Over the past few weeks, news coverage of protests throughout Latin America have focused primarily on Venezuela. However, protests against president Michelle Bachelet in Chile have begun.
As an emerging economy, Chile has greatly increased its GDP while making significant improvements in their Human Development Index, including reduced infant mortality and reduced malnutrition. Obesity and other dietary risk factors have replaced these traditional health issues and become the number one health concern in Chile. This phenomenon is known as the “nutrition transition,” and is a problem that often accompanies economic growth and trade liberalization due to shifts in the food market.
Below is an abstract for a paper presented at the 2014 Latin American Social and Public Policy Conference held at the University of Pittsburgh. Click here for a link to the PDF of the full article.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet anticipated protests this past Wednesday, May 21st, when she gave her first annual address to Congress in Valparaiso.
On September 26th, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signed into law a new environmental tax on carbon emissions, making Chile the first South American country to enact such legislation. The tax is targeting the country’s power sector, which is dominated by nearly 80 percent by fossil fuels.1 It is aimed at thermal plants with installed capacities of 50 megawatts or more. Plants of this size will be charged USD $5 per ton of CO2 released, exempting smaller plants and those fueled by biomass.1
La llamada Marea Rosada se refiere al giro dado por varios gobiernos latinoamericanos desde la década de 1990, hacia políticas públicas y sociales opuestas a la orientación neoliberal que caracterizó, en general, al continente en las décadas previas. Estas nuevas políticas también se distancian de los viejos y desgastados ideales del partisanismo revolucionario, intentando una crítica del neoliberalismo que no se reduce a una ruptura radical (e imposible) con su lógica de acumulación, sino que intenta adaptarse a él y dotarlo de un rostro más humano.
After three years of the heading the organization, UN Women, which strives for international gender equality and empowerment of women, Michelle Bachelet returned to her seat as president of Chile. This is her second term in office and she is focusing especially hard on equality for women. As the leader of UN Women, Bachelet and other diplomats, worked on the 58th session of the Commission of the Status of Women to stake out five of the most important women’s equality agreements to improve on in international law.
Despite growing up in London and presently working in his Brooklyn, New York studio, the Chilean-born artist Sebastian Errazuriz clearly retains an implicit and powerful emotional connection with his South American homeland.
Similar to various other Latin American countries, Brazil suffered through a right-wing military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.1 The aim of this dictatorship was to eliminate any and all threats of communist uprising within the country. This is similar to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, but, unlike such countries, Brazil has only now acknowledged the torture and other atrocities committed during the 21-year dictatorship.
Despite the return of electoral democracy to most of Latin America in the 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of protesters continue to be arbitrarily arrested, injured, or even killed by police.1 At the most extreme, dramatic events result in many people losing their lives to police violence. For example, during the December 2001 economic and political crisis in Argentina, 39 protesters were killed. Yet such repressive protest policing is not limited to dramatic and destabilizing events.
