can you eat vegan in South America?

[from Adeline Bash @ Trekking Through It, 10 October 2010]

An American Vegan In Chile.

When I came to Chile I expected to be hungry…

I had given up animal products six months ago and my school had warned me South American fare was not vegan friendly.

My counselor suggested I begin reincorporating meat back into my diet immediately, to avoid getting sick while I was abroad.

I wanted to experience the culture and didn’t want to come off as a pretentious American to my future Chilean family, but eating meat again? That was out of the question.

I reasoned that I would do my best to avoid it, but told my advisor that, if need be, I would eat eggs and dairy again. But after discussing it with my mom, who also recently adopted a vegan diet, I gained a new perspective.

She reminded me that my diet was about more than food. My decision to stop eating meat was not a new fad. It was not one of my numerous New Year’s health kicks that I knew I would inevitably give up. It was about how I wanted to interact with the earth and the other living things with which we share it.

I revised my application form and stated that I intended to maintain a vegan diet during my time abroad. My counselor was apprehensive, but told me I should be fine.

Nonetheless, with everything I’d heard about the Chilean diet—carne at every meal, bread cooked with animal lard—I expected to be hungry.

But after being here for a little under three months my experience has been the opposite.

Like most of my American girlfriends my jeans are fitting tighter and I am enjoying every minute of gorging myself on the magnificent—and unbelievably cheap—fruits and vegetables that line Chile’s busy outdoor marketplaces.

Click here to read more.

happy sad in South America

[from Adelina Bash @ The Santiago Times, 4 July 2011]

Chile among South America’s least happy nations, study finds

Though Chile has one of South America’s strongest economies, a recent study of happiness rates it second-to-last in the region, leading experts to assert that national happiness is not determined by a nation’s wealth or economic development.

The survey as conducted in Chile, Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela.

Happiness in Chile was on par with happiness in the sample’s poorest country: Bolivia.

“Money does not determine happiness,” Pablo González Vicente, president of Cimagroup — the marketing analysis firm that conducted the study — said to El Mercurio. “What is more important is the level of inequality in countries: in general, the countries with the most equal distribution of wealth are happier than those with a lot of inequality.”

While there was little correlation between wealth and happiness, the study did determine other factors that appeared to influence national satisfaction.

People who live in warmer climates, for example, tend to be happier than those in colder ones, the study found. Within Chile, the cities in the warmer north were on average happier than those in the south, where the weather is much colder.

Overall, the analysis found that people were most satisfied with their family life and least satisfied with their financial situation.

Financial satisfaction, however, seemed to be determined not by the amount of money a person had, but instead by their expectations of what that money should mean.

For example, Venezuela, which the study determined was the happiest country overall, had a 56 percent economic satisfaction rate. Chileans, on the other hand, were wealthier but had a lower average satisfaction rate of about 33 percent.

Along with climate, family and finances, researchers found that happiness was influenced by a person satisfaction with his or her love life, health, job and physical appearance.

The importance of these factors varied between countries. For Chileans, personal finances were the most important; for Bolivians job satisfaction ranked the highest; and for Colombians and Peruvians love and relationships had the biggest impact.

“Even though we share the same language and may have similar histories, we are not the same,” González said of the results. There is no one indicator of happiness, he said. Instead, it seems, “every country has its own way of looking at life.”

wildlife reserve for the Patagonian huemul

[from MercoPress, 3 July 2011]

Biosphere reserve in Chilean Patagonia gives hope for preservation of the huemul

The United Nations added 18 new sites to its global list of biosphere reserves, (including one in Chilean Patagonia) bringing the total to 581 in 114 different countries, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported.

Patagonian huemul (Hippocamelus bisulcus)

The International Coordinating Council of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB), meeting in Dresden, added sites in Lithuania, Maldives, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Togo for the first time to the World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR).

Biosphere reserves are places recognized by MAB where local communities are actively involved in governance and management, research, education, training and monitoring at the service of both socio-economic development and biodiversity conservation. They are thus sites for experimenting with and learning about sustainable development, UNESCO said.

Including Chile’s Corredor Biologico de Nevados de Chillan y la Lagua del Laja in the WNBR gives a boost to private and government efforts for the conservation of the huemul, a Patagonia native deer.

The huemul herd in the Corredor Bilogico is down to 40 and highly fragmented as to their distribution which makes reproduction difficult. Besides they are geographically isolated from a greater herd further south in the Aysen region.

Chile’s National Committee for the defence of fauna and flora, CODEFF, received with great enthusiasm the UNESCO news.

“This acknowledgement has been possible because of the joint work of civil society organizations with officials from municipal, regional and central government offices”, said Bernardo Zentilli, president of CODEFF.

“The WNBR is protected by international law which is a great step forward for the conservation of the huemul, an emblematic Chilean species, which is in serious danger of extinction with only 2.500 left according to the latest census”, said Zentilli.

A biologic corridor is described as a geographic space which provides connectivity for ecosystems, habitats, original or modified and which at the same time ensures the maintenance of biological diversity, plus protection to ecologic and evolution processes.

Nevados de Chillán is an Andes cordilleran protected area with the purpose of making compatible its sustainable use with conservation of hydrologic basins, flora and fauna resources, preservation of scenic beauties, avoid the destruction of soils and protect the fields where the huemul lives.

Nevados de Chillán

lithium cartel

[from MercoPress, 1 July 2011]

Argentina is promoting the idea of an OPEC-like cartel for lithium

Argentina is promoting the idea of an OPEC-like cartel for itself, Bolivia and Chile, which together control 85% of the world's reserves of lithium, a key component in electric car batteries.

“In the near future and with our production at such a high level, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile will control the lithium market,” said Rodolfo Tecchi, the director of the technology and science promotion division of the Argentine Ministry of Science and Technology. “They could do it with a sort of OPEC-like arrangement,” he added.

The three countries, which Forbes magazine calls the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” would establish “control mechanisms for the sale of lithium carbonate, avoiding the lower prices that come with overproduction” he indicated.

Not everyone in the industry agrees, including the head of the Argentina chamber of mining industries in the province of Salta, Facundo Huidobro.

“The idea is a bit premature,” said Huidobro. “We have to make sure that investments have been made”.

Salta, along with the northern provinces of Jujuy and Catamarca, contain Argentina's largest lithium deposits.

Argentina has about 10% of the world's reserves, after Chile, with 25% in Atacama, in the north of the country, and Bolivia, which holds about half the world's supply in Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat.

Sales of lithium by Chile, on the other hand, represent 44% of worldwide revenue, followed by Australia, with 25%, China with 13% and Argentina with 11%.

A ton of lithium, worth $2,500 in 2004, now sells for around $6,000.

While lithium is also used for cell-phone and computer batteries, experts expect its greatest use will be in electric cars.

pumas or pasture animals?

[from Nathan Frandino @ Santiago Times, 22 June 2011]

Puma Attacks On Sheep, Cattle Raising Problems Across Chile

Reports of attacks multiplying in various regions of country

puma (aka mountain lion, cougar): Punta Arenas, Chile [photo by Bruce Dale]
government protections have helped their numbers rebound

Desperate and decimating.

That’s how biologist Agustín Iriarte describes the attitude of livestock farmers and their dwindling number of livestock, as predators take their toll.

Chile’s pumas are attacking and killing sheep flocks more than ever.

Between 2008 and 2009, cattle farmers reported 198 deaths attributed to pumas in Canela (Coquimbo Region). Meanwhile, in San Fernando (O’Higgins Region), sheep breeders reported 160 killings by pumas in the last three months of 2010.

In the north though, cattle farmers have taken the matter into their own hands, Iriarte said.

“We’ve found several cases of pumas basically mummified, which is a sign of poisoning,” Iriarte told El Mercurio.

Iriarte works on a project monitoring the puma population for Chile’s Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG). He said this kind of extermination is illegal.

Down south, capturers can earn up to 60,000 Chilean pesos (US$127) per head, despite the animal being protected by hunting laws. If offenders are caught, they receive heavy fines unless they have a hunting license, which is rarely permitted.

In 2009, SAG launched the puma conservation plan, which includes a study of the animal’s population growth and aims to provide information on reducing the impact of the attacks.

Alejandro Donoso, head of SAG’s natural resource protection division, said part of their research seeks to find a balance between protecting the animal and protecting the interests of cattle farmers.

“The fences that the farmers use are inadequate,” Donoso told El Mercurio.

The division has also started a nationwide training program for villagers and small farmers about how to differentiate between puma attacks and attacks by other animals.

“Many times they blame the killing of livestock on the pumas, but on many occasions, it’s been stray dogs,” Donoso said.

Farmers still remain confident that the puma is to blame.

“For starters, look at this tremendous footprint and the injuries to the animals,” Rodrigo Prado, a veterinary and livestock specialist in the Petorca area, told El Mercurio. “A fox or a dog could not have done this.”

Prado said that before the pumas mainly ate fowl, but recently they started eating calves.

“Throughout the year, they come to pens and eat the goats and sheep,” Prado said.

The puma is considered a near-threatened species, but not in danger, Donoso said, but that could change, which is why they’re studying the animal.

“In protected areas (like national parks such as Torres del Paine), there is greater protection, but in agricultural areas there is insufficient information on population density and distribution, making it difficult to design mitigation plans” that could help protect livestock, Donoso said.

Bariloche covered with smoke & ash from Chilean volcano eruption

[from La nación, 5 June 2011]

view of the Puyehue eruption at dawn

Cesó la caída de cenizas en Bariloche, pero se mantiene la emergencia

El fenómeno fue reemplazado por una lluvia tenue e intermitente; el aeropuerto y los pasos fronterizos permanecen cerrados; la nube afectó levemente, también, a la cordillera de Chubut; accedé a la fotogalería y al video

ash-covered streets in Bariloche

Read more here.

Chile's Atacama Desert

[from Laura Fraser @ Los Angeles Times, 21 May 2011]

Chile's Atacama Desert: Otherworldly and timeless

There are plenty of wonders in this most inhospitable of places: steaming geysers, hoodoos, volcanoes, Saharan landscapes. The town of San Pedro de Atacama is a convenient staging ground for outdoor treks and other adventures.

Licancabur volcano

Reporting from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile— Only four people live in the village of Machuca, 13,000 feet up in the Chilean Andes, and all of them are related to Joel Colque. Colque, who grew up in this stone village that hugs the side of a volcano, is our guide for a daylong trek in the altiplano — the high rocky plateau — above the Atacama Desert, the driest spot on Earth, ringed by 19,000-foot volcanoes where rain evaporates long before it reaches the crusty salt flats far below.

We're shivering here on a June winter morning, the short alpine plants frozen sharp as needles.

Colque greets his aunts — squat women with long dark braids and colorful ponchos — who weave handicrafts and raise llamas to barbecue for visitors on their way to nearby steaming geysers or high mountain lagoons. They speak Quechua, the Inca language, as well as some Kunza, a nearly extinct language spoken in these northern Andes for centuries.

He tells us that his family has lived in this spot, in the shadow of the volcanoes, since the beginning of time. More recently, Colque's grandfather climbed the 19,409-foot Licancabur volcano to extract sulfur, and Colque has snowboarded down its slippery peak.

Colque belongs to this ancient world, as well as the world of San Pedro de Atacama, a small town and staging ground for outdoor adventures, full of camping gear stores, hostels, hotels and luxury resorts such as the Alto Atacama desert lodge, where he is the chief guide.

Alto Atacama desert lodge & spa

Read more here.

land or power?

[from Merco Press, 10 May 2011]

Chilean protestors clash with police as regulators approve five-dam project in Patagonia

Chile approved on Monday the construction of a hydroelectric project that would flood Patagonian valleys and become the country’s biggest power generator, sparking violent protests.

The HidroAysen project would generate 35% of Chile’s current power consumption.

Police fired water cannons at demonstrators outside the building in the city of Coyhaique where 11 of the 12 members of an environment commission voted in favour of the HidroAysen project that Santiago-based Empresa Nacional de Electricidad SA and Colbun SA (COLBUN) want to build.

HidroAysen’s five dams would flood nearly 6,000 hectares of land and require a 1,900 kilometre transmission line to feed the central grid that supplies Santiago and surrounding cities as well as copper mines owned by Codelco and Anglo American Plc. The government of President Sebastian Piñera says Chile needs more hydroelectric and coal- fired plants to meet demand that will double in the next decade and reduce power costs that are the highest in the region.

“We have to get that energy somewhere, independent of what the project is, because energy today is twice as expensive as in other Latin American countries,” Ena Von Baer, the government’s spokeswoman, told reporters in Santiago. “We want to be a developed country and to do that we need energy, especially cheap energy for the poor.

Read more here.

Also, if you haven't already, read Fred Pearce's When the Rivers Run Dry: Water -- The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century to learn why new dams anywhere in the world might be a bad idea.

Read about the deficiencies of the environmental impact studies, including insufficient mapping, no studies on productive soils, no mapping to identify productive soils in areas that would be impacted, potential seismic risks, hydrological risk events, no information on relocation of people, superficial description of worker camps, no studies on increases in vehicular traffic, including extremely large and heavy vehicles and machinery, transportation of material, fuel and hazardous waste, no analysis of public works impacts, violation of protected area laws, impact on fauna & flora, impact on tourism.

stars, rocks, & bones in Chile

[from Kenneth Turan @ Los Angeles Times, 22 April 2011]

Movie review: 'Nostalgia for the Light'

Patricio Guzmán examines three groups of searchers in Chile's Atacama Desert — astronomers, archaeologists and relatives of 'the disappeared.'

"Nostalgia for the Light" won't make you nostalgic for anything because it's not like other documentaries you've seen. A film of rare visual poetry that's simultaneously personal, political and philosophical, it's a genuine art film that's also unpretentious and easygoing.

As directed by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, "Nostalgia" is a completely fascinating meditation on different aspects of the past and the interlinked ways we explore them. This may sound cold and distant but Guzmán's mastery of cinema means that what sounds artificial turns out to be moving in a surprising, even profound way.

Beginning with the landmark "The Battle of Chile," that country's past has always been Guzmán's subject, specifically the Salvador Allende revolution and the Augusto Pinochet counter-revolution. With this film, he's found an unusual new way to approach it, a way that goes though a very particular area called the Atacama Desert.

One of the driest places on Earth, devoid of insects, animals or birds and so arid it registers as a parched brown even from outer space, Chile's Atacama has qualities that make it an accessible gateway to the past, qualities that draw three distinct groups interested in that kind of exploration.

Because he has been interested in astronomy since childhood — the film opens with intriguing images of the still-functional 1910 telescope that inspired him — Guzmán starts with scientists who choose to study the stars from a series of Atacama radio telescopes because the area's transparent air makes it ideal for that purpose.

"Nostalgia" intersperses ravishing images of the solar system with heady conversations with scientists who let us know that by definition astronomy is the study of the past. For the interplanetary light they study has been traveling for hundreds of thousands of years to get here.

The Atacama has also attracted more conventional explorers of the past, archaeologists who show the filmmaker rock carvings by pre-Columbian shepherds that are more than 10,000 years old.

As Guzmán points out, one of the paradoxes of the Chilean experience is that, in contrast to all the attention paid to the distant past, Chile has been reluctant to confront its immediate past, to look into the large numbers of political opponents liquidated or "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime.

The Atacama plays a part in this too, because this remote desert turns out to have been a dumping ground for bodies of murdered political prisoners. And sharing the desert with astronomers and archaeologists is a third group of searchers, relatives of "the disappeared" who sift through the sands looking for remains of their loved ones.

The connections and reverberations among these three groups is the heart of this film, and it is made especially involving because of the articulate nature of the people Guzmán has chosen to interview and the way he talks to them.

"I don't like to corner the people in my films into giving me a specific answer," the director has said in the past. "I usually interview them for hours and hours without ever revealing where the interview is headed."

When combined with cinematographer Katell Djian's stunning images, Guzmán's fluid, unconventional filmmaking deftly explores surprising relationships and meaningful cross-cultural connections among these nominally very different groups of searchers. The result is as emotional as it is unexpected, and that is saying a lot.

world's tallest Lego tower

[from Tafline Laylin @ Inhabitat, 11 April 2011]

Brazil Breaks Chile’s Record for the World’s Tallest Lego Tower

Here at Inhabitat, we’ve got a whole lotta Lego going on, but even we couldn’t come close to Sao Paulo’s love for the colorful building blocks. Breaking last year’s record set by Chile, Brazil built the world’s largest Lego tower over the weekend. It took four days to assemble 500,000 Lego pieces that were used to construct a 102 foot, three inch high tower. The independent Lego bricks were stacked using a crane, while wire supports were used to keep the tower from toppling over. Building Lego towers became popular in 1988 when London built the world’s first. Since then, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo and Munich have jumped on the bandwagon. What’s next? Maybe Lego towers of epic Saudi proportions?

Mercado Integrado Latinoamericano (MILA)

[from MercoPress, 6 April 2011]

Chile, Colombia, Peru launch integrate stock markets beginning May 30

Operations of a joint stock market linking Chile, Colombia and Peru are scheduled to begin May 30. The group, known as the Integrated Latin American Market, or Mila, said Tuesday that the decision was taken following two rounds of successful testing.

Mila will list 560 companies and becomes the second largest of the region by capitalization

On April 15, the companies that will trade on the joint exchange will start to list, Mila was quoted on Dow Jones Newswires.

Last year, Chile, Colombia and Peru said they would merge their stock markets to form one cross-trading platform. The integration was expected to be finished by the end of 2010, but it was postponed.

Officials announced earlier that the new platform will list some 560 companies, combining the listings from each individual country, making it the largest Latin American exchange by number of companies listed and second-largest by market capitalization.

Meanwhile Latin American stocks rose to their highest since June 2008 on Tuesday, but profit-taking in Mexico and signs Chile's rally may be running out of steam could limit gains in the coming sessions.

Investors bet a move on Tuesday by China to tighten borrowing costs would help manage to tame strong growth without undermining high prices for Latin America's key commodities.

“China will keep growing, just at a slower pace,” said Gerardo Copca, a strategist at consultancy Metanalisis.

China is Brazil's top trading partner and also one of Chile's top customers for its copper.

Chilean stocks led gains in major regional markets, with the IPSA index .IPSA rising 0.56 percent to close at its highest since late January as industrial conglomerate Copec CPO.SN rose 1.99 percent.

Surprisingly strong growth data in Chile backed bets that the country's stocks could see solid profit growth during the first quarter.

Vik

Estancia Vik & Playa Vik are luxury art hotels, two more reasons to visit Uruguay.

Also, don't miss Vik Holistic Vineyard in Chile.

Some pix of Estancia Vik.

parilla & dining room

living room

bathtub

Allende's Chile

During Salvador Allende's presidency, Marxist Edward Boorstein was an assistant & close friend of Jaime Barrios, an economic advisor to Allende. Boorstein's Allende's Chile: An Inside View is the author's report on what happened, what Allende achieved, & why he failed.

I knew nothing of this history & found the book well worth the read.

Boorstein's proposition is that Allende failed because he behaved honorably, while everyone else – Chilean political parties, Chilean armed forces, Chilean press, international corporations with Chilean interests, United States government (Nixon, Kissinger) & CIA – behaved dishonorably wherever dishonor served them well.

GPS in Argentina

Greg Utas offers this information about using a Garmin GPS in Argentina:

I took my Garmin 255W to Argentina and it worked great. Very useful for driving around the city of Salta. The maps were loaded onto a small memory card that goes into a slot on the side of the Garmin. I ordered a preloaded card from travelbygps.com.

You can download the maps yourself, but for $20 I didn't want to spend time on it. The maps also include Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

Not everything went smoothly. My 12V (cigarette lighter) adapter would often fall out when driving over a bump. You can imagine the hassle, so I travelled around Salta in search of a new adapter. Marc Chagall, located at Florida 11 in the pedestrian mall area just south of the Hotel Alejandro I, had a 12V adapter with a USB port. They also had a USB cable to plug into this port, one with the right connector for the Garmin at the other end. This adapter could still fall out, but twisting a car key under the spring clips widened their grip to the point where they would hold.

The maps don't know about La Estancia's roads yet, apart from the southern service road. And a couple of times, they wanted to send me the wrong way down a one-way street. So pay attention.

On 2 April 2011, Jeremy commented: You can find Garmin-compatible maps of Argentina and Uruguay at www.proyectomapear.com.ar. It's free, by the way, and it works.

a new joint stock exchange

[from Andres Oppenheimer @ Miami Herald, 16 February 2011]

South American stock exchange: the way to go

The merger of the New York and Frankfurt stock exchanges to create the world’s biggest stock market made big headlines this week, but there is a lesser-known process in South America that should also draw our attention — the union of the Chilean, Peruvian and Colombian stock exchanges.

The stock exchanges of the three South American countries announced recently that they have finished the regulatory paperwork to start joint operations, and that they are preparing to do so within the next few months.

The three-country stock market, known as the Integrated Latin American Market, or by its Spanish initials MILA, will be Latin America’s second-largest stock market, after Brazil’s.

In a telephone interview this week, Juan Pablo Cordoba, president of the Colombian Stock Exchange, told me that “there is a strong commitment by the three countries to get it started before the end of the first semester this year.’’ MILA’s launching date will be announced after an internal technical try-out session next month, he said.

The idea behind MILA is that, in an increasingly globalized world, where the biggest stock markets are merging, it will be increasingly difficult for medium-sized or small economies to attract investments unless they are part of a bigger financial market, Cordoba said.

In addition to the New York and Frankfurt stock exchanges, the London and Toronto stock exchanges have announced their own mergers, and the Singapore stock exchange announced in October that it plans to buy the Australian Stock Exchange.

While the economies of Chile, Peru and Colombia have grown steadily in recent years, they are small by international standards. By unifying their operations, they will make it easier for domestic and foreign investors to buy stock in each of the participating countries’ companies, thus increasing their corporations’ ability to sell their stocks and attract investments.

“Colombian companies will not just have access to Colombian investors, but to those of Chile and Peru as well,’’ Cordoba said. “They will have access to more investors, and to a bigger pool of capital.’’

A second advantage, he said, is that “it will make us more visible to international investors, because it’s easier to invest in integrated markets than in individual countries.”

Unlike the New York-Frankfurt stock exchange merger, the Chile-Peru-Colombia stock market union will not initially be a merger of the companies running the stock exchanges, but an “operative integration” of the three stock exchanges.

Two of the participating stock exchanges, those of Peru and Colombia, are planning to go a step further and announce the merger of their respective holding companies later this year, he said.

Later, if everything goes well, other Latin American stock exchanges may join the group, he added.

“In Latin America, we have been talking about financial integration for the past 50 years, and nothing has been done,” Cordoba said. “We are doing something concrete, from the bottom up.”
Will it work, I asked Alberto Bernal, chief analyst with Bulltick Capital Markets in Miami.

“Sure. It will be very relevant for the development of capital markets in each of the three countries. And if Mexico joins then in the future, it will be even more so,” Bernal said.

My opinion: The Chile-Peru-Colombia stock market integration couldn’t have been more timely.

There is a new world trend of increasingly fewer and bigger stock exchanges, and countries without huge internal markets that are not part of any larger stock market — such as Argentina, Ecuador and Central American countries — will find it more difficult to attract capitals and make their companies more competitive.

We may be witnessing the redrafting of Latin America’s financial architecture. Will MILA be extended to include more countries in the region soon? Will the stock markets of Brazil and Mexico team up to become big players in the world financial scene? Will there ultimately be a unified Latin American stock exchange.

Latin American governments have failed to advance the cause of integration despite grandiose announcements at regional summits that they have created a region-wide common market. Maybe the region’s stock exchanges will be able to start doing what politicians have failed to do for so many years. We should wish them luck.

the phantom left

[from Jacobo Timerman's Chile: Death in the South, tr. Robert Cox, Vintage, 1987]

The terrorists of the extreme left in Uruguay (Tupamaros), in Argentina (Montoneros), and in Chile (MIR, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left) based their strategy on the achievement of one objective: to make themselves feared as an organically structured army and to appear as an alternative to the military. They realized this objective in the minds of the great majority of the officer corps in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. The intelligence services and the military commanders, to be sure, knew the truth about these phantom guerrilla armies. They nevertheless encouraged the belief that the phantom armies were real, so as to gain support for the conspiracy to stage a coup. In every Latin American coup officers with a vocation for politics play a major role. These officers are precisely those in the intelligence services and those who dominate the high commands. All the intelligence wings of the armed forces in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile knew perfectly well that none of the guerrilla groups had the remotest possibility of constituting an alternative to the military.

So convinced were these terrorists who aspired to be guerrillas that their image was more important than the organization, and even more important than training and supplies of arms, that in some cases they invented imaginary actions they asserted they had carried out. They also claimed responsibility for actions initiated by other groups. The Argentine Montoneros maintained that they had "executed" a police chief and his wife when, in fact, the two were murdered by the chief's rivals in the police force. They attacked a barracks, Monte Chingolo, even though they knew that the army was ready and waiting for them to strike. The result was an impressive massacre of civilians who were caught in the cross-fire.

The pseudo-guerrillas of the left in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina had also convinced themselves – like a neurosis that feeds on itself – that they represented an immovable obstacle in the path of the military and that they would be able to prevent a coup. They did not avert the coup, they did not even delay it – nor did they provoke it. In all three countries there were other motives for the armed forces' taking power – the guerrillas merely provided another pretext. What the violent left did accomplish, however, was to grease the wheels of the killing machine. They wanted to cause panic in the armed forces in order to paralyze them, but the panic they created in the officer corps was just enough to set in motion the most awful killing machine that has been experienced in any of the three countries in the course of this century.

The inexplicable homicidal extremism that took hold among the military in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina is the other side of the coin to the declamatory extremism of the revolutionary left in those countries. The terrorists attacks never posed any danger to the existence of the state or the survival of the armed forces. The insistent declamation began with Commandante Ernesto Ché Guevara in Bolivia, when he forecast "many Vietnams" in Latin America. It reached its height with the blessing Juan Perón gave to the Argentina Montoneros. He made them believe that in every country there was more than one army and that the new army, the guerrilla army, would soon replace the professional armed services.

In general, a political force will always seek to magnify the danger posed by the enemy. It will try to demonstrate that there is not merely danger ahead but that the very existence of society is at stake. Hitler perfected this mechanism with the Jews; Stalin used it against the old Bolsheviks and the dissidents. In a way, although within the limitations set by a democratic society, Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to do the same in the United States.

Yet with the left-wing extremists in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina exactly the opposite happened. They tried to make themselves appear more dangerous than they were. They boasted of their omnipotence, they exaggerated their operational capacity, they intellectualized their phobias, proclaiming a revolutionary military strategy. It was nothing more than a tale told by an idiot. But it was sufficient to motivate the armed forces, themselves victims of the manipulation of their own intelligence services, and it drove them to commit the first acts of genocide in this century in the three most civilized societies of Latin America: Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina.

governing Chile

[from Paul E. Sigmund's The Overthrow of Allende, University of Pittsburgh, 1978]

Chile has lessons not only for less developed countries. It has been experiencing in accelerated fashion the transition from traditionalism to modernity, from hierarchy to equality, and from elite rule to democracy that began in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and has now spread throughout the globe. It has tried the formulas of right, center and left which have been developed since the French Revolution as secular religions, ideological responses to the new awareness of the capacity of man to use the state to transform society and achieve justice. Yet those responses differ in their choice of values to emphasize, and they can either organize society for change or immobilize it by creating deep divisions in the body politic. In the Chilean case, ideology divided the country into three groupings, and when any one comes to power the other two would combine to prevent it from governing.

desaparecidos in Chile & Argentina

[from Jacobo Timerman's Chile: Death in the South, tr. Robert Cox, Vintage, 1987]

The psychologists [at a conference of psychologists in Buenos Aires on "The Culture of Fear in Totalitarian Regimes"] established the following general characteristics of a state of constant fear:

Sensation of vulnerability: In the face of life-threatening situations there is a sense of personal weakness. The individual feels "identified" and "persecuted" and loses all possibility of privacy and intimacy in his personal life. He becomes susceptible to arbitrary behavior beyond his control.

State of alert: The senses are exacerbated and the individual cannot rest in the face of imminent danger and the life-threatening situation this poses. This can be expressed in various symptomatic ways.

Individual impotence: The individual recognizes that his own resources and strength are inadequate to deal with adversity. The individual in this situation feels he has no control over his own life and that decisions about his future are not in his hands. This impotence, and the allied feelings of vulnerability and helplessness, give rise to a sense of abandonment in the face of violence.

Alteration of the sense of reality: As one of the objectives of inducing fear is to deprive an individual of his ability to act, the ordinary sense of reality is deliberately disrupted and rendered useless. It comes to seem practically impossible to verify what is objective fact as against subjective experience, and the boundary between what is real and possible on the one hand and what is fantasy and imagination on the other tends to dissolve. Reality becomes confusing and threatening, with no clear borders, and so loses its guiding role in subjective processes.