Chile round up

A view of the Andes mountains in Santiago. Photo by Samuel Silva

“In Brazil, Turkey and Chile, Protests Follow Economic Success,” is the title of an op ed piece by Moises Naim in Bloomberg Businessweek. Asking why thousands of citizens in three countries which have enjoyed strong economic growth in recent years are taking to the streets in mass protests, Naim suggests the answer may be found in a 1968 book by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.

He writes that “in societies experiencing rapid change, the public’s demand for public services grows at a faster clip than the government’s ability to satisfy it. His more general point is that institutions cannot develop at the pace required by the fast-growing expectations of a population recently empowered by prosperity, literacy, more information, and a newfound expectation—indeed hunger—to shape its own better future. In Huntington’s words, “The primary problem of politics is the lag in the development of political institutions behind social economic change.” http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-27/in-brazil-turkey-and-chile-protests-follow-economic-success

The New York Times travel section has a piece on Valparaiso, a port city once the main trading harbour for the Pacific but which declined after the opening of the Panama Canal and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site undergoing a renaissance of sorts: http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/travel/a-comeback-on-chiles-coast.html?ref=travel

The Washington Post has a blog piece on Chile’s primary elections, in which former president Michelle Bachelet had  an easy win in the Nueva Mayoria coalition, a group that now includes Chile’s Communist Party: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/06/28/in-chiles-sunday-elections-the-question-is-who-will-finish-second/

A Chilean news roundup

The Santiago Times reports that Chilean troops will continue to serve with United Nations peacekeeping forces in Bosnia for another year, joining soldiers from 23 other nations. Chile is the only Latin American country participating in this operation. Chilean troops also work with the UN in Haiti:  http://www.santiagotimes.cl/world/chile-abroad/25542-chile-to-keep-peacekeepers-in-bosnia-for-another-year.

The British travel book company, Rough Guides, has included Valparaiso on its Travel Hot List 2013, describing the Chilean port as “one of the most distinctive cities in Latin America, with colourful houses draped across a series of steep, undulating hills overlooking the Pacific. Valparaiso has an edgy bohemian atmosphere, character-filled cobbled streets, and wonderful turn-of-the-century architecture, plus some of Chile’s best restaurants and bars.” http://www.roughguides.com/website/Travel/SpotLight/ViewSpotLight.aspx?spotLightID=592

Entertainment Weekly has an interview on its blog with director Pablo Larrain about the making of the film “No,” Chile’s entry for the Oscar’s best foreign film: http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/12/19/prize-fighter-chile-oscar-foreign-film-no-director-pablo-larrain/

The British Foreign Office’s announcement that the southern part of its claimed Antarctic territory would be named Queen Elizabeth Land has raised eyebrows in Chile and Argentina, as both countries have overlapping claims to the region as well. The Guardian newspaper calls the move “a retro piece of neo-imperialism for Her Majesty” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/queen-elizabeth-land-retro-neo-imperialism   while the Telegraph notes that “Australia, Norway, France and New Zealand are the only countries that formally recognize the existence of British Antarctic Territory; Argentina and Chile clearly don’t.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/9755939/Whats-in-a-name-in-Antarctica-A-lot-….html.

MercoPress reports that Chile’s Antarctic bases expect to host some 250 scientists, including researchers from Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Germany, the United States, South Korea and Venezuela, who will work on 50 different projects over the 2012-2013 austral summer. http://en.mercopress.com/2012/12/19/chilean-antarctic-bases-expect-to-host-250-scientists-and-over-50-projects

The Neruda Case

Chilean novelist Roberto Ampuero’s thirteen books have been translated into German, French, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek and Croatian and the Spanish-speaking world has awarded him several literary prizes. But only now are English-speaking readers getting a chance to read his work.  This month Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin group, has published The Neruda Case, one of Ampuero’s six detective novels featuring Chilean sleuth Cayetano Brulé.

The Neruda Case opens in present day Valparaiso, with vivid descriptions of the port city’s “fifty teeming, anarchic hills” and its inhabitants who “risked their lives on shabby postwar trolleys and a handful of whining cable cars each time they rode to work or to homes with crumbling balconies and gardens that settled gracefully on peaks or clung precariously to hillsides.”  Cayetano Brulé watches the city, remembering his work as a much younger man, and a photograph of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda sends his mind back to 1973, before the military coup that ousted Socialist president Salvador Allende.  The poet, gravely ill with cancer,  summons Brulé and asks him to track down an old acquaintance last seen in Mexico.

Here’s an essay by Ampuero’s translator Carolina De Robertis in Publishers Weekly:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/52414-translating-a-pablo-neruda-mystery.html