a more innocuous one of the general as a sort of elder statesman.
In the 20th century, few had bigger egos than Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Known as El Jefe, Mr. Trujillo took power at age 38, wearing a sash with the motto Dios y Trujillo, or “God and Trujillo.” Even churches were forced to emblazon the motto. A few years later, the capital, Santo Domingo, was renamed Ciudad Trujillo. Fond of wearing comic-opera military uniforms with 18th-century-style plumed hats, Mr. Trujillo was as brutal as he was outlandish, murdering thousands of Haitian immigrants as well as torturing and killing political opponents; he fed some of them to the sharks.

Trujillo was the US's man in the Caribbean, a bulwark against communism. His cruelty and brutality is undeniable, yet to omit mention of his being favored by Washington leaves an incomplete, and thus an inaccurate, picture.
While arms made the man in the 19th century, in the 20th, most caudillos have been careful to present themselves as champions of the people, wrapped either in the mantle of revolution—like Fidel Castro—or in that of democracy. Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón used populism to endear himself to the nation’s poor, known as descamisados, or “shirtless ones.”

Perón returned in the 1970s and held power again, and after his deatch, his new wife held power for a while. Perónismo is the dominant ideological construct, but a vapid skeleton that simply has the label, and little substance. Its meaning is manipulated, so that Menem and the Kirchners can both be labeled Peronists.

The legacy of Mr. Perón’s free-spending populist philosophy has led Argentina into periodic economic crises. When prices for Argentine exports like beef are high, for instance, Perónist governments have spent the windfall like a drunken sailor, leading to a cash crunch when prices eventually head south.

Rather poor choice of metaphor: Argentina is in the South.

As far as the U.S. was concerned, the cause of democracy in Latin America often took a back seat to fighting Communism during the Cold War. For years, the U.S. either looked the other way or supported coups with the aim of preventing the spread of Communism in the hemisphere. Military coups became almost ritual. In the 1970s, Honduras endured so many coups that the capital was jokingly called Tegucigolpe, for the Spanish word golpe, or coup.
Well, the point is raised; I would quibble with the word often. But, the point is made, and is accurate.

While democracy has spread throughout Latin America, caudillos never vanish, they just adapt to changing times. Gone is the old-fashioned military coup, replaced with a new strategy for power that could be called “coup by stealth,” or “coup by democratic means.”


The primary architect of this new blueprint is Mr. Chávez, a strongman with one foot grounded in the past and the other firmly placed in the future of caudillismo. In 1992, Mr. Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel with a mish-mash of leftist, nationalist and fascist ideas, led an old-fashioned coup in an attempt to overthrow the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. It failed, and Mr. Chávez was jailed.

Prudent Chile Thrives Amid Downturn

During the emerging economies' commodities boom a few years back, Chilean Finance Minister Andrés Velasco was a wet blanket at the fiesta. Chile, the world's largest copper producer, was reaping a bonanza from the quadrupling in the metal's price. Mr. Velasco insisted on squirreling away a large chunk in a rainy-day fund.

As the savings swelled above $20 billion -- more than 15% of Chile's economic output -- Mr. Velasco faced growing pressure to break open the piggy bank. In September, protesters barged into a presentation by Mr. Velasco, carrying an effigy of him and shouting, "The copper money is for the poor people."

The CIA World Factbook has the estimated US 2008 GDP as $14.29 trillion; 15% of that would be $2.143 trillion.

Wonder who led those protests?

The 48-year-old Mr. Velasco, wary that a flood of copper income could generate lending and consumption bubbles, stood his ground, even as the popularity of the center-left government withered. Latin American history, he cautioned, was full of "booms that had been mismanaged and ended badly."

Finance Minister Andrés Velasco built Chile's rainy-day fund.





Today Mr. Velasco looks like a prophet. Since the onset of the global economic crisis, copper prices have fallen by 50%, in line with the sharp decline in other commodities. Emerging economies that got too giddy in the good years are now coping with nasty hangovers. Soybean-dependent Argentina is facing a possible debt default while oil-rich Russia has been stuck bailing out banks and companies that got in over their heads in debt.

Thanks to Mr. Velasco's caution, Chile is now in a position to try to bootstrap its own recovery from the global recession. Mr. Velasco's preemptive moves have kept Chile's government from having to spend a single peso on bank bailouts. Having paid down foreign debt during the fat years, Chile is now a net creditor nation, with a debt rating that was upgraded by Moody's Investors Service in March.



And now Chile is pouring some of its copper savings into a massive stimulus plan, consisting of job-creating public-works projects, tax breaks for business, investments to keep mines operating and other goodies. Chile's plan is one of the largest stimulus packages in the world relative to the size of its economy. The Chilean program is the equivalent of 2.8% of gross domestic product, versus 2% in the U.S.

And it doesn't have to be borrowed.


Juan Carlos Huaiquimil, who sells soft drinks from a pushcart, is the head of one of 1.7 million Chilean families, the poorest 40% of the population, which received cash stipends from the government in March. He says the money, equivalent to $70, was a godsend, helping pay for school supplies and uniforms for his three children. Last week, Chile announced another stipend will be paid in August.

"How many countries are in a position to give away money today?" he asks.

The answer in emerging-market countries is not many.

Nor among the emerged, developed countries.

For Chile's governing Concertación coalition, prudence is providing a belated political boost. The government is more popular today during the global recession than it ever was during the copper boom years. President Michelle Bachelet has a 67% approval rating, up 25 points since last August. Mr. Velasco, whose job appeared in danger a year or two ago, is as popular as she is.

Ah, hindsight.

To avoid repeating history, Mr. Velasco in 2006 pushed through a law requiring the annual budget to be based on an independent committee's estimate of the average copper price over the next 10 years -- not on the current market price. Any copper income above the budgeted price goes into a savings fund maintained outside the country.

In mid-2006, tens of thousands of Chilean high-school students, seeking free school transportation and education reforms, launched disruptive demonstrations, known as the "March of the Penguins," because of the students' black-and-white uniforms. In August 2007, Chile's top union leader called a national strike, after accusing Mr. Velasco of "declaring war" on workers by resisting wage demands. Protests coinciding with the strike led to street fights with police and hundreds of arrests.

So much for foresight.

Chile Deal Spices Up Wal-Mart

In today's print edition of the Journal the offer by Wal-Mart to buy D&S (Distribución y Servicio) is advertised.

Buying D&S will give Wal-Mart an instant hold on 33% of Chile's grocery market, which can be linked to Wal-Mart's existing distribution chain running from Argentina to Mexico.

Instantly, it'll have a third of the market. More, Wal-Mart will use its existing distribution chain, which should reduce per unit costs.

D&S operates through a variety of store sizes, including smaller locations to compete with local shops in underdeveloped regions. Wal-Mart has experience with a similar model in Mexico, where it operates through 68% subsidiary Wal-Mart de México, known as Walmex. As it did with Walmex, Wal-Mart is only buying a majority stake in D&S. The family that now controls the retailer will keep a minority stake, which means Wal-Mart has an experienced local connection in the company.

As a Memoirist, a Chilean Diplomat Takes Off the White Gloves

Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz, an Allende supporter, now Chile’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

Mr. Muñoz wanted to examine the question of whether Chile’s free-market economic miracle was really the fruit of the Pinochet period — as General Pinochet’s die-hard supporters still claim — or whether it might have occurred without such a brutally anti-Socialist regime.

Worthy of exploration and examination, the question can not be answered with a slam-dunk assertion that of course Pinochet's rule brought prosperity to Chile.

Although General Pinochet unleashed free-market policies inspired by the “Chicago boys,” young Chilean disciples of Milton Friedman and other economists of the Chicago School, the dictator was forced to retrench and even to nationalize much of the banking sector with a $7 billion bailout in the early 1980s.

An objective argument against Pinochet's being the launcher of an economic miracle.

It was only after the defeat of General Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite and the establishment of democracy that the real economic boom occurred, Mr. Muñoz argues in the book, with the poverty level in Chile dropping to 13.7 percent in 2007 from 40 percent in 1990.

40% poverty rate hardly qualifies as an economic miracle.

But Patricio Navia, who teaches Latin American studies at New York University, says the book underplays the extent to which modern Chile is a creature of what Pinochet wrought. “Chile today is much more what Pinochet had in mind than what Allende had in mind,” he said, referring to Salvador Allende, the Socialist president of Chile who was overthrown in the 1973 coup.

Paul E. Sigmund, a professor emeritus at Princeton and an expert on Chilean politics, said the book’s greatest value lay in its detailed descriptions of the policy fights of the Pinochet era. “He is a remarkable combination of political activist and political observer,” Mr. Sigmund said of the ambassador.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Heraldo Muñoz.

Chile eruption spurs evacuations

Authorities in Chile have ordered the complete evacuation of two towns after a volcano erupting nearby increased its activity, spewing out lava and ash.

Chaiten volcano in the southern Patagonia region began erupting on Friday for the first time in 450 years, taking local officials by surprise.

A plume of ash from the volcano caused disruption as far away as Argentina.

Chile is one of the most volcanic countries on Earth, with more than 100 active volcanoes.

Of those, experts say about 20 are in danger of erupting at any time.

More than 4,000 people left the town of Chaiten, 10km (six miles) away from the volcano, after the initial eruption. Several hundred are still waiting to leave.

Futaleufu, 70km to the east, is also being evacuated.

Rodrigo Rojas of the National Emergency Office said the situation had deteriorated suddenly.

"Today the volcano is erupting with pyroclastic material on a different scale," he told Reuters news agency.

"We presume lava is flowing and so have ordered the immediate precautionary evacuation of all civilians, military and press in Chaiten."

View of the gas and steam from the Chaiten volcano, which erupted last Friday affecting the city of Chaiten, 1.220 kilometers South of Santiago de Chile, 04 May 2008.

Libraries multiply offer of dailies to attract immigrants

A library article from newspaper (online version) La Vanguardia, Barcelona.

Seguir leyendo noticia

"a prensa extranjera "ha sido una forma de enganche, de que vinieran". No es de extrañar, pues, que el centro ofrezca la posibilidad de leer diarios en urdu, bengalí, hindi, árabe, francés, italiano e inglés, además de en catalán y castellano. Y dentro del castellano, se puede leer prensa de diferentes países de habla hispana, como Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina o Chile."

"Acorde con el cambio que ha vivido la sociedad catalana en los últimos años -en 2006 más de un 12% de la población de la provincia era extranjera- las bibliotecas se adaptan a sus nuevos usuarios."