Don Francisco, Hispanic America's most popular broadcaster, landed a blow for Spanish-language TV this month when his programme won the ratings battle for young adult viewers.

Don Francisco Presenta was more popular among 18- to 49-year-olds than any English-language offering in its time slot, even its biggest rival, the crime drama Law & Order. It was the first time Spanish programming had achieved this feat in the nation's largest media market.

The milestone, much celebrated at Don Francisco's network, Univision, the biggest US Spanish-language network, came during the quietest period of the year. But Univision has more viewers than any English-language networks in Los Angeles, Miami and San Antonio, and already had plenty to crow about. In the 12 months to July this year, its primetime viewership among those between 18 and 49 rose by 18 per cent.

Others are competing. Azteca America, backed by the Mexican broadcaster TV Azteca, and NBC's Telemundo both offer a similar diet of news, variety shows, Mexican soap operas and Latino sports (particularly Mexican soccer).

The rise of television in Spanish is the most obvious symptom of a growing “Hispanic market” in the US, to which both marketers and politicians are desperate to appeal. But the “Hispanic” community is diverse. Does it really make sense to talk about a single “Hispanic market,” or one “Hispanic vote”? And is Spanish the best language to reach them?

Sergio Bendixen, a Peruvian and an influential pollster and consultant to several Democrat politicians, can trace an emerging “Hispanic” identity. “Hispanics come from many different countries, and they have very different legal status in this country. . . . What holds us together is a culture that works to live rather than one that lives to work.”

This is seen as in contrast to an “Anglo” culture where self-image is linked to how much money people make and to how much they work. Mr Bendixen cites Univision as an example. “There's a message throughout their programming, and that is that they emphasise the cultural differences, and the importance of holding on to them.”

In focus groups, young Hispanics who speak English and have never been to their parents' home country still proudly call themselves Latino. “They say: ‘We enjoy life more. We have stronger relationships. We give friendships more importance. We stay closer to our families.' They are much more able to show their emotions and are very passionate about things.” This, Mr Bendixen says, is “what joins the second-generation Hispanic in Texas and a recent migrant who just arrived in Orlando or New York”.

Others disagree. Andre Pineda, a Californian pollster, the son of immigrants from Costa Rica and Nicaragua whose wife was born in Mexico, says: “It's not Hispanic surnames that matter most here. What matters more is country of origin, or how long they've been in the US, or which generation, or which language they choose to use.”

Cubans, for example, are notoriously more conservative than other Hispanics. But, he says, Cubans in “Generation 1.5” those born abroad, who arrived in the US before their 10th birthday approach politics differently from their parents. “Their obsession with Fidel Castro is not there. They're trying to get through college and go to professional school and so on. What does Castro have to do with any of that?”

Si! TV, which started broadcasting last year as the latest entrant to vie for Hispanic viewers, was founded upon exactly this demographic insight. All its programming is in English.

Even Spanish-language stations now carry English advertising. According to Carlos de la Garza, who heads advertising sales for Azteca America: “Latinos like to go to a film's opening weekend. It's a status symbol. And they don't want to see a movie like Brad Pitt's Troy dubbed into Spanish.”

The makers of Troy understood this - they ran English commercials during the advertising breaks for Mexican soccer games and soap operas.

This truly bilingual community creates difficulties for marketers and politicians alike. Azteca is now launching its soap operas simultaneously on both sides of the border, and Femsa, the Mexican brewery that makes Sol and Tecate, tailors its marketing of lager to different consumers.

Anglos and established Hispanics are targeted with bottled beers at a premium price, advertised in English, while Tecate is aimed at immigrants. As drinking beer from a can is expensive in Mexico, where most beer is drunk from returnable glass bottles, Tecate in California is marketed in Spanish, and sold in cans to aspirational migrant workers who want to show that they have arrived as rich Mexicans, and can afford canned beer.

Political appeals to Hispanic voters have yet to show such subtleties. Democrat strategists say President George W. Bush's success in gaining 42 per cent of the Hispanic vote last year was in part because most Latinos lived in non-competitive states, without big “get out the vote” campaigns.

But New Mexico was harder to explain. The state is more than 40 per cent Hispanic, but swung to Mr Bush last year despite the presence of Bill Richardson, the state's Democratic governor, who is himself Hispanic. According to Mr Pineda, the Democrats made a basic mistake in approaching Hispanic New Mexicans, many of whom are of Mexican origin but whose ancestors have lived in the state for more than a century. “We have to get [beyond] the idea that Spanish is the path to the Latino vote. Only 18 per cent of US Latinos are voters.”

He added: “Unlike Hispanics as a whole, 72 per cent of Latino voters were born in the US, and only 9 per cent come from Spanish-speaking households. Two-thirds per cent say they watch more English than Spanish.” The Democrats might have done better speaking in English.

Peru in a glass: A pisco primer
JACOB GOLDSTEIN, The Miami Herald
August 25th

It may be possible to understand pisco without considering the Spanish conquest of South America, the Chilean invasion of Peru and the first Peruvian driver to finish the Paris-Dakar road rally.

But if you ask Ari Loebl about the potent brandy known chiefly for its role in the pisco sour, that is more or less the route his answer will take. The route will be long, and it will be framed by a grand yet simple rhetorical flourish.

''Why do we claim that pisco is Peruvian?'' he will ask. ``It is history.''

That question (and its answer) go to the heart of a Peruvian complaint against Chile, which manufactures and exports more pisco than Peru -- a fact that has inspired not only much gnashing of teeth among the Peruvian cognoscenti but a case before the United Nations-sponsored World International Trade Organization.

The WIPO ruled on July 14 that brandy can be called pisco only if it comes from Peru. Two weeks later, on Peru's independence day, pisco spewed from the fountain at the center of Lima's main square.

TRADING PLACES
Ari Loebl is in the pisco business. Although he and his wife, Elena, relocated to South Florida in 1986 with their son, Herbie, they still do business in their native Lima. The family distributes American and European food products in Peru (''Hershey, Wrigleys . . . big names,'' Elena says) and Peruvian foods in the United States and Europe.

In the early 1970s, Loebl, a fan of car racing, met Coco Corbetto, the first Peruvian ever to finish the Paris-Dakar rally. Corbetto ran his family's business, Pisco Montesierpe.

''His pisco was very good, but he didn't know how to sell it,'' Elena says.

The Loebls began selling Montesierpe in Peru in 1999. Last year, they began importing it to the U.S.

Since then, Herbie has spent countless hours schmoozing liquor store owners and bartenders -- buying drinks, asking what they know about pisco, leaving them free bottles. He says he now sells to about 250 South Florida customers.

Herbie, who is 25 and could be cast in a movie as an earnest young man on the make, is particularly pleased with the work of Leonardo Lopez, an Argentine bartender at Sushi Samba Dromo on Lincoln Road. Lopez might mix a pisco lychee-tini or a pisco with watermelon and mint.
He also makes a fine pisco sour, shaken rather than the traditional frappe. The drink is three parts pisco, two parts citrus (lemon, lime or sour mix), one part sugar, a dash of bitters and a raw egg white (or pasteurized, powdered egg white, depending on the bartender).

There is something to be said for watching a bartender crack an egg and separate the white into the pint glass in which he's mixing your drink. In a small way it conveys the sense of living on the edge, of literally drinking in what the world has to offer, that is part of the pleasure of getting drunk in a bar.

Though pisco is made only of grapes, its smell and taste are reminiscent of a very mellow tequila, and the pisco sour could be a cousin of the margarita, with a little meringue on top courtesy of the agitated egg white.

''What gets you is the foam,'' says Herbie. ``You never had a drink with foam on it.''

SPANISH CONQUEST
Ari Loebl's story of the meaning of pisco begins in the 1530s, with the Spanish conquest of the Incas.

''When they came to Peru they found there were no grapes,'' he says. ``There was no wine. There's no Spaniard who will have lunch without wine.''

The conquerors discovered their Old World grapes grew well in a valley south of present-day Lima. The valley was full of birds, and came to be called Pisco, from pisscu, the native word for ''little bird.'' (This according to a Peruvian tourism brochure titled ''Pisco Belongs to Peru.'' The obvious subtitle -- ''and not to Chile'' -- is left unstated.)

In time the name of the valley was also applied to the brandy distilled from the local wine.
According to Loebl, pisco made its way to Chile during the War of the Pacific in 1879. ''The Chileans, when they invaded Peru, they liked the pisco and they took it to Chile,'' he says. (For their part, the Chileans claim they began making brandy in the 17th century and selling it as pisco in 1871, eight years before the war.)

Chilean pisco is aged in wood barrels, which give it a brownish tint, and mixed with water to lower the alcohol content. Peruvian pisco is kept in glass or steel containers (''It has to be completely transparent,'' Loebl says) and sold undiluted. Peruvian pisco is 76 to 96 proof; most Chilean piscos are 60 to 90 proof.

The recent WIPO ruling is unlikely to affect pisco sales in the U.S., which is not a signatory to the treaty governing country-of-origin labeling for spirits. The battle between the two countries seems likely to slog on.

Like the French, who insist that champagne can only be made in Champagne, the Peruvians say pisco must come from Pisco (or thereabouts).

The website of the Peruvian embassy in London offers a 14-page 'defense of the Peruvian denomination of origin `pisco' '' that includes a detailed history of grape cultivation in Peru as well as a list of 17 pisco-related laws, resolutions and decrees.

The Chileans seem to favor a live-and-let-live approach.

''Shared with our Peruvian neighbours,'' says the website of Chile's U.S. embassy, ``pisco is a grape brandy of high alcoholic grade.''

''Each one has its clientele,'' says Marcel Encina, owner of Sabores Chilenos on Flagler Street. ``The Chileans like the Chilean. The Peruvians like the Peruvian.''

If nothing else, the fight has raised pisco's profile back home.

Drinking it ''just recently has become an issue of patriotism,'' Herbie says.

''Five years ago, of every 10 cocktails that were sold in Peru, nine were whiskey and one was pisco,'' says Ari. ``Today it's exactly the opposite.''

Capital Formation Gives Big Lift to Chile's GDP
The Wall Street Journal
August 24th

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Chile's gross domestic product rose 6.5% on the year in the second quarter, the Central Bank reported. The figure is above the 6.1% revised growth figure for the first quarter, which the bank originally reported as rising 5.7% on the year, but in line with previously released economic-activity data.

"Overall, this is a very constructive and balanced set of real sector figures -- broad-based and balanced growth drivers with a very sound demand-side composition," said economist Alberto Ramos at Goldman Sachs in New York.

In the first half, GDP grew 6.3% on the year, well above the bank's 5.5%-6% estimate issued in late May and moderately below the torrid growth of late 2004.

The Central Bank estimates GDP growth of 5.3%-6.3% this year, but will publish a revised outlook next week.

"The main booster of this result was gross capital formation," up 26% on the year in the first half, the bank said. Most of the rise in capital formation stemmed from investment in machinery and equipment, which surged 42.6% in the first half, and construction, which increased 13.6% on year in the period, the bank said.

American Creates Vast Park in Chile
Reuters en Los Angeles Times
August, 22th

CALETA GONZALO, Chile — He spent more than $30 million and wrangled with the Chilean government and public for eight years, but a former American clothing magnate-turned-conservationist has realized his dream of transforming his vast lands in southern Chile into a nature sanctuary.

In a ceremony at the gateway to his rainy Patagonian wonderland, Douglas Tompkins, co-founder of clothing company Esprit, donated more than 714,000 acres of almost untouched forest to a Chilean foundation that will run South America's biggest nature preserve.

The Pumalin Park Nature Sanctuary is a rugged land of mossy trails, steep mountains, deep fjords and clear rivers, with camping and cabins for tourists who fly or boat in from the city of Puerto Montt, 75 miles away.

"I especially salute your perseverance," Chilean President Ricardo Lagos told Tompkins at Friday's ceremony. "I never imagined a project to protect our natural resources could have so many obstacles."

Four years ago, Tompkins threatened to abandon the park after lawmakers and business and civic groups objected that his land purchases limited economic development in the remote area and threatened national security.

Tompkins said he fell in love with southern Chile's dramatic landscapes as a youth and began buying the land 15 years ago. Tompkins' Conservation Land Trust and his wife Kristine's Patagonia Land Trust have purchased more than 2 million acres in Chile and Argentina.

Education Minister Sergio Bitar said he took on the sanctuary as a pet project and worked to turn the tide of negative opinion in Chile, where most people thought of Tompkins as the man who tried to cut the country in half by buying up land.

The decree forming the sanctuary puts the land in the hands of a national foundation and guarantees government access for roads and power lines.

Among the former detractors at the ceremony was Sen. Sergio Paez, who represents the southern part of Chile's Tenth Region and had criticized Tompkins for allegedly forcing settlers to sell him their land.

"I talked to a lot of people and many people did get good money for their land and they were not taken advantage of, which was what I had feared," Paez said.

Tompkins and his wife will be on the seven-member board that runs the sanctuary, along with religious, government and academic representatives. His land trust will provide most of the approximately $700,000 a year it costs to administer the park.

Victory for democracy
OUR OPINION: CHILE RIDS ITSELF OF LAST VESTIGES OF PINOCHET'S MILITARISM
The Miami Herald, editorial
August 19th.

The people of Chile, a nation often cited as Latin America's model democracy, quietly took another important step this week to restore their country's constitutional equilibrium. Just one month before the 32nd anniversary of the coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and ushered in a military dictatorship led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, full control of the military was once again placed in the hands of civilian authority. This is a significant political and historical milestone that deserves to be cheered.

By a resounding vote of 150-3, the Chilean Congress voted to discard anti-democratic provisions inserted into the constitution at Gen. Pinochet's insistence after a new constitution was put into effect in 1980. This occurred at a time when the general ruled Chile with an iron fist and brooked no real opposition. Among other things, these archaic provisions allotted appointed seats in the Chilean Senate to retired military and police commanders and denied the president the power to fire military commanders.

The purpose of these provisions was to ensure the continuing power of Gen. Pinochet and his military cadre when the general was obliged to relinquish power to civilians after his defeat in a plebiscite in October of 1988. No matter who was elected by the people to run the country, the military would hold a trump card.

It has been nearly 20 years since that famous voto del no -- when Chileans said No to Gen. Pinochet's dictatorship and voted to return to the path of democracy. It has taken this long for Chile to rid itself of these odious remnants of the dictatorship precisely because they cemented Gen. Pinochet's position as a powerful member of the Senate -- also guaranteed by a tailor-made constitutional provision -- and unfairly gave the military political power that it was loath to surrender.

It is a measure of the political maturity of the Chilean people that the nation did not rush to change the constitution in the early years of the transition to democracy. This could have precipitated a dangerous political crisis. This week's decision, which won support from President Ricardo Lagos and the opposition, signals that the last vestiges of Pinochetism are finally being relegated to the history books, where they belong.


Gas ring
Chile's search for reliable suppliers
The Economist
August 19th.

OVER the next couple of years Chile is likely to be Latin America's fastest-growing economy, as it was for much of the 1990s. But there is one big potential brake: energy. With little oil or coal of its own, Chile imports two-thirds of its energy, relying especially on Argentina's natural gas. Some $4 billion has been invested in gas pipelines and gas-fired power plants. Until recently, Chile was importing 20m cubic metres of Argentine gas per day. This provided a quarter of central Chile's electricity and almost 60% in the north.

But Argentina's government has frozen the price of gas at home: consumption has soared and investment fallen. Since last year it has imposed unilateral cuts in gas exports to Chile of 20% (and at times 50%). Chile has avoided power cuts, mainly because heavy winter rains boosted hydroelectric output. But it urgently needs more reliable suppliers.

One solution might be Bolivia, which has South America's largest gas reserves after Venezuela. But Bolivia still smarts at Chile's annexation of its mineral-rich coastal territory in a 19th-century war. It refuses to sell gas to Chile.

So Chile is looking elsewhere. First, ENAP, the state oil company, plans to award a contract in October for the supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and a $400m re-gasification plant near Santiago. A second, more ambitious, plan is for a single “energy ring” in South America's southern cone which would incorporate gas from Peru's Camisea field. This would use existing pipelines across the southern cone. It would add at least one more, along the Pacific coast from Peru to Chile.

Mooted at a meeting of Mercosur, the region's putative common market, in June, this plan is gathering momentum. A legal framework for it should be drawn up by the end of the year. One obstacle is Chile's quarrel with Peru over their maritime border. But supply cuts for nationalist reasons would be less likely if they also affected Argentina and Brazil, and the project would include some form of supply insurance.

The bigger question is whether the “ring” is the best design for energy integration. The 1,200km (750-mile) pipeline from Peru to northern Chile could cost up to $1 billion. A possible extension to Santiago would increase demand, but over a distance at which it becomes cheaper to import liquefied gas (indeed Peru might be a supplier for the ENAP plant). Transport costs would make Peruvian gas uncompetitive in Argentina. And Camisea may not have enough gas to supply the southern cone as well as the home market and planned LNG exports to North America.

The main purpose of the “ring” appears to be to coax Bolivia (an observer at the talks) into bigger gas exports. “It's amazing how transforming this into a multilateral issue has cut through bilateral difficulties,” says Rudolf Araneda, a manager of a Chilean pipeline. Bolivia has resumed talks on a second pipeline to Argentina (potentially freeing up more Argentine gas for Chile) which it broke off earlier this year because of political turmoil. The “ring” means that Bolivia would no longer hold all the cards in the southern cone's power game. But much will still depend on Bolivia's presidential election in December.
Pinochet's wife gets bail, but not son
Augusto Pinochet's wife, Lucía Hiriart, was granted freedom on bail in a tax evasion probe, but a divided court denied bail to their youngest son, Marco Antonio Pinochet.
Miami Herald
August, 12th.

SANTIAGO, Chile - (AP) -- A court on Thursday granted freedom on bail to the wife of Gen. Augusto Pinochet but kept his youngest son on jail, one day after both were indicted and arrested as accomplices in a tax evasion probe related to the former dictator's multimillion-dollar fortune overseas.

Pinochet's 82-year-old wife, Lucía Hiriart, will remain a bit longer in Santiago Military Hospital, where she has been detained, so that she can undergo some medical tests, the hospital announced Thursday.

In the case of the former dictator's son, Marco Antonio Pinochet, the court voted 2-1 to keep him in jail because he might be considered ``a risk for society.''

As soon as the court's 3-0 decision to release Hiriart was announced, aides for Pinochet rushed to the bank to deposit the $3,600 bail.

Doctors said Wednesday that Hiriart was being treated for headaches and high blood pressure. The hospital's communiqué Thursday said that although she has ''evolved in a satisfactory manner,'' her blood pressure is still high.

Hiriart and the young Pinochet were indicted and ordered arrested Wednesday by Judge Sergio Muñoz as part of his investigation into the multimillion-dollar accounts owned by Pinochet at banks in the United States and other countries. The existence of the account was disclosed by a U.S. Senate committee investigating the Riggs Bank of Washington.

Pinochet, 89, said in a statement Wednesday that he put the ''savings of my entire life'' into overseas accounts because he expected that after he left office he would be the target of ``persecution and political harassment.''

Muñoz has indicated he plans to try Pinochet himself in the case, and has already succeeded in having the Santiago Court of Appeals strip the former ruler of his immunity from prosecution, a ruling that has been appealed by his defense before the Supreme Court.

Muñoz has estimated Pinochet's fortune abroad at $27 million. The judge calculated that Pinochet failed to pay the equivalent of $9.8 million in taxes and said that his wife has not filed a tax return since 1998. Pinochet said he has already paid those taxes.

Police in Chile Detain Pinochet's Wife and Son
in Fraud Inquiry
By Larry Rohter, The New York Times
August, 11th.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug. 10 - The wife and younger son of Gen. Augusto Pinochet were in police custody in Santiago, Chile, on Wednesday after a judge ordered them detained in connection with a tax fraud investigation of secret bank accounts that General Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, opened in an American bank.

Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet and Marco Antonio Pinochet are charged with being General Pinochet's accomplices in a decade-long scheme to shift millions of dollars, whose origins are also being investigated, to safe havens abroad. In recognition of her fragile health, Mrs. Pinochet, 82, was being held in the Military Hospital in the Chilean capital, where her husband visited her on Wednesday afternoon.

"This is like a bullet in the head," said Augusto Pinochet Jr., the couple's elder son, as he arrived at the hospital. He was convicted of fraud last year and fined in a case involving stolen cars. "What do they want? There is no respect for anything or anyone on our side."

In June, General Pinochet was stripped of immunity from prosecution so that tax fraud charges might be filed against him. That decision has been appealed to the Chilean Supreme Court, which in the past has ruled that Mr. Pinochet, 89, who was in power from 1973 to 1990, is too feeble to stand trial in connection with human rights violations.

Addressing reporters, President Ricardo Lagos cited Wednesday's indictments as proof that "in Chile, all citizens are equal; no one is above the law." Because of the corruption accusations against him, General Pinochet's stature in Chile has declined even among former supporters, and there were no protests or statements of support for him on Wednesday from active duty military officers.

The Pinochet family's secret accounts came to light 13 months ago, the result of a United States Senate committee inquiry into possible money laundering at Riggs Bank in Washington. At that time, American investigators concluded that General Pinochet had hidden up to $8 million in six accounts there, some opened with his wife under aliases.

Since then, however, a Chilean prosecuting judge, Sergio Muñoz, and the investigators working for him have concluded that the amounts involved are actually much larger. In a recent court filing, he calculated that General Pinochet had more than $17 million in more than 100 bank accounts in the United States, Chile and other countries.

Under Chilean law, Judge Muñoz has until Saturday to conclude his inquiry, and some additional indictments are possible. On Monday, he interrogated six former military officers who worked on General Pinochet's staff, reportedly in an effort to determine if money from a secret government fund was illicitly transferred to General Pinochet's personal accounts abroad.

In remarks to reporters in Santiago, General Pinochet's lawyer, Pablo Rodríguez, said the indictment, though "expected," was "a huge mistake and a tremendous injustice." Mrs. Pinochet, he maintained, "had practically no involvement in the matters Judge Muñoz is investigating" and merely received without question the money her husband passed on to her, "as spouses do with their partners."

But the judge's 27-page ruling, based on three interrogations of Mrs. Pinochet, concluded that she "at all times had knowledge" of the movement of her husband's fortune and "received direct benefits" from the joint accounts. As for Marco Antonio Pinochet, he "cooperated in the management of the funds that Augusto Pinochet Ugarte maintained abroad, an activity in which he used false documentation," the judge ruled.

A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career
LARRY ROHTER, The New York Times
August, 9th.

SANTIAGO, Chile - Even before his death two years ago at 50, Roberto Bolano was emerging as his generation's premier Latin American writer. But with the posthumous success of "2666," an extravagantly encyclopedic 1,119-page novel that traverses two continents and eight decades, Bolano's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.

To younger readers and writers, Bolano, a Chilean who died in a Barcelona hospital while awaiting a liver transplant, is a cult hero cut down, like some rock star or movie idol, as he was reaching his prime. In little more than a decade, he produced a torrent of novels, short stories and essays that chart a path distinct from the "Boom generation" of Latin American writers before him.

"Bolano's genius is not just the extraordinary quality of his writing, but also that he does not conform to the paradigm of the Latin American writer," said Ignacio Echeverria, former literary editor of El País, Spain's leading daily. "His writing is neither magical realism, nor baroque nor localist, but an imaginary, extraterritorial mirror of Latin America, more as a kind of state of mind than a specific place."

Since its publication late last year, "2666" has won nearly every literary award for which it is eligible, most recently the municipal prize here in Bolano's native land. It would be the favorite for the Rómulo Gallego prize, the most prestigious in Latin America, except that Mr. Bolano won it for his last novel, "The Savage Detectives," and is not eligible.

Divided into five sections that Bolano first envisioned as separate novels, to be published one a year, "2666" begins with the hunt for a writer who has disappeared. But the search for the writer converges with the efforts of police confronting a serial killer who preys on female factory workers in a Mexican border town.

"Roberto emerged as a writer at a time when Latin America no longer believed in utopias, when paradise had become hell, and that sense of monstrousness and waking nightmares and constant flight from something horrid permeates '2666' and all his work," said the Argentine novelist Rodrigo Fresana. "His books are political, but in a way that is more personal than militant or demagogic, that is closer to the mystique of the beatniks" than the "Boom."

Bolano also differs from the generation of writers preceding him in that his national identity is fluid. Whereas Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico all identify closely with their native lands in their important works, Bolano makes his protagonists vagabonds who move from country to country, usually on some quest doomed to disappointment.

"He's not really from any one place, but is a sort of international, post-nationalist writer with strong emotional ties to Chile, Mexico and Spain," said Natasha Wimmer, who is translating "The Savage Detectives" into English. "He's not just steeped in his own national literature and drama, but is more wide-ranging and global, especially in his later books, and language-wise he definitely draws on the colloquialisms and slang of all three countries." In his last interview, published by the Mexican edition of Playboy magazine, Bolano said he regarded himself as "a Latin American," adding that "my only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me."

His early years were spent in southern and coastal Chile, by his own account a skinny, nearsighted and bookish but dyslexic child. As a teenager, though, he moved with his family to Mexico, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing political causes. He returned here just before the 1973 coup that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power, and, like many others of his age and background, was jailed but, as he told it, was saved when two former classmates serving in the national police recognized him and authorized his release following a week in prison.

After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible - "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings," his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled.

He finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled in a small town on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector, while he wrote.

Mr. Bolano thought of himself primarily as a poet, and a 20-year collection of his verse was published in 2000 under the title "The Romantic Dogs." He turned to narrative fiction "and abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence," Mr. Herralde said, because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction."

As regards his native country, which he visited just once after going into exile, Bolano had conflicted feelings. It was surely not by accident that the main garbage dump where many of the murdered women in "2666" are found is called "El Chile," or that he named his son Lautaro, after a leader of the Indian resistance to the Spanish conquest here.

Bolano is also notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment. "He didn't fit into Chile, and the rejection that he experienced left him free to say whatever he wanted, which can be a good thing for a writer," said the Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman. Of Latin America's writers, Bolano most admired Borges. The first of his novels, "Nazi Literature in the Americas," published in 1996 and soon to be available in English, can be read as a homage to Borges.

A voracious reader, Bolano was also familiar with Anglo-American literature, and was fascinated by such genre writers as James Ellroy, Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy. "Everything he writes seems to have some riddle in it that is a reference to something else," said Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, which plans to publish a Bolano short story later this year. "You get a definite sense of the wide reading he had done and feel this sort of allusive quality."

In "2666" Bolano works some ofthe same geographic territory as Mr. McCarthy - the arid frontier between Mexico and the United States - but in the more hallucinatory fashion of Mr. Ellroy. Though the novel starts and ends in contemporary Germany, the focus is on the murders of scores of female factory workers in the imaginary border city of Santa Teresa, a plot line modeled on similar killings that have occurred in recent years in Ciudad Juárez.

The reasons for the book's unusual title remain a mystery even to Bolano's closest friends. But there are oblique references in his writing indicating that Bolano thought of that year as a sort of apocalypse. Thus far, Bolano is little known in the English-speaking world and most of his work is not readily available. But the critics and editors familiar with the two small, early novels that New Directions has published in translation, "Distant Star" and "By Night in Chile," or who have read him in French, German or Italian translations have been unusually enthusiastic about his work. Susan Sontag called him "the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world."

Over the next few years, more Bolano will be translated into English. In addition to the 622-page "The Savage Detectives" and "2666," the rights to both of which were recently acquired by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, all his other novels are to be translated, and a collection of short stories called "Last Evenings on Earth" is to be published early in 2006. "We want to do everything, because he is just a mesmerizing writer," said Barbara Epler, editor in chief of New Directions.

Bolano was extraordinarily prolific, but Mr. Herralde, his Spanish editor, said that not much remains unpublished: a volume of poetry tentatively called "The Unknown University" and one more collection of short stories. Bolano joked about the "posthumous," saying the word "sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated," and would no doubt be amused to see how his stock has risen now that he is dead. Still, Mr. Fresan said that "Roberto was one of a kind, a writer who worked without a net, who went all out, with no brakes, and in doing so, created a new way to be a great Latin American writer."

An American in Chile Finds Conservation a Hard Slog
By Larry Rohter, The New York Times
August 7, 2005

REÑIHUE, Chile - Douglas Tompkins first fell under the spell of Chilean Patagonia's lush forests and rushing streams as a backpacking teenager from New York. Today, 40-odd years older and much, much richer, he may well be the region's biggest individual landowner, and its most controversial foreign presence.

His holdings in this realm of snowcapped peaks and wind-whipped shores are larger than Rhode Island and include tracts that timber, electric power and agricultural interests covet. But instead of moving to chop, dam and dig, Mr. Tompkins has turned his properties into nature sanctuaries, open to the public but with strict limits on use, that he has said repeatedly he hopes to donate to the people of Chile. If they can be persuaded to accept his offer.

In so insular a society, far-fetched explanations for Mr. Tompkins's presence here have flourished like moss. Some have suggested that he wants to turn Patagonia into a nuclear dumping ground, others speculate that he wants to seize control of water supplies in a world with a growing thirst, and there have even been accusations that Mr. Tompkins, a buttoned-down, gray-haired WASP, has acquired the land as the site for a new Jewish state.

Over the years, Antonio Horvath, a conservative senator who represents the region just south of here, has been one of Mr. Tompkins's leading critics, suggesting that he is just the latest in a long line of foreign adventurers with extravagant designs on Patagonia. He dismisses some allegations against Mr. Tompkins as "extreme ultranationalist postures," but says his presence does raise legitimate issues of sovereignty and development.

"If I were to go to the United States and buy a big area of Florida as an environmental preserve and tell people they can't go here or there, I think the U.S. would kick me right out of there," Mr. Horvath argued. "Every nation wants some degree of protection of its territory, and Chile is no different."

Just the reserve here where Mr. Tompkins lives much of the year, known as Pumalín Park in honor of the pumas that roam the park's virgin forests, occupies 1,153 square miles. All told, he and his wife, Kristine McDivitt, a former chief executive officer of the Patagonia retail chain who is wealthy in her own right, own more than 2,000 square miles of wilderness real estate dotted across southern Chile, either directly or through foundations they control.

"We want to do something good, but you've got to be very naïve and out to lunch to think that certain sectors of society are not going to put up resistance," Mr. Tompkins said in a rare interview on a typically squally day here at his remote homestead at the head of a fiord. "If you're not willing to take the political heat, then you shouldn't get into the game of land conservation, especially on a large scale."

Raised in Manhattan and Dutchess County, Mr. Tompkins, 62, became interested in the outdoors as a teenage rock climber in the Shawangunk Mountain Range, in the Hudson River Valley, and visited Patagonia for the first time as "kind of a ski bum" in 1961. He later founded The North Face, an outdoor apparel company, and the Esprit line of clothes, which he sold in 1990 for a price reported to be more than $150 million, giving him the means to indulge his fascination with the wilderness.

Mr. Tompkins has the lean and weathered look of the outdoorsman and a direct and blunt style that Ms. McDivitt, gentler and more cheerful, tempers. Their home here, which they designed themselves, is built in a simple but elegant style that recalls the Pacific Northwest, open and airy with plenty of windows to take advantage of a view that includes a volcano off in the distance.

One of the reasons he chose Chile as the base of his conservation efforts, Mr. Tompkins said, was a dynamic free-market economy that is unique in Latin America, with few government restrictions on the purchase or development of property. But the tradition of philanthropy that accompanied the growth of American capitalism has not taken root here yet, and that, Mr. Tompkins's local supporters say, has worked to his disadvantage.

"Because he is a North American doing this for such a strange purpose, for conservation, the assumption is that he must have hidden intentions, a secret agenda," said Rodrigo Pizarro, the director of Terram, a leading environmental group in Chile. "If he were buying the land for profit, like all the other foreigners do, no one would be raising any questions."

Pumalín Park actually bisects Chile, running from Corcovado Gulf to the Andean mountain border with Argentina. Mr. Tompkins and his wife have acquired an additional 1,129 square miles of land in Argentina, mostly in the Patagonia region there, which only adds to nationalist anxieties, here and there.

Business interests here and in the United States have also sought at public events, in publications and on Web sites to portray Mr. Tompkins and the nonprofit Foundation for Deep Ecology he established in 1990 as environmental extremists, even crackpots. He shrugs that off as part of a smear campaign, but makes no apologies for his belief that human interference with nature has provoked looming global disaster.

"To me, we are on a runaway train, heading for a cliff with nobody at the controls," he said. "It has to do with our economic model and our ecological illiteracy, our overexpansion, our dangerous technologies that have damaging effects on ecosystems, our consumption patterns. It's an interminable list of environmental catastrophes and encroaching populations, and you have to ask: Where are we going? What is enough? What are the limits?"

Chilean ecologists agree with his objectives, but not always with his methods, which reflect his hard-charging background in the American business world rather than the chummy, close-knit world of politics in this nation of 15 million people.

"The project itself is a very good one, a model for others to follow, but Tompkins himself sometimes doesn't help much," Mr. Pizarro said of Pumalín Park. "He has an entrepreneurial mentality, wants to do his business his way and can be a bit disdainful of the way things are done in countries like ours, which has led him to make a lot of errors in communication."

In the late 1990's, Mr. Tompkins's efforts to join the north and south sections of Pumalín Park by buying the 125-square-mile tract separating them were blocked by the Christian Democratic government then in power. Even though he was willing to offer the best price, the Roman Catholic university that owned the parcel sold it to a Spanish-controlled power company.

His relationship with the current, nominally Socialist government, which leaves office early in 2006, has been cautiously friendly. At the start of this year, an area he owned south of here, known as Corcovado and Tic-Toc, was designated a national park, and plans are under discussion to expand it to include what would be Chile's first marine sanctuary.

These days, Mr. Tompkins also has a message that may calm his critics: he has reached his limit and does not intend to buy more land. "We have a number of ventures that we are working on, and those are going to take the rest of our lives to finish," he said, clearly interested in his legacy.

Carlos Weber, the director of the National Forestry Corporation, Chile's equivalent of a national park service, said that "though the local authorities still have in their heads a model based on settler colonies that raze the forest to plant potatoes and raise animals, what Tompkins is doing offers the best opportunity for sustainable development in that region."

"He is little appreciated, understood or welcomed in Chile today," Mr. Weber said, "but I predict that 30 years from now, after people's thinking has matured and they see results, no one will be against him."

Chile Is Hot
By Michael Franz, Food Section, The Washington Post
July 27th.

During the past two decades, the wine business has become extremely competitive and truly global. Countries that could recently have been dismissed as winemaking upstarts have become worldwide contenders, and today the most elite regions face stiff competition from many quarters. This was perhaps demonstrated most strikingly when Australia surpassed France in wine exports to the United States in 2003. Since then, competition for shares in world markets has increased, and even an export powerhouse like Australia must now worry about the challenges posed by Argentina and Chile.

These two countries enjoy a powerful combination: very low production costs and superb conditions for growing grapes. Widely regarded as good sources for low-priced bottlings, both have recently proved that they can produce reds that rival the world's best in terms of quality while undercutting them in price.

This has led naturally to accelerated development of the industries in both countries, with the delightful result that new wines seem to arrive here almost weekly from either Argentina or Chile. I've recently been scrutinizing them to learn whether they will diminish or enhance the two countries' stature as wine producers.

As you may have seen in my columns of June 29 and July 13, I've found the newcomers from Argentina extremely impressive. I can now report that Chile's newest exports are likewise remarkably strong.

As in the case of Argentina, the best wine flowing our way from Chile remains red. Cabernet sauvignons and Bordeaux-style blends are the best of the best, but impressive improvements are also being made with carmenere. This grape was virtually lost in France during the famous Phyloxerra blight of the late 19th century but was rediscovered just over a decade ago in Chile. Chilean vintners are learning how to deal with carmenere's late-ripening peculiarities, and lower-priced bottlings are becoming more consistent even as high-end renditions are attaining indisputable greatness.

You'll see that some whites also have earned recommendations below, and there's good reason to believe that Chile has edged ahead of Argentina where whites are concerned. To the best of my knowledge, the wines reviewed here are all the first or second vintage available in our area. They are reviewed in order of preference, with parenthetical indications of growing regions, approximate prices, importers and local distributors:

RED WINES

Purple Angel (by Montes) (Colchagua Valley) 2003 ($48, TGIC Importers/available in August from F.P. Winner in Maryland): This is the new state of the art in carmenere. Dark, densely concentrated and packed with powerful flavors, it is nevertheless as impressive in complexity as power. Notes of licorice, cocoa, wood smoke and minerals lend interesting accents to the core of blackberry fruit. Carmenere has its detractors both within and beyond Chile, but this wine should reduce their ranks.

MontGras (Colchagua Valley) Minquén Mountain Vineyard 2002 ($32, Palm Bay/National): This blend of 95 percent cabernet sauvignon and 5 percent malbec shows marvelous complexity in a restrained, sophisticated mode that places it in a league with wines costing over $50. Lovely notes of cedar, dark cherries and blackberries, dried herbs, tobacco leaves and leather are detailed and expressive.

Casa Lapostolle (Requinoa Vineyard, Rapel Valley) Syrah "Cuvee Alexandre" 2003 ($23, Marnier-Lapostolle/ Washington Wholesale): Massively concentrated but marvelously lush and soft, this is already beautifully integrated and will continue to develop for years to come.

Sincerity (Colchagua Valley) Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 ($17, Royal Imports/National): This delicious wine deserves your attention even if you weren't looking for one that was crafted from organically grown grapes. A blend of 55 percent merlot and 45 percent cabernet sauvignon, it is packed with ripe, rich, vivid fruit, and it also offers a softness that seems unusual in a wine packing such deep flavors. Most wines costing $30 should seek cover when this one enters a room.

Morande (Maipo Valley) Carmenere "Edicion Limitada" 2002 ($20, TGIC/Country Vintner): Exotic and interesting, this features a solid core of blackberry fruit with accents of licorice, dried herbs, roasted meat and spices. Also excellent is Morande (Maipo Valley) "Edicion Limitada" Cabernet Franc 2003 ($25).

MontGras (Colchagua Valley) "Quatro" Reserva 2004 ($15, Palm Bay/National): This internationally styled wine packs a wallop of fruit that is framed with a dose of spicy oak. Made from 35 percent cabernet sauvignon, 28 percent malbec, 22 percent merlot and 15 percent carmenere, it offers excellent value for the price.

Also recommended: Morande (Maipo Valley) Cabernet Sauvignon "Vitisterra Grand Reserve" 2002 ($16, Morande USA/Country Vintner), Morande (Maipo Valley) Carmenere "Terrarum Reserve" 2003 ($13, Morande USA/Country Vintner) and 2 Brothers Winery (Colchagua Valley) Syrah 2003 ($12, Billington/Winebow).

WHITE WINES

Montes (Leyda Valley) Leyda Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc "Limited Selection" 2004 ($16, TGIC/F.P. Winner in Maryland and Country Vintner in D.C. and Virginia): With flashy aromas and flavors of grapefruit and freshly cut grass, this beautifully balanced sauvignon joins Terrunyo Sauvignon Blanc in the sweepstakes for South America's finest white wine.

Sincerity (Casablanca Valley) Chardonnay 2004 ($17, Royal Imports/National): Fleshy and full of flavor, this chardonnay is substantial and satisfying but so well balanced with subtle oak and fresh acidity that it never seems heavy or tiring to drink.

Cousiño-Macul (Maipo Valley) Sauvignon Gris 2004 ($11, Billington/Winebow): Sauvignon Gris is a very rare variety thought to have originated in the Graves district of Bordeaux. This rendition is medium-bodied and capable of holding its own with relatively rich dishes, but the citrus-flavored fruit is so fresh and well-braced by acidity that it can also be enjoyed as a simple sipper or partner for shellfish.

Cult's Enclave in Chile, Guns and Intelligence Files
LARRY ROHTER, The New York Times
June 17th, 2005.

RIO DE JANEIRO, June 16 - The authorities in Chile searching for victims of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship who are said to be buried at the enclave of a secretive, apocalyptic religious cult of German émigrés have unearthed a large cache of weapons and intelligence files.
"This arsenal is going to end up being the biggest ever found in private hands since the restoration of democracy in 1990 and in the history of Chile," the deputy interior minister, Jorge Correa Sutil, told reporters on Wednesday. "Believe me, what has been discovered so far is of a dimension that can only be explained in a military context."

The enclave, Colonia Dignidad, was founded in southern Chile in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, a former Nazi Luftwaffe medic turned fundamentalist preacher. He fled around 1997 after being charged with the sexual abuse of more than two dozen boys in his care. He was convicted in absentia of pedophilia, arrested in Argentina in March and sent back to Chile, where he is now in prison, facing charges of kidnapping, forced labor, fraud and tax evasion.

Colonia Dignidad enjoyed official protection during the 17-year dictatorship of General Pinochet, and had close relationships with the Chilean Army and the state intelligence agency, known as DINA.

According to a 1991 government report on human rights abuses, Mr. Schäfer allowed DINA agents to hide political prisoners in the enclave and may have taken part in torturing detainees.

Human rights advocates in Chile said they hoped the files found at the site would help explain the relationship between Mr. Schäfer and state security forces, as well as the fates of some Pinochet opponents.

The material is being examined by a judge and has not yet been made public, but Chilean news reports said the documents included files on hundreds of people that the government and Colonia Dignidad regarded as enemies. More than 250 people still live at the enclave.

Among the cult's other victims may have been Boris Weisfeiler, an American mathematics professor who disappeared 20 years ago while hiking near Colonia Dignidad. A Chilean military informant later provided an account, found plausible by the American Embassy, saying Dr. Weisfeiler, a Russian-born Jew, had been killed on Mr. Schäfer's orders.

The weapons seized include machine guns, rifles, rocket launchers, grenades and mortars. Some were said to be of World War II vintage, and were accompanied by manuals written in German; others were more modern.

The discovery may solve another mystery: From the mid-1970's, the United States and other countries cut off weapons sales to the Pinochet dictatorship, which nonetheless managed to stay well armed. Diplomats and rights groups have long suggested that Colonia Dignidad acquired weapons for the Chilean military through trading companies that the sect controlled.

Citing military sources, the Chilean daily La Nación reported Thursday that the arms at Colonia Dignidad were buried there between 1976 and 1978, when Chile nearly went to war with neighboring Argentina in a border dispute.

Government officials said the discovery of the arms would strengthen their case against Mr. Schäfer and associates who are also in jail by giving prosecutors grounds to invoke a racketeering statute. "Colonia Dignidad was an illicit association dedicated to committing sexual, tax and economic crimes and had a paramilitary purpose," Mr. Correa Sutil said.

New OAS chief ready for challenges aplenty
In an interview, Chilean diplomat José Miguel Insulza recognized he has entered a minefield at the Organization of American States, starting with worsening finances. But he insisted he could reach out to all from north to south.
JANE BUSSEY, The Miami Herald
June 8th, 2005.

As a Chilean exile living in Mexico, José Miguel Insulza helped found one of Latin America's first U.S. studies centers outside Cuba. His understanding of the United States may have served him well before his election as secretary general of the Organization of American States, when Washington favored first a Salvadoran, then a Mexican for the post.

''Look, I have a daughter who was born here in the United States,'' Insulza said, adding that, like many exiles who have moved from country to country, ``I am good at making friends.''

But while the Chilean politician could brush off Washington's initial opposition, he faced a quick baptism by fire at the three-day OAS General Assembly meeting in Fort Lauderdale.

Not only is political unrest erupting in the region, the OAS faces a financial crisis.

In an interview, Insulza acknowledged that reordering the OAS' priorities is among his first tasks.
''I've discovered the OAS does so many things,'' he said. ``It's too many missions.''

Insulza, who turned 62 last week, started out as a Christian Democrat in Chile, then served as a Foreign Ministry advisor in the government of the late Chilean Socialist President Salvador Allende. After Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1974, Insulza left Chile, living six years in Spain before going to Mexico.

He helped found the Center for U.S. Studies at Mexico City's Center for Economic Research and Teaching.

''We decided it would be a good idea to carry out studies on the United States,'' Insulza said, adding that many in Latin America and the Caribbean fail to grasp that neither the American public nor government is monolithic.

RETURNED HOME
Insulza returned to Chile after democracy was restored and has participated in every government since then.

'He sort of became a `minister for life' in Chile because his political skills are so gifted; he is widely liked and he has key networks,'' said David J. Rothkopf, author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.

''He's going to need all those skills,'' said Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration Commerce Department official who has known Insulza for many years.

At the OAS meeting, one of Insulza's strategies was to extend his network. He spent hours listening -- for example, sitting through a two-hour meeting Saturday where Caribbean officials and U.S. lawmakers shared views on bilateral issues.

Just as Insulza shrugged off any lasting implications of Washington's initial support of former Salvadoran President Francisco Flores and Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Derbez for the OAS post, he deflected criticism about OAS inaction in the troubled spots across the hemisphere.

''We are going through a period of tests for democracy,'' Insulza said, adding the challenge was trying to find a nonintrusive way to assure that governments are not only elected democratically but also rule democratically.

But he drew a line around the crises in different countries facing threats to political stability and criticism of OAS performance.

The Bolivian government, whose president, Carlos Mesa, offered his resignation this week, had not asked for OAS intervention, and Ecuador needed more time to work out its recent change of government, he said.

He also noted the opposition had made few formal concrete complaints in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez was elected and reaffirmed in a recall vote, but where the opposition insists the country is sliding into authoritarian rule.

UP TO THE TASK
Insulza insisted he was up to the challenges facing the OAS and the hemisphere.

''I have been working in negotiations all my life,'' Insulza said, adding that talks would fail unless opposing sides were willing to compromise. ``You have to have at least a spark of hope.''

On Haiti, Insulza said he saw some possibility of a political dialogue. He pledged that the OAS would help to keep that country from sliding into a situation where elections could not be held.

''All of these issues require political leadership,'' he said. ``I hope the political role of the OAS will be recognized.''

Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, likened Insulza's role to the head fireman whose own firehouse needs urgent attention: ``He has a dual challenge. He has a region in increasing political disarray and an organization that is very weak financially and operationally.''

Weak deal puts spotlight on OAS chief
Andres Oppenheimer, The Miami Herald
June 8th, 2005.

It's now up to you, Mr. Secretary General. As expected, the 34-country Organization of American States annual meeting failed to create a formal early-warning system to prevent new dictatorships in the region. Now, the collective defense of democracy will pretty much depend on your leadership.

Judging from the draft final resolution that circulated late Tuesday, at the end of the OAS three-day foreign ministers' meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Latin American countries significantly watered down a U.S. proposal to give the OAS greater powers to put joint pressure on hybrid democracies, such as those in Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, to respect the rule of law.

While the draft final resolution is written with so many caveats that it allows all sides to claim victory, it will not go down in history as a turning point in the struggle against oppression. Fears in Latin America and the Caribbean of U.S. intervention under the guise of defending democracy prevailed over fears of a spread of totalitarian rule in the region.

Before we get into what was approved, let's look at the original U.S. proposal: It called on newly elected OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza to draft ''a plan of action'' with the ''input of civil society'' to strengthen the 2001 OAS Democratic Charter. This would have given human rights groups, for instance, a formal channel to draw OAS attention to government abuses before they result in a break of democratic rule.

The charter, in its current form, calls on the OAS to ostracize governments that seize power in coup d'états, but is vague about democratically elected governments that assume near absolute powers, closing down congress or cramming the supreme court.

In its present form, there is little the OAS can do in a country such as Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez recently packed the Supreme Court with 17 loyalists, in effect taking over the judicial system, or taking over the country's electoral tribunal.

Under the U.S. proposal, the OAS meeting would have agreed that countries ``must govern democratically, fully respecting the rule of law.''

Well, that language was not apparent in the draft that was scheduled to be approved late Tuesday. The paragraph demanding that elected governments rule democratically was gone altogether.

Instead of a ''plan of action'' to create an early-warning system with the help of ''civil society'' to protect democracy, the text only asks the OAS chief ''to make proposals for cooperation initiatives.'' And even that, ``within the principle of nonintervention.''

U.S. officials say the draft final resolution advances the cause of democracy.

''We are quite satisfied with this proposal,'' Roger Noriega, the State Department's chief of Western Hemisphere affairs, told me late Tuesday. ``It represents a consensus that the organization needed to be more proactive, and that the secretary general is charged with proposing new tools [to defend democracy].''

In an apparent jab at Venezuela, Noriega added that ``there are several countries that probably didn't want any sort of resolution of this kind.''

Other diplomats added that Venezuela joined the consensus because it could live with the final text and didn't want to be isolated.

Chilean Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker, whose country drafted the final resolution, told me that it was a compromise between what the Bush administration wanted and Venezuela was willing to accept. Which was not much. So, as I anticipated in Sunday's column, all sides will be able to read whatever they want into the new draft resolution.

My conclusion: The OAS' wishy-washy draft final resolution puts the spotlight on Insulza. He will not have an explicit mandate to move against democrats-turned-dictators, but he will have some leeway ``to make proposals.''

That may not be too bad: a veteran former Chilean interior and foreign minister, Insulza has been a committed human rights and pro-democracy activist throughout his life. Now, he has to move quickly and boldly, or the OAS will become even more irrelevant than it has been lately.

From Thousand-Year-Old Sentinel to Traffickers' Booty
LARRY ROHTER, The New York Times
June 3rd, 2005.

ALERCE, Chile - The majestic tree that gives this town its name is one of Chile's principal national symbols. Streets, schools, suburban housing developments, hotels, gas stations, taxi fleets and even a record company and a brand of cellphone - all invoke and honor the towering and sturdy "sequoia of South America," as the alerce is sometimes called.

But here in Alerce, as in many other parts of southern Chile, there are scarcely any alerce trees to be found these days. Predatory cutting and burning in defiance of laws meant to protect the species have reduced its range and numbers by half and created a lucrative black market in which alerce timber can fetch as much as $5,000 per cubic yard, if successfully spirited abroad.

"The corruption is tremendous, involving very important people," said Adriana Hoffman, a former Environmental Protection Agency director. "There is always plenty of talk about saving the alerce, but nothing gets done and as a result, we are losing part of our patrimony. What is going on is truly scandalous."

Despite its resemblance to the North American redwood, the alerce (pronounced ah-LER-say) is actually a relative of the cypress, with a tough, water-resistant reddish-brown wood that makes it much sought-after for use in building construction and furniture making.

Slow-growing, largely because it favors soils poor in nutrients that other trees shun, it nonetheless grows to a height of 165 feet or more and a width of 15 feet, and some trees in protected areas are more than 3,600 years old.

Since 1975, the export of alerce timber from Chile for commercial purposes has been banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. To further protect the species, Chile in 1976 also approved laws that declared the alerce a "national monument" and prohibited the cutting down of any live trees.

But those regulations contained a loophole that loggers were quick to exploit. Since it is legal to harvest dead trees killed off by fire, lightning or disease, traffickers have been clandestinely helping the process along, environmental advocates say, in hopes of reaping big windfalls.

Most often, loggers simply strip trees of their bark or set forest fires to scorch them and make them eligible for the death certificates that are required before they can be cut down and trucked to sawmills. But the traffickers have also been known to "strangle" alerces with metal rings placed tightly around the trunk.

On a recent cold and drizzly Saturday morning, José Darío Cárcamo, 68, and his son and grandson were scavenging for the remnants of trunks in what had once been a grove of alerce trees here. Their plan was to recover as many stumps as they could with their axe and power saw and then sell the wood, either to neighbors for fuel or to local artisans who prize the alerce as the raw material for carved souvenirs or musical instruments. "When I was a young man, it seemed that there were still alerce forests everywhere," said Mr. Cárcamo, a former woodsman. "Now my grandson has only this, and God only knows what will be left for his grandson."

Government officials maintain that environmental groups here and abroad are exaggerating the threat. They argue that alerce stocks remain plentiful and that the official policy is working better than the alternatives suggested by critics.

"The alerce is not going to be wiped out this year or next, or in the next thousand years," Carlos Weber, director of the National Forestry Corporation, the government agency that oversees all aspects of Chile's forest management, said in an interview in Santiago. "We're not talking about 50 or 100 trees left, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, far above what the market demands each year."

In an effort to safeguard the alerce, Chile has set up a network of national parks and other protected areas. But the government has crippled the environmental crimes division of the national police, and environmental advocates say they are worried at other signs of a lack of resources and political will to guarantee that the law is obeyed.

"It's an absurd responsibility and raises the question of whether the government is serious about enforcing environmental laws in southern Chile," said Aaron Sanger, the representative in Chile of Forest Ethics, an American environmental group. "The government has one ranger for every 900,000 acres in that region, so it is kind of hard for that ranger to do a good job of detecting illegal logging in these remote places."

Environmental groups charge that the illegal traffic in alerce wood is controlled by a mafia that has connections to powerful politicians. Last year, a judge near here received death threats after she began an investigation into charges that a federal senator had improperly pressured Mr. Weber to issue logging certificates to favored constituents.

More recently, the mayor of Fresia, west of here, Nelson Schwerter, was arrested and accused of being a middleman in an alerce-smuggling scheme. He has accused judicial authorities of a political vendetta, but five woodcutters have identified the mayor as the person to whom they sold illegally logged alerce.

Much of the alerce shipped abroad has been tracked to places like Britain and Japan. "The alerce is mixed with other woods that are not on the protected list, and the customs people are none the wiser," said Dr. Hoffman, now the director of Defenders of the Chilean Forest, a leading environmental group. "There is little control and even less knowledge."

Yet in spite of the high price that alerce commands on the black market, commercial loggers have shown little interest in replanting the tree, for obvious economic reasons. Pine and eucalyptus grow fast enough that they are ready for cutting in as little as 20 years, while the alerce requires 1,000 years or more.


China in new Latin American foray
Geoff Dyer in Shanghai, Financial Times
June 1st, 2005.

China stepped up its interest in Latin America's natural resources yesterday when China Minmetals Corporation signed an investment and supply deal for copper with Codelco of Chile which could be worth up to $2bn.

In the latest overseas foray by a Chinese company in search of raw materials, Minmetals, the state-owned group, will initially invest $550m to obtain a 50 per cent stake in a joint venture with Codelco, the state-owned Chilean mining group. As well as provisions for further Chinese investment in copper mines in Chile, the deal also gives Minmetals a long-term supply contract of 55,000 tonnes of copper over the next 15 years.

China has been scouring the world to sign up raw materials for its rapidly growing economy, especially since Chinese demand began to feed into rapidly rising commodity prices around three years ago.

China consumes around 25 per cent of the copper in the world and its demand is expected at least to double by the end of the decade, supplying huge investments in construction, infrastructure and power plants.

Last year Chile, the biggest producer of copper, sent 18 per cent of its output to China, its biggest customer. The deal will be of huge interest in other Latin American nations with natural resources. Although China's emergence represents a huge opportunity and Chinese politicians have pledged billions of dollars in investment in visits to the region, there has been scepticism about these promises.

Juan Villarzu, chief executive of Codelco, said: "The alliance will bring significant benefits and will assist us in developing our copper projects through a new source of financing." Codelco invests around $1bn a year in developing new deposits, but analysts say it will have to invest more heavily if it is to meet increases in global demand.

The deal, which will be financed by China National Development Bank, also gives Minmetals an option to buy 25 per cent of the Gaby mine, which is expected to produce around 150,000 tonnes of copper cathode annually from 2008.

Mr Villarzu also said Codelco planned a public offer of at least 24 per cent of the Gaby project by 2009. Japanese companies are also said to be interested in forming such joint ventures with Codelco. Zhou Zhongshu, president of Minmetals, said that despite the deal with Codelco, the Chinese company was still interested in investing in Noranda, the Canadian copper and nickel group, Reuters reported.

Growth and the Poor
Editorial, The New York Times
May 25th.

Last year should have been a good one for Latin America's poor; the region's economies grew by 5.8 percent. Yet outside Chile, Latin America's high growth rate is not cause for rejoicing. In places with relatively egalitarian income distribution, growth helps everyone. But in unequal countries, where the poor get only a few cents out of every new dollar, growth bypasses the poorest. Latin America is the world's most unequal region. That means growth will not reduce poverty unless Latin American governments redirect it to the poor.

The first thing they must do is keep growing. Chile's achievements are in part the product of sustained growth. Unfortunately, most countries in Latin America are growing not because they have improved productivity, but because of the rise in the price of oil and other commodities, quick booms that lend themselves to quick busts.

Many countries also are carrying debt loads far above what is considered sustainable and spend a big chunk of their treasury on servicing their debts. For three very poor countries, Honduras, Nicaragua and Bolivia, the international banks and their members are reducing debt, although not enough. But there is no help in sight for heavily indebted Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and other countries.

Latin American nations also typically take in far too little in taxes. To reduce poverty with what they do have, Latin American countries would do well to follow the model set by Chile, which has cut extreme poverty by 65 percent since 1990 by carefully targeting its spending. Chile makes direct payments to poor households. It has invested in rural primary education and helps buy housing for the poorest people. These programs have been successful because Chile is well governed enough to measure accurately which families need help and deliver it with little corruption.

Some other countries have similar programs. Since 1997, Mexico has helped more than four million of the poorest families keep their children in school, eat better and stay healthier. In many countries, these programs need closer oversight to keep local politicians from siphoning off aid. But in general, such targeted help can make a difference. In Mexico, it is a safety net for the most marginalized. With sustained growth, however, such programs could help lift millions of people out of poverty.

Secretary General called capable, impressive leader
The Miami Herald
May 25th.

Question: The OAS General Assembly is holding its annual meeting June 5 to 7 in Fort Lauderdale, where discussions will focus on ''delivering the benefits of democracy.'' Is the OAS, under new Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, up to the task? How can the OAS foster democracy in the region?

Answer from César Gaviria, chairman of Hemispheric Partners, former OAS secretary general, and former president of Colombia: José Miguel Insulza is without a doubt the appropriate person to lead the OAS given the current state of affairs of the Americas.

He is an accomplished individual, with extensive public experience and broad knowledge of hemispheric affairs, resulting, in part, from his time at the Chilean foreign ministry.

He has, in addition, a character that will allow him to act with the independence that is necessary to face the democratic crises that threaten the political stability of the region and the significant achievements we've reached in the reinforcement of democratic values.

He possesses an impeccable track record for the respect of human rights. He will be able to implement the broad and enriched agenda set by the presidents' and prime ministers' summits.

He will also push the OAS to be at the vanguard in fortifying collective action to deal with the challenges of globalization and to make the organization more inclusive toward the hemisphere's marginalized citizens.

He will work tirelessly toward the integration of the Americas.

Reshuffling the electoral cards
The Economist
May 19th.

A surprise presidential candidate may signal a new era in Chilean politics

UNTIL last week, Chile's opposition parties were pretty much resigned to losing the next presidential election, due in December, and seeing the centre-left government coalition take a fourth term in office. But now, following a rebellion in the National Renewal (RN), the smaller of the two main opposition parties, the race has been thrown wide open.

Divisions within the opposition alliance—an uneasy marriage between the RN and the more right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI)—are nothing new. The RN has long been angered by the perceived steamrolling tactics of its more disciplined and dogmatic ally. It is also frustrated by the lacklustre performance of Joaquín Lavín, hitherto the opposition's presumed joint presidential candidate, who almost defeated President Ricardo Lagos in 2000, but has since lost much of his popular appeal.

The RN nevertheless surprised everyone when, at a meeting on May 14th called to endorse the UDI's Mr Lavín, it voted overwhelmingly to proclaim one of its own former leaders, Sebastián Piñera, as its presidential nominee.

A successful businessman worth an estimated $1.3 billion, Mr Piñera has the advantage of being able to finance his own campaign. His opposition to General Augusto Pinochet in the late 1980s also makes him more acceptable to centrist voters, whereas the UDI remains tainted by its association with the former dictator.

Could Mr Piñera win? His aides predict that in the first round of voting he will come second to Michelle Bachelet, the main government contender, forcing a run-off which he could win by picking up Mr Lavín's votes and those of centrist voters nervous about Ms Bachelet's socialism. But could he rival her charisma?

Whatever the outcome, Mr Piñera's candidacy signals a welcome end to the division of Chile's political parties along the fault line of those who opposed or supported the Pinochet dictatorship.

Park at world's southern tip recovers from fire
Katie Burford, The Boston Globe
May 17th

TORRES DEL PAINE, Chile (Reuters) - It took a month and 800 firefighters to put out an immense wildfire earlier this year in remote southern Chile's Torres del Paine national park, world renowned for its awe-inspiring granite spires and glaciers.

Now, near the southern tip of the world where the growing season is compressed into a few months, authorities have begun the long process of helping nature heal from the park's worst fire in decades, started when a Czech tourist's camp burner blew over.
Tourism officials, meanwhile, are assuring nervous tour operators from France to Japan that Chile's most famous park is still a rugged backpackers' paradise. Tourism pumps an estimated $75 million a year into Chile's extreme south.
"Something that man caused, man can also fix," said Marco Cordero, regional director for Conaf, Chile's forest service.

Immediate concerns are that erosion could alter the park's brilliant turquoise lakes, invasive plant species could gain a foothold or endangered wildlife could be forced outside the park's protective boundaries to forage for food.

As a token of goodwill, the Czech government contributed about $185,500 toward the recovery, which is expected to cost $7 million.

Preserving this pristine hinterland in the heart of Patagonia, a loosely defined region that encompasses southernmost Chile and Argentina, is about more than aesthetics.
"Tourism for the Magellan region is one of the main sources of revenue," said Miguel Angel, regional director for Chile's Sernatur tourism department.

Torres del Paine is Chilean Patagonia's headline attraction, but the Straits of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn and Antarctica are other popular destinations.

Most that journey to this far-flung, glacier-encrusted region expect to encounter its legendary wind. It forces trees to grow sideways and has merited a mention by every prominent chronicler to pass through in the last 500 years.

The wind frustrated the efforts of firefighters gathered from all over Chile and Argentina to put down the fast-moving blaze, which seemed to send fingers out in all directions.
Authorities point out that only a fraction of the park burned -- 45 square miles of 935 square miles total -- and this was more than a mile from the park's signature spires, which jut from plains in a cluster like a prairie Atlantis.

Still the damage is startling. Travelers on the park's easternmost road drop over a hill to find themselves suddenly surrounded by a barren moonscape. In sections, charred ground stretches for as far as the eye can see.

The fire, which began on Feb. 17, hit at the peak of the park's four-month tourist season, which starts in December, the middle of the southern-hemisphere summer.
Tourism officials say they have not seen a unusual dip in visitors, which number about 100,000 a year from 80 different countries. As a precaution, they put the word out at travel fairs around the globe that Torres del Paine is still very much worth the trip.

ABOUNDS WITH WILDLIFE
Native people believed the peaks, which soar as high as 10,000 feet (3,050 m), were warriors turned to stone by an evil spirit. Starting in the early 1900s the surrounding land, cursed by many a settler as worthless, was used for ranching, until 1959 when it was declared a national park. Tourism started to hit its stride in the '90s.
Outside Patagonia's protected areas large sheep farms still operate and overgrazing of the pampa is a major concern of environmental groups. The wildfire that devastated Torres del Paine also burned 15 square miles of adjacent private ranchland.
The park abounds with wildlife -- ostrich-like nandu, Andean condors, llama-like guanaco, Austral parakeets, flamingos, puma and the endangered huemul, a member of the deer family. The only known fatalities of the fire were a handful of guanaco.
The first stage of the 12-year fire recovery plan involves filling in trenches, dug as a barriers to contain the fire; building dikes to prevent erosion; and collecting seeds to use for reseeding next season. The government is compensating ranchers whose land is being grazed by displaced wildlife.

SYMBOLIC PARK
Although Czech tourist Jiri Smitak has said he deeply regrets the fire, many Chileans were incensed that he only received a $200 fine. Lawmakers called for tougher penalties and the State Defense Council filed a suit against Smitak seeking damages.
National pride in the park runs deep but since it is not connected to the rest of Chile by road, the park is expensive to reach and only about a third of Torres del Paine visitors are Chilean. Most come from the United States or European countries. Visitors fly in to an airport about a four-hour drive south of the park.
Cordero said various organizations from around the globe have offered to help with funds or expertise. "For the whole world, Torres del Paine park is something of an emblem," he said.

Peru's collective air rage
Financial Times, Observer section
May 16th

Peruvians love to tell visitors what's wrong with their country. Of course, if others find fault, it's a different story - particularly if they come from Chile, Peru's rival to the south.

So when it emerged last month that Lan, Chile's biggest airline, had shown an in-flight video depicting Lima as a squalid and dirty city with vagrants urinating in rubbish-strewn streets, the capital's residents were somewhat chagrined.

Lan claimed it had bought the video - meant to highlight "adventure" tourism - sight unseen from a company in California.

With an eye on next April's elections, Peruvian politicians lined up to express their indignation. Congress even hauled in Emilio Rodriguez Larraín, president of Lan's Peruvian subsidiary, to explain himself.

Lan apologised in full-page ads in Peruvian newspapers and sacked those responsible, but Ignacio Walker, Chile's foreign minister, aggravated tensions by saying Peru was whipping up a storm in a teacup.

Peru has called off trade talks with Chile, and a Congressional committee proposes to exclude Chile from investing in ports and airports. Carlos Ferrero, Peru's prime minister, has vowed to seek damages from Lan in court.

Lan is promising to make amends by making a new film that shows the colonial "City of Kings" in all its splendour. Observer suggests that this time any shots of tramps relieving themselves be edited out.

Jailed Leader of Police Unit Lays Blame on Pinochet
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times
May 16th

SANTIAGO, Chile, May 14 (AP) - The commander of the secret police under Gen. Augusto Pinochet said in a court document that General Pinochet was responsible for abuses committed by the police, his lawyer said Friday.

The retired commander, Gen. Manuel Contreras, also submitted a document to the Supreme Court discussing the fate of more than 500 dissidents who disappeared after being arrested by his force, said Juan Carlos Manns, General Contreras's lawyer. The report confirmed that many of the victims were thrown into the sea after being killed - a disclosure made last year by a presidential investigative commission.

Mr. Manns said his imprisoned client put the responsibility for the abuses on General Pinochet and the other military commanders. In the document, General Contreras said he was writing to counter "the permanent, ominous silence maintained by my superior," referring to General Pinochet.

The government said it would be up to the courts to determine the accuracy of the information.

General Contreras, 75, commanded the secret service known as Dina, which is blamed for the worst human rights abuses during the first years of General Pinochet's dictatorship. He is serving a 15-year prison term for the assassination of a dissident. Some other officers in the service are also serving prison terms.

General Pinochet, who took power in a violent coup on Sept. 11, 1973, and ruled until 1990, has been indicted twice, but the trials were stopped by the courts because of his health.

General Contreras, his law