Bachelet’s Swiss Visit
Junio 3, 2007
Swiss President: Micheline Calmy-Rey has hailed Switzerland and Chile’s shared values, including social justice, equality and interest in human rights.
She was speaking in the Swiss capital, Bern, during a two-day state visit by her Chilean counterpart Michelle Bachelet, which started on Friday.
On Saturday Bachelet visited western Switzerland. Having been shown around the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she travelled with Calmy-Rey by ferry to Geneva, where she met Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
- “Switzerland and Chile are a lot closer than geography would suggest,” said Calmy-Rey in her speech on Friday.
- “We have the same political priorities which are close to our hearts such as the fight against poverty, and the promotion of social justice,”.
Calmy-Rey also highlighted how the two presidents were keen to protect human rights around the world and pointed to how Bachelet had tried to reconcile Chile with its past under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).
The Swiss president, who is also the foreign minister, said she was proud that Switzerland had welcomed many Chilean refugees during that period. She said that currently the Chilean population numbered around 4,000.
- Around the same number of Swiss are resident in Chile.
Calmy-Rey said there were similarities as well in terms of the two countries’ political position within their regions.
“In Latin America, Chile operates a policy which one could almost call neutral because it tries to maintain good relations with all the countries,” said Calmy-Rey.
Swiss-Chile Invest:
She added that economically both countries were dependent on exports, but wanted a fair form of globalisation.
- Exports towards Chile from Switzerland totalled almost SFr200 million ($163 million) last year and imports were SFr62 million. Swiss direct investments in Chile were around SFr1.2 billion in 2005.
Bachelet said that economic relations between Santiago and Bern were good, but she intended to step up business cooperation.
Bachelet, said: “Switzerland’s have ahigh level of human development” was a model that we wished to reproduce in Chile, with a more integrated and fair society.
- Chile is one of South America’s most stable and prosperous nations. It is still recovering from the 17-year rule of General Augusto Pinochet. His 1973 coup was one of the bloodiest in Latin America and his dictatorship left more than 3,000 people dead and missing.
- Chile has a population of 16.3 million and the main language is Spanish. Many people are of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent.
- Chile’s GNI per capita is $5,870 and its main exports are copper, fish, fruit, paper and pulp, as well as chemicals.
- Michelle Bachelet was elected the first woman Chilean president in 2006. She is also a medical doctor.
Transantiago Chile · Publicación: English Information
Chile Goes Down
Mayo 27, 2007
In the government of Michelle Bachelet the accumulated problems and several fronts have opened up. The first was the massive and solid protests by the secondary school students against the education law. The mobilisation put on the table the problem of the profit-making in teaching, which the greater part of the establishment is reluctant to question. Hardly had the echoes of the student gatherings – which have come to be a watershed in a political culture centred on representation – died down than Transantiago (Santiago mass transport system) floundered, provoking a political crisis which can be the ruin of Concertación Democrática, the alliance of Christian Democrats and Socialists that has administered the Chile since 1990.
Decadence: First time in 16 years
The politicians are showing signs of worry at the direction of these events. The economic “model” has sprung a leak. A recent study by two University of Chile economists indicates a record flight of capital in 2006 – $25billion, 17% of the GDP.
They said the Chilean economy was living through a “fatigue” and that only the contribution of the state mining company, Codelco, prevented a crisis from surfacing. In a country that has glorified like no other the private sector, it is the state sector which has salvaged the situation.
Most of the capital that fled, or reverted according to the technocratic jargon, was from the mining sector which gained with the denationalisation of copper.
Codelco has 30% of the business and the foreigners 70%. But the contribution to the treasury is the other way round: Codelco contributes 70% and the foreign companies 30% despite their profits.
The impression is that that the economic situation of the “model” hangs by a thread. Regarding copper: in 2003 it was valued at 80 cents a pound; this year it reached three dollars. The flight of capital in 2006 equalled 84% of the state budget and threatens to choke growth.
The question of Transantiago is even serious because it lays bare before the population the perversity of the “model”. The government handed over to the private sector the remodelling of the chaotic mass transport system of the capital.
Transantiago was inspired by Transmilenio of Bogota: a large number of buses moving along lanes, separated by trunk and secondary routes. It was launched in February 10, and there was chaos. There were not enough of the buses because the businessmen did not want to take risks. In the poorest neighbourhoods, where it is least profitable, the buses did not arrive or did so after enormous delays. People had to walk kilometres to arrive at a stop where they could expect to wait for up to an hour for a bus to turn up. Thousands have lost their jobs for arriving late. And the metro is so congested it cannot cope.
The first arguments, which generated some spontaneous demonstrations, were followed by indignation when the level of speculative gains by the businessmen came to be known. As the service started making losses ($30 million in April alone), the government decided to help the private sector. The efficient state metro was forced to lend money to Transantiago and now the Bachelet government has proposed to parliament a loan of $290 million to a private business that did not fulfil its contract. Even Christian Democrat deputies have questions about the state supporting business inefficiency.
The former President, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, a neoliberal Christian Democrat, asked for the establishment of a “state transport system like in the large cities of the world”, something unthinkable a few years ago.
Problems are elsewhere. The social protest now tends to go beyond the sectors that were always set against the Chilean neoliberal model, like the Mapuche people and the nonconformist youth, isolated and hemmed in by repression. A long strike in the south, where 7,000 forestry workers raised their fist against the powerful and haughty Angelini business group, one of the strongest in Chile, is all in all a sign of the new times. The workers used the firm’s heavy machinery to resist the police with the outcome of one dead and many injured.
At some point the protest of the workers, residents, Mapuches and students can come together. We know that when those at the bottom no longer put up with repression, the ones at the top start thinking of introducing changes so as to redo the make-up
Transantiago Chile · Publicación: English Information
Pre-Emergency Levels
Mayo 17, 2007
Even more overwhelmingly predictable, months before it went into effect, was that Santiago Chile’s revamped transportation system would be a massive failure. The micros, yellow city buses that scream and belch out clouds of black, were not replaced. But repainted: green and white. Nobody was fooled. Or maybe they were. Now everyone is acting shocked that smog has reached appallingly dangerous levels.
Trumped up as a solution to Santiago’s constant, dangerous smog, Transantiago was going to eliminate the need for the government to call pre-emergency levels. Yet two have already been called, this weekend reached the worst level since 1999.
Smog in Santiago:
A pre-emergency level is called when PM-10 (particles of 10 microns in diameter) reach a level of 300 or more per cubic meter. Pre-emergencies require limits on car driving and factory pollutants. When they are called, PM-10 levels go down. But the naughty little government doesn’t always call them. Nor are they measuring the only harmful factor of pollution. For instance, PM-2.5 particles are smaller, and dig deeper into the lungs and stay there permanently, causing cancer.
And a study by the University of Santiago warns that Santiago’s warning system fails to forecast 40%-50% of the days that Carbon Monoxide levels are higher than healthy.
This weekend, PM-10 reached 409 in the poor community of Pudahuel. 344 in the city center. And, to give you a sense of how tragicomic classism is in Chile: the rich community of Las Condes got only 39. I’m moving there.
In response to these record levels, El Mercurio published an article which basically amounts to a bunch of politicians and physicists citing recycled information about how bad smog is, how the poor people should burn less wood in their houses, etc. But NONE of them seems to be taking any initiative. Sure, they bounce around a few ideas — the best one is a London-style congestion reduction through tollbooths. But why don’t they make that a real initiative? Why don’t they tax the hell out of car ownership. Jail people who drive without catalytic converters. Subsidize heating for poor families who burn wood instead of gas.
In their defence, I wouldn’t piss off so many special interests either if I were a had a cushy government job that paid the rent in Las Condes.
Ricardo Lagos Effects:
Ex-president Ricardo Lagos, the mastermind behind the Transantiago debacle whose appointment as a UN Global Warning ambassador received the harsh protest of 20 NGO’s in Chile for his abysmal environmental record, is now blaming Argentina for Chile’s pollution problem.
Yes, a portion of smog is created by the poor people who burn wood in stoves. And when Argentina stops exporting natural gas during the winter, as it did last winter and you knew it would this winter, then economically challenged Santiaguinos burn wood instead, because it’s cheaper. But Ricardo Lagos, who is a dipshit and will probably get elected again after Bachelet steps down, would prefer to blame it on Argentina. And he gets pissed off when asked about it. “There’s less noise pollution, isn’t there?”
Actually, that’s worse too. The re-routing caused more buses to drive by my house. And they’re the same loud, screaming cancer buses as always. So, Your plan is a complete disaster. And you, Ricardo Lagos, are a pathetic dipshit posing as an environmental socialist. A Berkeley professor. A pathetic excuse for a human being.
But at this point in the conference, you chose to snap back and say, “I’m not running Chile.” What a wanker. You can blame Argentina (and, indirectly, Chile’s poor) for creating smog in Santiago, but when the questions get rough you get angry.
Anyway, it strikes me as strange that poor people and their wood-burning stoves are one of the most oft-cited causes of smog. About 70% of smog is caused by cars, and the law restricting cars without catalytic converters is only in effect till 10PM. Which is bullshit, because plenty of those clunkers drive past 10PM. And when a bunch of people were fined this weekend for driving during the day, many said they had no idea there was such a law.
The government is not at all serious about tackling the smog problem, and there isn’t even a public education program for responsible driving practices.
There’s no serious investigation into clandestine factories that operate at night. In the Mercurio article it was mentioned that one of the physicists cited a factory recently discovered that burned tires all night long.
The failed public transportation system of Ricardo Lagos is really the only program that was promised to have a positive impact on the smog, and it was predictably a failure. Even if it did work, it wouldn’t have eliminated smog.
But Ricardo Lagos seems more comfortable preaching to the world about global warming than facing special interests at home. He’d rather blame the poor, and Argentina. Meanwhile, his failure is evident in a thick, daily and almost never-interrupted haze across Santiago, where smog accounts for 10% of illness, and deaths among babies and the elderly. In the long term it causes asthma and cancer. Thanks Ricardo Lagos, you fucking jackass.
Transantiago Chile · Publicación: English Information