Terremoto. FUERZA CHILE.

FUERZA. CHILE.

Santiago.

Curico.

Rio Claro

Santa Cruz

This past Saturday, at around 4:45 AM, local Chilean time, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Central-Southern Chile. 10 minutes later, a 15 meter tsunami made its way towards the Chilean coast. This was the 5th most powerful earthquake ever recorded in history. There have been aftershocks, some with a magnitude of 5.0 occuring every few times an hour since the first one. Bridges collapsed. This quake has damaged 500,000 homes, and has severed the main north-south freeway in multiple parts. Poorly constructed apartment buildings in the sector of Maipu in Santiago completely collapsed. Bridges fell. The epicenter of this horrible earthquake was off the coast of the Maule Region VII. This earthquake was felt through most of the country, and greatly affected parts of the 6th region O'higgins, the 7th region Maule, and the 8th region Biobio. The city of Concepcion, only 70 miles from the epicenter and is on the coast. It suffered extensive infrastructural damage. The major cities from Curico, Talca, Linares, Chillan, and Concepcion all were greatly affected. Many older parts of Santiago with more poorly constructed buildings recieved a lot of structural damage. Many people, either to afraid to sleep in their apartments, or unable to, were forced to sleep on the street or in parks. The majority of affected areas had no electricity or safe water for all of Saturday. Many smaller towns still do not have electricity, and Constitucion, and Talca, (I believe, ) are still without access to water and electricity. As of now, there are 708 recorded deaths, most coming from Region VII Maule, with around 100 from BioBio and 100 from O'Higgins. Recently, there has been a rise in looting. While some are desperate, others are opportunistic. Police in Concepcion are overwhelmed. The federal government made an agreement with Chile's major supermarket companies, in which supermarkets will give away sanctioned amounts of basic food to anyone who needs it. Although the death toll is at 700, it will rise in the next few days, when more searching is done on the coasts, and in collapsed buildings. The port city of Constitucion was the closest to the epicenter, and the tsunami took many victims. The president, Michelle Bachelet, said that " the catastrophe is enormous... there's a number of those dissapeared that I would say is still rising".

It's difficult to find exact news, as it is changing constantly, but I have heard that numerous small towns, such as Dichato, have been completely destroyed. Santa Cruz, a historic pueblo in O'Higgins region is in ruins. Rengo was just far enough away from the epicenter to not have as much destruction. It is hard to say how long Chile will need to recover from this. This will exhaust local, regional, and even national government. Only time will tell what affect this will have on Chilean society. CHI CHI CHI. LE LE LE. VIVA CHILE.

Gorazde

an old postcard of Gorazde

In Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco uses comics to portray the events that took place in Bosnia from 1992 through 1995. He succesfully expresses the feelings and situations of the Bosnian Muslims living in one of the UN safe areas, Gorazde.

The united Yugoslavia that Tito had been credited to creating was more of a suppressor of harsher ethnic relations. After Tito's death, Milosevic took power, and arued for Serbian nationalism, causing Croatia and Slovenia to split from Yugoslavia. Both of these regions had small Serb minorities. However, Bosnia was more mixed, with roughly 52 % Muslim, and 44 % Serb. In 1990, (Bosnia's first free election), three nationalist parties, (Serb, Croat, and Muslim) were created. The Muslim party (Izetbegovic) argued for Bosnian sovereignty, and it was recognized as autonomous in 1992. However, this caused the Serb faction to leave the Bosnian assembly, create their own Serb state, and establish themselves as autonomous in many parts of Bosnia.

Thus, many Serbs saw it as their duty to cleanse Bosnia of it's Muslim population in order to survive. Throughout 1992, the Serb government took over the majority of Bosnia, causing the UN in 1993 to create safe areas that they were responsible to protect including Sarajevo, Zepa, Srebrenica, and Gorazde. This idea of "safe area" is largely hypocritical, as the presence of the UN peacekeepers in Gorazde did little to ameliorate the situation. They were quite useless. "Safe Area" Gorazde was still targetted by Serb forces. Within Gorazde, most of the Serb citizens had fled to Serb controlled areas, leaving just the Muslims within the city. Everyone was affected. The town was destroyed and people, men, women, the eldery and the young, were massacred during Serb offenses.

Life before the war had been peaceful. In Gorazde, as in most of Bosnia, Muslims lived next to Serbs. They were friends, and their ehtnic backround did not matter. How is it that two groups can feel peaceful towards eachother, but when a provincial and nationalistic leader comes to power, (Milosevic,) superficial differences between groups that hadn't mattered at all before become the most important factor in distinguishing who is killed and who kills. People hear what the leader has to say, and their feelings can become exxagerated and exploited.

Another chiling aspect of this four year genocide that is portrayed in this book is the ignorance of the rest of the Western world's population. The UN's inability to make any difference in the situation is incredibly dissapointing, considering that they should be the people to help those that need help in these situations. Unfortunately, the UN's influence is always muted when they are forced to be neutral in these conflicts. They can't be seen favoring one side over another. Unfortunately, in this case, although it is clear to us now who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, during the conflict it was not as easy for the rest of the world to tell. The Serbs argued that it was the Muslims who were trying to create a radical Islamist nation (!) and who were killing Serbs... Unfortunately, preconceived notions and stereotypes about Muslims may allow a Westerner to believe this interpretation of the war than what really happened.

In one part of the story, one of the "silly girls" asks Joe if people know about Gorazde in America, and he has to lie to her that they do. The fact is that people in America did not know what Gorazde was, and what was exactly happening there. And if they did, it wasn't likely that they were actively doing much about it. Unfortunately, this has not changed, and I fear it will never change, regarding ethnic conflict. During the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the ehtnic strife in Rwanda, the genocide in Darfur, and the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the rest of the world has failed to help those when they most need it, during the conflict. Rather, afterwords, they realize that what had happened had destroyed the lives of so many innocent victims, and the world says "Never Again". But, it happens again, and again, and again. :(

Pinochet Created the Criminals he Purged.

Chileans very varied reactions to the death of Pinochet

In The Politics of Street Children, Guadalupe Salazar explains how the existence of street children in present day Chile is evidence of the greater disparity between classes, the structural and symbolic violence that has been passed down since Pinochet, and the overall failure of radical neoliberalism coupled with a harsh dictatorship.

Shortly after Pinochet took over power, restructured politics by use of state terror and "stabalized" the economy with radical neoliberalism. The infamous "Chicago Boys" were hired to "neoliberalize" Chiles economy with severe measures called "Shock Treatment". This experiment, which privatized just about every social service, did not work, as the GDP fell 12%, and class disparity greatened. The Chicago Boys had a monopoly on economic policy.. **It seems to me that if a neoliberal agenda is supposed to work, "monopolies" within the government cannot exist....cachai, you get it?**...Salazar writes that "citizens were responsible for meeting their basic needs without subsidies or aid from the government while simultaneously stripped of weapons or defenses , such as access to education, training, or health care that would enable them to better reach those needs"... **It's hard to pull up your bootstraps if you don't have any boots**...

In 1979, Pinochet created SENAME, a program supposedly created to help "problematic" children whose parents could not care for them. SENAME created insitutions called Centros de Orienatcion (Orienatation Centers). The aim of these COD's was to correct these delinquents.The environment of these COD's was no different from a prison.... The COD buildings used to be used as torture centers duirng the coup... The COD's treated these children as criminals, and because of this, children became criminals. They accepted the perceptions that others had of them, and only saw their futures full of crime. They even began to see it as a profession. Many street children saw it as an advantage to be a better criminal; by doing so would bring forth more food, better clothing, a better life. They tried to be the most choro or tough in order to gain respect from the rest. Street children understood their second class position in society as deviants, but did not understand that the path was not a "career choice" but rather a given, It was impossible for them to get out of the mold that Piochet put them in 25 years before.

Pinochet's radical neoliberalisim exxagerated already existing inequalities between classes. The government fabricated the label of "delinquent" on many children of the lower classes, and this started a cycle that still has not stopped. Pinochet called the children "delinquents". The children then accepted their place in society as delinquents and acted as such. Pinochet then could justify his measures against the delinquents because they truly were a threat. This does not end. The individual's acceptance of such categorizing has been an integral part in the repression and silency of society.