La Portada / Juan Lopez

Hewn by seawater out of striped sandstone, La Portada is the symbol of Antofagasta. It rises out of the sea a few kilometers north of the city. My grandparents and their generation had beach parties there. According to my grandmother at least one husband caught his wife their with another man, killed the man and got away with it. My mom went there too, here is a picture of her on the beach.

My Mom on the beach in '68 with cousins.

In 1983, I went down to that beach and tried to go out to the portada itself. My mom stopped me. I regret it because now it is under the authority of Ministry of Agriculture. They closed the beach to visitors in 2003 because the numbers of visitors were eroding the sandstone and threatening the site.

However, the ministry did build a lovely restaurant there.

La Portada, lover's land turned tourist trap

Some intrepid folk have built a shack here. No electricity, no running water, but an incredible view to wake up to in the morning.

Love Shack

Speaking of intrepid folk, my Aunt Mabel and I decided to drive up the road to see the town of Juan Lopez. In the back seat, my less intrepid Aunt Frances pleaded to God for safe passage, while my cousin rolled her eyes. Apparently the Chilean Ministry of Public Works (MOP) needed practice building winding roads through hills because the drive involved going up and down big hills with tight curves on a very modern road.

When my aunts were little girls (like the 60s) my whole family would drive up the coast to Juan Lopez and have a picnic on the beach, it was apparently a beach named after some guy called Juan Lopez. It has built up into an idyllic little hamlet by the sea.

Juan Lopez

The big reward though was on the way back, driving down the hills as the rapidly setting sun lit up the entire landscape making that which up close look like so much dirt into a scintillating spectrum of stripes and glitter.

Antofagasta

As the plane finally descended through the low stratus clouds, I looked out the window for signs of the ground, lights, the usual signs of life one see when descending at night over a metropolis. There was nothing. I couldn't even tell we were over water or land. Maybe I imagined it, but somehow I got the sense that we were over land and that it was brown. My beliefs were confirmed a minute later by our landing on a tarmac that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Cerro Moreno (Brown Hill) is a very small airport, back in the thirties this airport supported Panagra flights from New York to Buenos Aires. Back then people would get off the plane at night, and get set up at a house the airline had in town. My Grandfather managed Panagra's operations at the airport and in town. He had drivers, and a master chef, and was himself concierge, host and gentleman. But now this airport only supports domestic flights on Chilean airlines, and hospitality comes in the form of my Aunt greeting me once I found my bags.



This is the Lan Chile plane that made my Sky Airlines plane late. They use the same gate in Santiago, and Lan simply couldn't get their act together tonight. While we are beating up on Lan, let me tell you that besides costing more they gave my cousin a cold sandwich, while I got a hot meal on Sky. The flight attendants on both could stand to be friendlier.

The Atacama Desert surrounds the town, while being driven to the Capetanupulos homestead by my Aunt Mabel from Cerro Moreno, I confirmed that even at night the ground looked brown. I mean you could tell it was brown even though there was little light, it was like the platonic form of brown.

Maybe I'm not getting this across. Imagine a beach with brown sand. OK, now imagine a blue-green pacific next to it on one side, now give yourself a few hundred yards of dirt and then lay down gigantic brown hills. That is the outskirts of Antofagasta. See?



There are "colonies" of people here from England, Greece, Croatia, China and of course Spain. My ancestry is in this place is Greek-Mestizo. My great-grandfather, Juan (his name was Ivan in Greece) came to Antofagasta from a formerly Greek (now Turkish) island called Tenedos in 1910. My great-grandmother Rosa Contreras was born up the coast in Tocapilla, one of eight children. My mother's parents met here. This place, where I have been so few times in my life, has a big impact on who I am.

Antofagasta is a mining town currently in yet another boom cycle* and like the rest of Chile, globalization has cropped up here. The town, now 300,000 strong has doubled in population in the past two years. It is a hodgepodge of dilapidated two story buildings, new shopping malls and hi-rises. In addition to boasting two (count em!), two McDonalds, cheap internet (C$400/hour or about US$.80) can be had in shops around the town. I was too busy at the time shopping for a metal detector to post entries from there. Apparently none of the electronics stores carry metal detectors. After a couple of hours of searching, I instead tried a hardware store on a whim (La Ferreteria Industrial at Maipu 549) and bought the only detector they had for about fifty bucks.

If hi-rise apartments and metal detectors weren't signs enough, a visit to the local supermarkets clinched it. The last time I was in Antofagasta was 1983. Besides the cathedral being the tallest building in town there weren't any supermarkets. In those days you went to the local store for sundries (fruiteria or bottleria), and then the butcher (carneceria) if you wanted meat and so on. The Lider and Jumbo both strategically adjacent to the costanera have full service you would expect in the states, American brands, and intense competition for shoppers. Each one has different things going for it. The Lider is more "hip" and is resident in a mall built on the foundation of the defunct local brewery (it has a three story masonry facade of the old building in front of the modern lines of the mall). In it there is a multiplex and dozens of stores. Meanwhile at the Jumbo is more upscale and has easy access to Blockbuster, Domino's and two pharmacies. With Domino's, Blockbuster and cheap soda at ready access is it any wonder the Chileans are gaining weight?

To be fair I don't think this is all bad. To the north and south of town suburbs with 4 and 5 bedrooms are springing up like the desert flowers. The middle class in Antofagasta is obviously expanding. Even so signs of wage disparity are still evident. Bright murals found all over the town scream out for social justice.



This is actually not the best one, which I found when I didn't have my camera and couldn't find again, but it was moving, I was a socialist for a second ;).

My worry is that the fortunes of the town float on a river of copper. If that river dries up the fragile monolithic economy that props up this little haven of globalization could falter and shrivel like a desert flower.

* - first silver, then guano, then saltpeter, now copper

Leaving for Antofagasta

I will be going to Antofagasta today, I don't know if I will be able to get on the internet from there, but I will try. Meanwhile I will leave you with a postcard of the view outside the window of my hotel room in Santiago.

The Penguin Revolution will be televised.

The Penguin Revolution will be televised.
Walking home from the first day of class Steve and I stopped to take some pictures along the street (Ejército Libertador). Diego Portales, our law school and a bunch of other univerisities reside on this street.

There is a Student Strike going on here. Not college students - secondary students, hence penguins because of the black smocks and white shirts some of the girls wear to school. As far as I understand it (I barely understand it) the students are demanding massive reforms of the 'Ley organica constitucional e Enseñanza’ (LOCE).

After class we were walking to the metro down the Ejército Libertador in front of the Universidad de Santo Tomas (down the street from our school) where a couple of hundred students were in the street blocking traffic and blaring loud latin rap from inside the building. We noticed up ahead a huge swarm of students running down the street away from a water cannon mounted on a zorrico (green armored box).

Now the director of our program warned us of the potential for violence. So we were well prepared to do precisely what she said... what was it... oh yeah, she said to walk calmly on to a side street. Well, we were mid-block and the water cannon was advancing pretty fast. So we ditched the advice and ran across the street and up the stairs into the building.

The first floor of this building conveniently has a wall of glass facing conveniently out onto Ejército Libertador. As the water cannon and Carabineros stormed down the street spraying dozens of students (including several in our party). While squeezed in among the students in the lobby, there was screaming and cat calls as the Carabineros continued down the street arresting people as they went.

The big video

The Carabineros are the police in Chile, they look like regular army, they act like regular army, but they aren't. They are uncorruptible and generally but not always unfriendly in my experience. When they are in riot gear though I am pretty sure they don't want a hug.

Once they past we waited a few minutes and started moving down the street. Somehow our sense of adventure got the better of us and we took pictures of each other in front of the grafitti and I took more video of the demonstration that followed us to the metro. As the Chilean students broke into the closed shops we left on the Metro.



Demonstrators



Steve, International Journalist



Umm...victory


I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse.

Apparently several WCL students were sprayed full force by the cannon, and the liquid turns out to be water mixed with tear gas. A couple of our male students were rescued by some angels of mercy in the form of two female Chilean medical students, if any of you know their phone numbers please let us know.

The Chilean students claim they have a force of a million students on strike in a country of fifteen million. When I hear that I am reminded of the literal translation of the school motto for La Universidad Santo Tomas - "Light in Truth".

****

So later we got off the metro at Las Leones and were looking for Casa Musa, a place where they purportedly sell adapters for Chilean electrical outlets. Anyway we started asking around for directions and ran into this film crew.



Apparently we could be on Chilean television...