Student Protests For A New Society In Chile
Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines visits Chile to look at the student uprisings that have been going on for months. Students have taken over and occupied schools and universities — in opposition to the prohibitively expensive, poor-quality education system and politicians who say that their main priority is to provide “certainty for investors”. Does Chile’s extremely privatized, class-segregated education system provide a warning of where the United States could be headed?
Man Arrested For Stealing Chile’s Jorge Montt Glacier
A fascinating environmental crime. A man stole a five-ton portion of the fast-vanishing glacier, a national monument — the ice was to be used to create the most rarified of illegal cocktails — a drink which will be impossible post climate-change. Via the Guardian:
Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.
Local media reported that last Friday police intercepted a refrigerated truck with an estimated £3,900 worth of illicit ice allegedly bound for whiskies, rums and cocktails in the capital Santiago. Authorities have accused the driver of theft and are considering adding violation of national monuments to the charge sheet.
Chilean Students Demand Complete Transformation of Education System
Photo: Diego Grez (CC)
Who said that massive/social cultural revolutions were a thing of the ’60s? Via the Atlantic:
For the past several months, students, teachers, and their supporters in Chile have been staging chaotic demonstrations against their government.
Their goal is to transform the country’s education system. In particular, they’re seeking a referendum to significantly increase the funding and quality of public schools. Students have engaged in multiple forms of protest, from hunger strikes and sit-ins to marches and pillow fights. Smaller groups of protesters have engaged riot police directly, hurling stones and firebombs.
Chilean authorities have responded by banning demonstrations, pushing protesters back with water cannons, and offering education proposals that have been rejected. Students in the tens of thousands — with popular backing across Chile — continue to march without official permission, and public sentiment against president Sebastian Piñera continues to grow.
Collected here are some scenes from the streets of Chile over…
Salfate: Having Fun With Conspiracy Theories
One of the problems with American conspiracy theorists is that they’re mostly so damned serious that they’re just not as much fun to watch as their establisment counterparts (think Fox News), unless you find humor in an Alex Jones rant. Not so in Chile, where the TV host Salfate brings a smile to some serious questions about what’s going on in the world. Last week he covered the recent Bilderberg meeting in Switzerland, giving Jones a major shout out:
Trapped Chilean Miners Smoked Pot Underground Sent in Family Letters
Good to have family, but man, it had to come from family letters? Josh Visser writes on CTV Edmonton:
33 Men details the miner’s initial 17 days in excruciating detail — the mold that was growing on their skin in 35 degrees Celsius heat, the 25-calorie spoonfuls of tuna every two days and how close they were to death when the first drill reached them.
But after rescue workers made contact with the miners and were able to send items down the shaft, the miners’ dark thoughts turned to more base desires to help pass the time.
Family members smuggled pot to the miners in their letters, and small groups of the miners would sneak off to smoke it, leaving others out of the loop.
They “never even offered me one,” miner Samuel Avalos is quoted.
The drugs, instead of promoting camaraderie, were divisive to group morale, officials thought, and they considering using drug sniffing dogs…
33 Chilean Women Lock Themselves In 9,000 ft Deep Mine
A group of Chilean men were just recently pulled out of a mine creating quite a media parade. Now a group of Chilean women have willingly entered a mine in protest. If a group of men can gain global attention from being in a mine, so can women. At least, that’s the approach. From BBC News:
Thirty-three women in Chile have shut themselves in a mine after a government jobs programme that helped the victims of last February’s earthquake ended.
The women, in an echo of the story of the 33 trapped and then rescued miners, went into a former coal mine 500km (300 miles) south of Santiago.
“We’ve done many things to be taken into account but the government hasn’t listened to us,” a spokeswoman said.
The rescue of the miners made headlines around the world.
The women were part of an emergency works programme generating jobs at one point for some 12,000 people…
Chilean Miners Rescue Saga Exposed as Masonic Mega-Ritual
Vigilant Citizen combs popular culture for hidden esoteric meaning:
The rescue of the 33 unfortunate Chilean miners has definitely turned into an international media event. All aspects of the rescue have been carefully staged to make the entire thing a spectacular show inspiring emotions, admiration and national pride. For those knowledgeable of Masonic and occult symbolism, it is hard not to ponder on the numerological and symbolic facts of the event.
To the initiated, the deep significance of 33 miners being rescued in 33 days could not be more obvious. Can you guess how many characters were used in the first note sent by the miners?
Vigilant Citizen has also published dangerous exposés of the Illuminati infiltration of K-Pop, the occult symbolism of Kanye West’s Power, and an esoteric interpretation of Pinocchio.
It’s Dark As A Dungeon Deep Down In The Mine
Report from the Epicenter of Fraudclosures: Can There be A Rescue of US Workers Facing Foreclosure & Unemployment?
WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA: In all of the economic issues we are dealing with, there is always a “back story, a deeper context” that is usually missing, “disappeared” like those Allende supporters in Chile in the 1970s who wanted to empower workers, not just rescue them when they get buried in a deep hole.
Most deeper issues go uncovered. Luis Campos, Director of the School of Anthropology at Chile’s Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, points out, “more buried than the miners themselves, the demands and the rights of the indigenous population continue to be flouted and unrecognized in our country.”
Many unsafe mines worldwide are still at risk from China to Zambia.
Who woulda thunk—certainly not the 1300 “journalists” on the scene–that this mine disaster had its origins in the era when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger…
The 33 (Formerly) Trapped Chilean Miners Have A Contract to Stop Any Individual From Profiting at the Expense of the Group
Interesting way to deal with a horrible situation that these fellas found themselves into. Glad to see the rescue operation is going well, Godspeed. Fiona Govan writes in the Telegraph:
The 33 trapped Chilean miners have moved to stop any individual from profiting at the expense of the group, drawing up a legal contract to share the proceeds from the story of their ordeal.
The men have called in a lawyer to draw up a contract ensuring they will equally profit from the lucrative media deals they expect to secure for sharing the story of their two month survival in the hope that they never have to work again.
The group have already rejected requests for interviews and have instead made plans to jointly write a book about the days spent trapped below the Atacama Desert following the mine collapse on August 5.
The details of the discussions between the men were disclosed in…
Chilean Miners Video Shows Optimism and Gratitude
Thirty-three Chilean miners have sent a video to their loved ones showing high spirits after being located. They have been trapped since the cave-in on August 5, but may have to wait another three months before seeing daylight. Via ITN News:
Paul Schaefer, Nazi Preacher Who Led Torture Cult In Chile, Dies
Dead at 89, Paul Schaefer sounds like a monster out of a horror movie, but he was terrifyingly real. Strangest detail: “He had a glass eye, having accidentally gouged out his right eye while trying to untie a shoelace knot with a fork.” The Washington Post reports:
Paul Schaefer, 89, a German-born evangelical preacher who was convicted of sexually abusing 25 children while leading one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semitic and apocalyptic sects, died April 24 of a heart ailment at a prison hospital in Chile.
His enclave in southern Chile, Colonia Dignidad…doubled during the 1970s and ’80s as a detention and torture center for opponents of right-wing dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
At the time of his death, Mr. Schaefer was still under investigation in the 1985 disappearance of mathematician Boris Weisfeiler, an American citizen who went missing while hiking near Colonia Dignidad.
Mr. Schaefer turned to preaching after serving in the German military…
Declassified Cable Reveals Kissinger Blocked US Protest on Condor Assassinations
From TPR:
A controversy has simmered for some years over the role of the United States, and particularly of its then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in the actions surrounding Operation Condor. Condor was an assassination and torture plan implemented by a number of South American countries, braintrusted by Pinochet’s Chile.
A new FOIA release, courtesy of the National Security Archive, shows that only five days before former high-ranking Allende official, Orlando Letelier, and his U.S. assistant, Ronnie Moffit, were assassinated by Chile’s notorious DINA secret service in Washington, DC, a September 16, 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger told his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor. The cable was followed four days later by instructions from Shlaudeman to numerous South American U.S. embassies to forego any protests regarding Condor policy, offering…
Did Aliens From Friendship Island Warn Of The Chile Earthquake?
In January I visited Chile, luckily for me before the earthquakes. While there I was told a story about Friendship Island, a mythical island inhabited by strange beings off the southern coast of Chile (learn more here). Although famous amongst Chilean conspiracy buffs and ufologists, it is seldom discussed outside the region. I would have left it as an amusing piece of local lore, but recently the leading Chilean TV conspiracy theorist, Salfate, went on air in December 2009 claiming that beings from Friendship Island had told him there would be many earthquakes and tsunamis in 2010…
OK, it’s totally nutty stuff, but the natural disasters are hitting as predicted. What does anyone know about Salfate – is he credible or a crank?
Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
Alex Morales writes on Bloomberg:
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
The changes can be modeled, though they’re difficult to physically detect given their small size, Gross said. Some changes may be more obvious, and islands may…
Massive Earthquake In Chile Followed By Tsunami
Robin Henry reports for the Times:
A massive earthquake on the coast of Chile has killed at least 76 people, flattening buildings and triggering a tsunami.
The 8.8-magnitude quake, the country’s largest in 25 years, shook the capital Santiago for a minute and half at 3:34am (0634 GMT) today.
A tsunami warning has been extended across all Pacific islands and the Pacific rim, including most of Central and South America and as far as Australia and Antarctica.
The wave has already caused serious damage to the sparsely populated Juan Fernandez islands, off the Santiago coast, local radio reported. The quake hit near the town of Maule, 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles underground.
The epicentre was just 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live along the Bio Bio river. In Santiago buildings collapsed and phone lines and electricity were brought down, but the full…
Court Finds Former Chilean President was Poisoned
From The Syndey Morning Herald:
SANTIAGO: A judge has ruled that the former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva was assassinated nearly 30 years ago and the murder covered up by people linked to the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Frei, who preceded Salvador Allende as Chile’s president and later became a leading critic of the military dictatorship, died in 1982. An autopsy report blamed septic shock after stomach hernia surgery, but a new autopsy made public this year by University of Chile pathologists identified two chemicals in his body that attack the digestive system. One of them is used in mustard gas and the other is found in rat poison.
”He was injected with toxic substances, which produced other complications that deteriorated his immune system,” Judge Alejandro Madrid said.
”That was the cause of death.”
At the time of his death, Frei, 71, was investigating human rights violations by the dictatorship of Pinochet, who toppled Allende…
