Santiago Chile Quotes

In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.

«No soy un nacionalista exacerbado, sin embargo siento un amor auténtico por mi país. Chile, Chile. ¿Cómo has podido cambiar tanto?, le decía a veces, asomado a mi ventana abierta, mirando el reverbero de Santiago en la lejanía. ¿Qué te han hecho? ¿Se han vuelto locos los chilenos? ¿Quién tiene la culpa? Y otras veces, mientras caminaba por los pasillos del colegio o por los pasillos del periódico, le decía: ¿Hasta cuándo piensas seguir así, Chile? ¿Es que te vas a convertir en otra cosa? ¿En un monstruo que ya nadie reconocerá?».

I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán and then to Santiago, it sped off without warning, as if the somewhat ominous solitude of the place had unleashed atavistic fears in the driver's mind. For a moment I too was afraid. I must have been a sorry sight standing there helplessly with my suitcase from the seminary, holding a copy of Farewell's Anthology in one hand. Some birds flew out from behind a clump of trees. They seemed to be screaming the name of that forsaken village, Querquén, but they also seemed to be enquiring who: quién, quién, quién. I said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our Lady, do not abandon your servant, I murmured, while the black birds, about twenty-five centimetres in length, cried quién, quién, quién. Our Lady of Lourdes, do not abandon your poor priest, I murmured, while other birds, about ten centimetres long, brown in colour, or brownish, rather, with white breasts, called out, but not as loudly, quién, quién, quién, Our Lady of Suffering, Our Lady of Insight, Our Lady of Poetry, do not leave your devoted subject at the mercy of the elements, I murmured, while several tiny birds, magenta, black, fuchsia, yellow and blue in colour, wailed quién, quién, quién, at which point a cold wind sprang up suddenly, chilling me to the bone.

I was fifteen when I returned to Santiago, disoriented from having lived several years outside the country and from having lost my ties with my old friends and my cousins.

Inés Suárez (1507-1580), española, nacida en Plasencia, viajó al Nuevo Mundo en 1537 y participó en la conquista de Chile y la fundación de la ciudad de Santiago. Tuvo gran influencia política y poder económico. Las hazañas de Inés Suárez, mencionadas por los cronistas de su época, fueron casi olvidadas por los historiadores durante más de cuatrocientos años.

El imperio incaico quedó chico para contenerlos a ambos. Pizarro, convertido en marqués gobernador y caballero de la Orden de Santiago, se quedó en el Perú, secundado por sus temibles hermanos, mientras Almagro se dirigía, en 1535, con un ejército de quinientos castellanos, diez mil indios yanaconas y el título de adelantado, a Chile, la región aún inexplorada, cuyo nombre, en lengua aymara, quiere decir «donde acaba la tierra».

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Santiago de Chile sit on the ring of fire. Tehran, far away from the ring still suffers the same fate. Earthquake-prone, the city has learned to adapt. The city, stacked with apartments on top of one another, looks like a box of Lego. Tight alleyways, covered with buildings, stretch all the way to the foot of the mountains. The folks in Tehran don’t want to even imagine what chaos will ensue if a major earthquake strikes. The most frightening phenomenon though isn’t the rubble and building blocks crumbling down. None of that scares the people. What concerns them is if the mother of all earthquakes pays a visit, the biggest threat will be rats. Tehran’s underground has a burgeoning “ratopolis.” To every living human being in the city, there are three rats to match every living soul. And if the city collapses, three rats are enough to ravage through human flesh in a matter of days. So the urban myth goes. Even if bodies can be rescued from the rubble there’ll likely be carcasses left behind.

Afghanistan Kabul Argentina Buenos Aires Australia Canberra Austria Vienna Bangladesh Dhaka Belgium Brussels Bhutan Thimphu Brazil Brasilia Bulgaria Sofia Canada Ottawa Chile Santiago

¡Cuántas Madame Bovary, como en el siglo XIX, hay ahora en Santiago de Chile de dos mil y tantos!

For almost three decades, September 11 marked a day of infamy for Chileans, Latin Americans, and the world community—a day when Chilean air force jets attacked La Moneda palace in Santiago as the prelude to the vicious coup that brought Pinochet to power. In the aftermath of “9/11,” 2001, it is more likely to be remembered for the shocking terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With that horror, the United States and Chile now share “that dreadful date,” as writer Ariel Dorfman has eloquently described it, “again a Tuesday, once again an 11th of September filled with death.

Willibald Mattern, a German emigre in Santiago de Chile, had spun a powerful tale of Nazi resurgence. His book, UFOs: Unbekanntes Flugobjekt? Letzte Geheimwaffe des Dritten Reiches (UFOs: Unidentified flying object? Last secret weapon of the Third Reich) (1974), described how thousands of Nazi UFOs will one day fly forth from the South Pole to restore German world power against a scenario of increasing racial chaos and economic catastrophe in a final act of deliverance.

As he bit into the oily green flesh, Fairchild couldn't have known he was holding in his hands the future crop of the American Southwest. But he had a hunch. It was a black-skinned fruit, a variety of alligator pear, or as the Aztecs called it, "avocado," a derivative of their word for testicle. It grew in pairs, and had an oblong, bulbous shape. The fruit had the consistency of butter and was a little stringy. But unlike the other avocados he had tasted farther north, in Jamaica and Venezuela, this one had remarkable consistency. Every fruit on the tree was the same size and ripened at the same pace, rare qualities for anything that grew in the consistent warmth of the subtropics. In Santiago, where a boat had deposited Fairchild and Lathrop, the avocado had an even greater quality. Fairchild listened intently as someone explained that the fruit could withstand a mild frost as low as twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Such a climatic range suggested a perfect crop for America. From central Mexico, the worldwide home of the first avocados, centuries of settlers had carried the fruit south to Chile. David Fairchild mused about taking it the other way, back north. "A valuable find for California," he wrote. "This is a black-fruited, hardy variety." Lathrop tagged along on the daytime expedition when Fairchild tasted that avocado. He agreed that a fruit so hardy, so versatile, would perfectly answer farmers' pleas for novel but undemanding crops, ones that almost grew themselves, provided the right conditions. Fairchild didn't know the chemical properties of the avocado's fatty flesh, or that a hundred years in the future it would, like quinoa, find esteem, owing to its combination of fat and vitamins. But he could tell that such a curious fruit, unlike any other, must have an equally curious evolutionary history. No earthly mammal could digest a seed as big as the avocado's, and certainly not anything that roamed wild through South America.

AS THE TOUR PROGRESSED, I GOT TO KNOW SOME OF MICHAEL’S other friends and associates. In Santiago, Chile, Michael’s dermatologist paid him a visit. Michael had a skin disease called vitiligo. He had told me about it earlier that year, at Neverland, explaining that it caused patches of his skin to lose their pigmentation. He showed me some pictures of people who had advanced cases of it; those whose skin color was dark had dramatic and disfiguring patches of white all over their bodies. Michael told me how much he hated the disease, but how fortunate he felt to be able to afford the treatment, which involved lightening the rest of his skin to even out the color.

He thought about the telepathic Mapuches or Araucanians. He remembered a very short book, scarcely one hundred pages long, by a certain Lonko Kilapán, published in Santiago de Chile in 1978,

nos fuimos con la promesa de que íbamos a volver. Aunque no lo supiéramos, diez años después, en 2020, íbamos a retornar a Santiago de Chile y a nuestra querida U para una etapa más, la última como jugador profesional y ya con la familia ampliada por la llegada de Emma Sofía, nuestra hija menor. Con Valentín jugando en las inferiores del club y con Santino, el de los milagros, formando parte de la escuela de fútbol inclusiva de la Universidad de Chile.

En octubre de 1972 vino el ajuste final. Hoy se sabe que la CIA pagó dos mil dólares semanales a cada camionero que se sumara al paro que estrangularía a Santiago. La operación fue gigantesca y exitosa: de los cincuenta mil camiones que abastecían

En enero de 2008 tuve ocasión de visitar Santiago, y pude observar a los agentes de Bolsa en el Banco de Chile invirtiendo activamente las aportaciones de pensiones de los trabajadores chilenos en su propio mercado de valores. Los resultados han sido impresionantes. La tasa de rendimiento anual de las Cuentas Personales de Jubilación ha superado el 10 por ciento, lo que refleja el creciente rendimiento del mercado de valores chileno, que se había multiplicado por un factor de 18 desde 1987.

Y todo esto se da en Santiago tal vez por ser el símbolo de todos los problemas de Chile, de esta estrecha faja entre mar y montaña, que tiene 3.500 kilómetros de largo, que comienza en el norte con el desierto y termina en el sur con los hielos del polo, con el océano Pacífico al oeste y la Cordillera de los Andes al este, que la separan, al igual que el polo y el desierto, del resto del mundo, al que anhela unirse, no sólo en el concierto deportivo sino también en la búsqueda de la verdad y de la justicia, que no es la que los comunistas locales auspician, pero tampoco la que trata de darle la actual clase dirigente.

Una bomba nuclear de las más poderosas puede producir un temblor en Santiago y destruir un tercio de la ciudad, pero este evento zamarreó toda la geografía desde Talca hasta Aysén durante diez minutos eternos. El

estadounidense, integrada por oficiales y personal del ejército de tierra, que se radicaron en el séptimo piso del Ministerio de Defensa (frente al palacio de La Moneda), la armada (en Valparaíso) y la aviación (en la base aérea de El Bosque, en Santiago).46 La «ayuda» militar estadounidense a Chile entre 1953 y 1974 ascendió a 192,9 millones de dólares; de ellos, treinta y tres millones fueron entregados durante los años 19701973. Otro de los pilares de esta subordinación serían los programas de entrenamiento: entre 1950 y 1973, 5.679 oficiales de las tres ramas de las Fuerzas Armadas chilenas recibieron adiestramiento en bases militares estadounidenses,47 lo que tuvo una honda repercusión y produjo cambios

huella de su labor de un cuarto de siglo como senador, hasta 1970, también quedaría en la creación de la Sociedad Proayuda al Niño Lisiado (hoy Fundación Teletón) y de la Sociedad Protectora de la Infancia, en la construcción del edificio de la Asistencia Pública en Santiago y de la Escuela de Salubridad de la Universidad de Chile (actual Escuela de Salud Pública), en la concesión

When, in 1913, Theodore Roosevelt paid a visit to Santiago and welcomed Chile as a partner in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, a Chilean newspaper recorded its impressions of the former president. Roosevelt, it said, “is a typical product of United States civilization: vigorous, impulsive, not heedful of the consequences of his actions, strongly susceptible to error, but at the same time possessed of the noblest of humanitarian sentiments.

More than half of the Christian Democrats’ funds came from the United States. According to the Church report, the CIA, besides supporting the Christian Democrats, “mounted a massive anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers and wall painting.” In the first week of the CIA’s efforts, in June 1964, the agency produced 20 radio spots a day in Santiago and 12-minute news reports broadcast five times a day on three different Santiago stations. Activities in the provinces were even more extensive. To those inclined to react with indignation or outrage at Washington’s interventions, it is important to point out that Chile was hardly virgin territory whose purity was violated only by the intrusive, predatory United States. The Soviet Union and Cuba were doing their utmost to back Allende. If virtue was defined by a lack of foreign intervention, then nobody, inside Chile or out, could be said to be clothed in virtue. But even if critics are reluctant to celebrate it, the American covert effort can be seen as one of the great foreign policy success stories of the 1960s: Frei won the election with 56 percent of the vote compared to 39 percent for Allende. Afterward, Frei thanked the Americans for their help, though almost no one, including Frei himself, knew just how extensive that help was. The CIA, which did know, congratulated itself as one of the “indispensable ingredients in Frei’s success.

1984), lanzacohetes múltiples de Brasil (junio 1984), bombas de racimo de 250 kilos de Chile (enviadas desde Santiago a bordo de 747 de las líneas iraquíes en 1984).

Se encuentran ahora dos escritores, dos grandes escritores; uno de éllos, poeta. Ambos piensan en un único ideal céntrico: América; en eso coinciden. Las publicaciones periódicas de Bello se titularon, en Londres: Biblioteca Americana, Repertorio Americano; la de Chile, El Araucano. La obra “clásica” de Rodríguez, que ya comenzó a aparecer en Arequipa, se llama Sociedades Americanas. ¡Bolívar discípulo de ambos, fue asimismo América! También coinciden en el propósito de educar. Bello da clases en el Colegio de Santiago; enseña a adolescentes en su casa; es profesor del Instituto Nacional. El poeta y maestro no ha forjado innovaciones, como el otro; éste, no se ha consagrado a investigaciones en los campos de la poesía medieval (El Cid), de la filosofía, la moral. Los dos han ahondado en los estudios idiomáticos; en el mayor, hay originalidad de fondo y forma, vueltos éstos órgano vital integrado; en el otro, una mixtura elegante de casticismo académico y fervores románticos. ¡Coinciden, además, en la pobreza! Todavía no ha llegado Sarmiento a Chile ni se ha fundado la Universidad en la cual Bello será el Rector vitalicio. La actividad literaria del poeta se concentra en El Araucano, que para ese año de 1837 ya va por el número 368.

Por lo demás, en Chile no es tan grave dar clases de poesía italiana sin saber italiano, porque Santiago está lleno de profesores de inglés que no saben inglés, y de dentistas que apenas saben extraer una muela –y de personal trainers con sobrepeso, y de profesoras de yoga que no conseguirían hacer clases sin una generosa dosis previa de ansiolíticos.

Political leaders have two options in the face of extreme polarization. First, they can take society’s divisions as a given but try to counteract them through elite-level cooperation and compromise. This is what Chilean politicians did. As we saw in Chapter 5, intense conflict between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats helped destroy Chilean democracy in 1973. A profound distrust between the two parties persisted for years afterward, trumping their shared revulsion toward Pinochet’s dictatorship. Exiled Socialist leader Ricardo Lagos, who lectured at the University of North Carolina, recalled that when former Christian Democratic president Eduardo Frei Montalva visited the university in 1975, he decided that he couldn’t bear to talk to him—so he called in sick. But eventually, politicians started talking. In 1978, Lagos returned to Chile and was invited to dinner by former Christian Democratic senator Tomás Reyes. They began to meet regularly. At around the same time, Christian Democratic leader Patricio Aylwin attended meetings of lawyers and academics from diverse partisan backgrounds, many of whom had crossed paths in courtrooms while defending political prisoners. These “Group of 24” meetings were just casual dinners in members’ homes, but according to Aylwin, they “built up trust among those of us who had been adversaries.” Eventually, the conversations bore fruit. In August 1985, the Christian Democrats, Socialists, and nineteen other parties gathered in Santiago’s elegant Spanish Circle Club and signed the National Accord for a Transition to a Full Democracy. The pact formed the basis for the Democratic Concertation coalition. The coalition developed a practice of “consensus politics,” in which key decisions were negotiated between Socialist and Christian Democratic leaders. It was successful. Not only did the Democratic Concertation topple Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite, but it won the presidency in 1989 and held it for two decades.

Por fortuna, como en Chile siempre se lee sobre corriendo lo que despacio se escribe, nadie me hizo caso, y yo para evitar nuevas tentaciones, salí diligente del buen Santiago a mi desierto Teno.