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TOPIC: chile

This Happened

This Happened — October 24: Salvador Allende Elected

Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile on this day in 1970.

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This Happened — October 13: Chile Mining Rescue

On this day in 2010, the Copiapó mining accident in Chile comes to a happy end as all 33 miners arrive at the surface after surviving a record 69 days underground.

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This Happened — October 5: Chilean Referendum

The referendum in Chile took place on this day in 1988, when citizens voted against extending General Augusto Pinochet's regime.

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Latin America's Migrants Trying To Reach The U.S.: Risk It All, Fail, Repeat

Searching for a safe home, many Latin American migrants are forced to try, time after time, getting turned away, and then risk everything again.

BUENOS AIRES — With gangsters breathing down his neck, Maynor sold all of his possessions in Honduras, took his wife and three kids aged 11, 8 and 5, and set out northwards. He was leaving home for good, for the third time.

"I had to leave my country several times," he said, "but was deported." He was now trying to enter the U.S. again, but the family had become stuck in Mexico: "Things are really, really bad for us right now."

Migration in Latin America is no longer a linear process, taking migrants from one place to another. It goes in several directions. Certain routes will take you to one country as a stopover to another, but really, it's more a lengthy ordeal than a layover, and the winners are those who can find that receptive, welcoming community offering work and a better life.

The aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) calls this an international, multidirectional phenomenon that may include recurring trips to and from a home country.

Marisol Quiceno, MSF's Advocacy chief for Latin America, told Clarín that migrants "are constantly looking for opportunities and for food security, dignified work opportunities (and) healthcare access." These are the "minimum basics of survival," she said, adding that people will keep looking if they did not find them the first time around.

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Geopolitics
Héctor Abad Faciolince

Kissinger v. Allende, A South American Lesson For What's At Stake In Ukraine

The cold arrogance of Henry Kissinger extends from Santiago de Chile half a century ago, where he helped orchestrate the violent overthrow of the leftist President Salvador Allende to his view today on Russia's would-be "sphere of influence."

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — More than 50 years ago, there was a tense meeting in Washington between Chile's then Foreign Minister, Gabriel Valdés, and President Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Valdés, of the Christian Democratic party, had been imprudent enough to tell President Nixon a couple of things to his face: that Latin American states found it very hard to do business with the United States given the enormous economic disparity; and secondly that for every dollar of American aid sent southwards, South America was sending $3.8 back to the United States.

Nixon was furious (as if a servant had been impertinent), and asked Kissinger to set the Chilean diplomat straight, which he did, the next day.

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Kissinger told Valdés that it was "strange" coming to Washington to speak of Latin America, when it had so little importance. "Nothing important can come from the South," he is reported to have said (in Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power). "History has never been produced in the South."

The axis of history, said Kissinger, began in Moscow, and moved through Bonn and Washington toward Tokyo, and Valdés was simply wasting his time.

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In The News
Emma Albright, Anne-Sophie Goninet and Michelle Courtois

Morocco’s Rescue Race, Kim Express, “Lucky” NZ Climber

👋 Khulumkha!*

Welcome to Monday, where rescuers race to find survivors after Friday’s devastating earthquake in Morocco, Kim Jong-un is reportedly on a train to Russia, and a climber in New Zealand escapes unscathed from a dramatic 600-meter fall. Meanwhile, Simonetta Sciandivasci in Italian daily La Stampa pinpoints Gen-Z’s own version of “Big Brother”: location sharing.

[*Kokborok, India and Bangladesh]

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Society
Valeria Berghinz

Roe v Wade To Mexican Supreme Court: What's Driving Abortion Rights Around The World

A landmark decision Wednesday by the Mexican Supreme Court is part of a push in Latin America to expand abortion access. But as seen by the U.S. overturning Roe v. Wade last year, the issue is moving in different directions around the world.

Updated on September 8, 2023

PARIS — It has been 14 months and 15 days since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ruling that safe access to abortion is no longer a Constitutional right for American women.

For women in the rest of the world, the ruling reverberated on the weight of the U.S. judicial and cultural influence, with fears that it could have repercussions in their own courtrooms, parliaments and medical clinics.

Yet in what is perhaps the most momentous decision since Roe’s overturning, the U.S.’s southern neighbor, Mexico saw its own Supreme Court unanimously decree that abortion would be decriminalized nationwide, and inflicting any penalty on the medical procedure was “unconstitutional … and a violation of the human rights of women and those capable of being pregnant.”

Mexico is the latest (and most populous) Latin American country to expand reproductive rights, even as their northern neighbor continues to take steps backward on the issue.

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In The News
Yannick Champion-Osselin, Valeria Berghinz and Marine Béguin.

Johannesburg Blaze Kills Dozens, North Korea’s Mock Nuclear Strike, Tomatina Extravaganza

👋 ሰላም ሃለው*!*

Welcome to Thursday, where at least 73 are killed in a Johannesburg building blaze, North Korea simulates a “tactical nuclear strike,” and Spain’s yearly tomato debauchery yields striking images. Meanwhile, Giulia Zonca for Italian daily La Stampa reports on the controversy caused after a Turin gym installed urinals shaped like a woman's open mouth.

[*Selam halewi - Tigrinya, Eritrea and Ethiopia]

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CLARIN
Matilde Sánchez

The Tragic Story Of Pablo Neruda's Abandoned Daughter

The Nobel Prize-winning poet was a renowned defender of humanitarian causes through much of the 20th century. Yet he had no time or interest for his only child, who was born with hydrocephalus. Neruda's mistreatment of his daughter is one more part of his biography that has feminist activists denouncing him after revelations of sexual assault and other predatory behavior.

This article was updated on Aug. 17, 2023 at 5:45 p.m.

BUENOS AIRES — There is a dark blot in the life of Pablo Neruda that none of his many prizes and honors could ever efface. It is the secret story of his daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad Reyes, who suffered from hydrocephalus and died at the age of eight in the Netherlands. The child — the Chilean poet"s only offspring— was the product of his first marriage, to María Antonia "Maryka" Hagenaar.

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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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Society
Yasna Mussa

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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In The News
Emma Albright & Inès Mermat

Ardern Resigns, Chopper Crash Probe, French Strikes

👋 नमस्कार*

Welcome to Thursday, where New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announces her surprise resignation, a probe is opened into the helicopter crash that killed Ukraine’s interior minister and French workers go on a nationwide strike. Meanwhile, feminist digital media outlet LatFem reports on a women-led agricultural program that offers valuable lessons on sustainable farming methods in southern Ecuador.

[*Namaskār - Marathi, India]

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