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Chile

This Happened

This Happened — May 22: The Great Chilean Earthquake

The Great Chilean earthquake was a magnitude 9.5 earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile on this day in 1960.

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A Chilean Recipe To Become A Global Leader In Eco-Food Production

Chile's CeTA agency tests innovative food prototypes for startups and firms, helping to curb production costs and pushing for evolution in the context of climate change.

SANTIAGO — Drought in many parts of the world will likely become a recurring problem, and is already fueling not just fires but also debate on food security and sustainable food production.

Latin America is particularly vulnerable to climate change, as seen in Argentina's record-breaking summer heat and violent flooding in Peru, both of which threaten food production.

The future of food production has been of particular interest to neighboring Chile, which created in 2016 the CeTA (Centro Tecnológico para la Innovación Alimentaria), a research and testing center for new foods. This private-public partnership is working to make Chile a world leader in producing evolved, sustainable food products.

In 2014, a joint report by the government and Inter-American Development Bank found that Chile had doubled the value of its food exports in the previous decade, to $16 billion. Jean Paul Veas Flores, the CeTA managing-director, attributes this to expanded cultivation areas and switching to higher-value fruit and vegetables.

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50 Years After Pinochet's Coup, Chile Is Ready To Recover The Disappeared

The government of Chile's young new president, Gabriel Boric, has begun to develop the National Plan for the Search for Victims of the Dictatorship, half a century after the coup.

SANTIAGO — In what resembles an endless human chain, hundreds of people hold signs displaying black and white portraits with one question: where are they? Every September 11, the day of Chile's 1973 coup d'état, they follow the same route through streets that for one day become the setting of a pilgrimage to the General Cemetery of Santiago. They cry out for justice and demand answers.

They are, for the most part, women who know what it means to care for someone, even when the person they loved — they love — is no longer there. Wives, mothers, daughters, and granddaughters of the disappeared or other victims of the dictatorship who have not given in to oblivion.

This coming September 11, it will be 50 years since a group led by Augusto Pinochet shattered democracy and forever changed the history of a country whose wounds are still exposed : 17 years of a dictatorship would follow, in which thousands of people were sent to prison, tortured, murdered, or forcibly disappeared.

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The Latin American Left Is Back, But More Fractured Than Ever

The Left is constantly being hailed as the resurgent power in Latin America. But there is no unified Left in the region. The "movement" is diverse — and its divisions are growing.

-Analysis-

LIMA — Lula da Silva's reelection to the presidency in Brazil is the 25th consecutive democratic election in Latin America in which the ruling party has lost power. There appears to be general discontent with ruling parties, caused partly by external factors: the world's worst pandemic in a century, the worst recession since the 1990s, and sharpest inflation rate in 40 years.

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LGBTQ Plus
Laura Valentina Cortés Sierra, Sophia Constantino and Bertrand Hauger

LGBTQ+ International: Chile's Non-Binary ID, Slovakia In Mourning, Mr Gay World — And The Week’s Other Top News

Welcome to Worldcrunch’s LGBTQ+ International. We bring you up-to-speed each week on a topic you may follow closely at home, but can now see from different places and perspectives around the world. Discover the latest news on everything LGBTQ+ — from all corners of the planet. All in one smooth scroll!

This week featuring:

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Ideas
José María del Pino

Chile's "Silent Majority" Reminds Us About The Overreach Of Identity Politics

An overwhelming majority of Chileans quietly but very clearly voted to reject a draft constitution, which it feared would lock the country into a radical socialist mould.

-Analysis-

In Chile, the Left has fallen victim to its love of identity politics. Dizzied by the country's social upheavals and calls for change since 2019, it forgot that at the end of the day, Chile is the home of moderation.

The rejection Sunday by most voters of a proposed, new constitutional text comes in spite of the fact that 80% of Chileans still want to overhaul the constitution bequeathed by the country's conservative, military regime of the 1970s.

The vast majority of Chileans have in recent years come to a shared conclusion, that Chile's socio-economic advances and undoubted prosperity must be democratized and fairly shared out among its territories and socio-economic classes.

For the Chilean Left, led by the young President Gabriel Boric, this was the biggest window of opportunity in its history. It had never had such a clear mandate for creating a transformative project based on a new constitution, and this in addition to the symbolic weight of putting an end to the constitution of the late dictator, Augusto Pinochet.


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LGBTQ Plus
Laura Valentina Cortés Sierra, Lila Paulou, Emma Albright, Chloé Touchard, Bertrand Hauger and Lisa Berdet

LGBTQ+ International: Opposing "Don’t Say Gay," Amsterdam Pride — And Other Top News

Welcome to Worldcrunch’s LGBTQ+ International. We bring you up-to-speed each week on a topic you may follow closely at home, but can now see from different places and perspectives around the world. Discover the latest news on everything LGBTQ+ — from all corners of the planet. All in one smooth scroll!

Featuring, this week:

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Society
Gwendolyn Ledger

Didi, The Chinese Food Delivery App Finding Its Tasty Niche In Latin America

Didi Food, a delivery startup that struggled in East Asia, has found a growing market in Latin American cities, where appetite for home deliveries has yet to be fully satisfied.

SANTIAGO DE CHILEBarranquilla and Soledad are the latest Colombian cities to join the Chinese delivery firm Didi Food's expanding market in Latin America.

The firm began exploring partners here months ago, but announced its "arrival" online in late June once it had a critical mass of eateries and partners registered with it. The application is available in other Colombian cities, as well as in Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile and the Dominican Republic.

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Geopolitics
Andrés Hoyos

Why Chile's Radicals Are Already Sinking Their Own Leftist President

After becoming Chile's youngest president in December's elections, former student activist and socialist Gabriel Boric has disappointed his most radical voters. Will they prolong the social unrest and creative chaos that have smashed the country's fame as a conservative backwater?

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — I've been following Chile closely. While the country has South America's best social and economic indicators, and was supposedly a model to follow, it has suffered a political event not unlike the earthquakes so common to that land. And all in just three years.

Let's start with something Chile considered as solved since the restoration of democracy in 1990: violence or irrational destruction. Admittedly there were still active guerrilla groups like the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, close to the Communist Party, and the MIR (also Marxists), but Chileans generally reacted with measure to crises.

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Work In Progress
Rozena Crossman

Work → In Progress: Why 'Financial Wellness' Is Not Just About A Raise

The workplace wellness trend now includes the very practical questions about how, when and how much we get paid, and is shaping up to be the next step in blurring the lines between personal and professional that were once so neatly divided.

We’re approaching the end of Q1 of 2022 and the “wellness” trend that’s usually reserved for millennials’ yoga mats has officially made its way into the professional world. After two years of realizing that job setups don’t always favor employees’ health, the call for sweeping workplace changes — ranging from more medical access to an HR focus on mental well-being — is in full swing.

But wouldn't you know: the latest professional self-care trend carries a notably practical air: financial wellness.

Bank of America’s 2021 Workplace Benefits Report mentioned “financial wellness” 43 times, which it defined as “the type of support employers are offering to address financial needs.” But is making money not the point of work? It seems this new rebranding of how work relates to cash is indicative of how differently we now view employment.

The financial wellness movement doesn’t want companies to just fairly compensate employees but instead to teach them how to manage their salaries, be it saving for retirement, navigating debt or budgeting.

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Future
Gianni Amador

For Latin American Cities, Flying Cars Are Suddenly Within Reach

It may sound like science-fiction, but firms are already developing prototypes for this cheaper alternative to the helicopter. And for Latin America in particular, the sky's the limit for what Flying cars can bring.

SANTIAGO — Imagine taking a taxi — a flying taxi — to work. It sounds like the stuff of science-fiction like The Jetsons, the 1962 cartoon series set in 2062, but it may become reality sooner than we or filmmakers imagined.

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In The News
Anne-Sophie Goninet, Lorraine Olaya and Bertrand Hauger

New Russian Targets, ISIS Leader Death Confirmed, Two Years Of Pandemic

👋 Салам!*

Welcome to Friday, where Russian airstrikes target additional Ukrainian cities, while Moscow’s 40-mile long military convoy is on the move again near Kyiv; also, a new report finds the COVID-19 death toll may be three times higher than official data suggests. Clemens Wergin in German daily Die Welt examines the West’s different possible options to help Ukraine on a military level, and the risks they entail.

[*Salam - Kyrgyz]

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