Chileans will decide whether to adopt or reject the constitution in a nationwide plebiscite on September 4.
“I know, and all of Chile is conscious that this hasn’t been easy. And it’s that, dear compatriots, democracy isn’t easy,” Boric said after receiving a copy of the draft document.
“Regardless of the legitimate differences that may exist regarding the content of the text which will be debated in the next months, there is something that all Chileans have to be proud about — that in the moment of the most profound political, institutional and social crisis that our homeland has lived through in decades, Chileans opted for more democracy, not less,” he said.
The proposed constitution marks a departure from country’s existing constitution, which was written under the influence of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman´s neoliberal model. Despite many amendments, a majority of Chileans blame it for the country´s stark inequalities.
The proposed new constitution emphasizes social and ecological factors, enshrines the rights of Chile’s indigenous peoples and envisages a new national healthcare system.
The process towards potentially replacing the constitution inherited from the late General Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled the country from 1973 to 1990, was sparked by a metro fare increase three years ago.
Massive protests and riots throughout the country in the fall of 2019 forced then-president Sebastián Piñera to agree to a referendum on rewriting the constitution.
In October 2020, more than 78% of Chilean voters approved the constitutional change and in June 2021, they cast their ballots again to pick the members for a constituent assembly.
The center-left and right-wing coalitions that have shared power since the return to democracy in 1990 both took a serious blow, obtaining only 16% and 24% of seats in the assembly respectively.
Independents and newcomers from left-wing political parties and social movements in contrast had their hour of glory, gathering 60% of the votes.
Now the country is preparing to vote on the constitution they drew up, which could ring in widespread changes in Chilean society.
CNN’s Daniela Mohor W. contributed to this report.
Lucía Hiriart, the widow of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, has died at her home at the age of 99.
Hiriart – an intensely divisive figure in Chile – had rarely been seen in public in recent years and her health has been kept a closely guarded secret.
Cristián Labbé, a former government secretary who was an agent of Pinochet’s feared secret police and remains close to the family, confirmed Hiriart’s death to Chilean daily La Tercera on Thursday.
The news came three days before the second round of Chile’s most divisive presidential election since the country returned to democracy in 1990.
Voters will choose between the leftwing former student leader Gabriel Boric – who promises to rid Chile of Pinochet’s socioeconomic legacy – and far-right politician José Antonio Kast, an outspoken supporter of the dictatorship.
Chile’s uncomfortable relationship with its recent past was at the centre of mass protests in 2019 and 2020 in which demonstrators called for an overhaul of the country’s neoliberal economic model and the rewriting the country’s constitution, drafted during the dictatorship.
As news of her death broke on Thursday, crowds gathered to celebrate in Santiago’s main plaza – the epicentre of months of protests last year.
Hiriart’s death only sharpens the focus on the choice facing voters on Sunday – and the deep and persistent divisions within Chilean society.
She was seen by some as a philanthropist who dedicated her life to the service of the Chilean people. For others, she was a reviled and enduring symbol of the dictatorship and its bitter legacy in Chile.
Boric tweeted that Hiriart “died in impunity, despite the deep pain and division she caused in our country”.
Since 2014, a Twitter account called “Has the old woman died?” has intermittently posted the word “No”. On Thursday, it tweeted the word “yes”, receiving tens of thousands of retweets.
Hiriart was born into a wealthy family in the coastal city of Antofagasta in northern Chile in 1922. Her father was a politician who briefly served as Chile’s interior minister in the 1940s.
She was married to General Pinochet from 1943 until the former dictator died in 2006 without ever facing justice for the crimes committed under his 1973-1990 dictatorship. During his 17-year reign, more then 3,000 people were killed or disappeared and tens of thousands tortured.
In his memoirs, Pinochet wrote that Hiriart had helped persuade him to participate in the 1973 coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
“One night, my wife took me into the bedroom where my grandchildren were sleeping and said: ‘They will become slaves because you are not able to make a decision,’” he wrote.
According to several biographers, she held uncommon sway in La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace.
While Chile’s first lady, Hiriart founded several foundations and charities, including the Cema-Chile foundation, whose assets she was accused of embezzling to fund General Pinochet’s living expenses while under house arrest in London in 1998.
Hiriart was sued by two Communist party politicians and a group of the dictatorship’s victims’ families in 2016, alleging Cema had been engaged in tax fraud, embezzlement and misappropriation of public assets.
In 2005, she was sued by Chile’s inland revenue service for tax evasion, and was arrested alongside her five children in 2007 in a separate embezzlement case.
Clods of glass in the Atacama Desert, site of an ancient fireball airburst.Photo: R. Scott Harris
Nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Chilean coast are covered with oblong fragments of desert glass that researchers who recently studied them say came from a comet’s explosion over the Atacama Desert about 12,000 years ago.
The explosion was what’s called an airburst, which can happen when an object like a meteor or comet falls to Earth. These objects heat up due to friction with our planet’s atmosphere. While some burn up entirely in the atmosphere, other objects explode when they come in contact with thicker parts of the atmosphere. They can cause ground temperatures to be as hot as the Sun, with beyond-hurricane-force winds.
Such was the case for a comet that fell to Earth during the late Pleistocene, according to the team of researchers who studied the composition of the silicate glasses littered about Chile’s Atacama. They found the fireball’s explosion caused bits of space rock to fuse with the molten soils below, forming glasses. Their results were published this week in Geology.
“The Atacama is perfect for preserving the record,” Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University, told Gizmodo in an email. “The difference between other glasses across the Atacama and these glasses is that our glasses are really large and indicate complex interactions between the airburst, heating, and winds.
“In other words, it teaches us about the details of the event for the first time,” Schultz added. “We actually have more glasses in Argentina of much older ages but can show that these were produced by actual collisions.”
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Previously, a different team thought that the glasses came from ancient grass fires, long before the area became desert, that burned hot enough to transform the soil. But the recent team suspects an extraterrestrial object is the source of the geological oddity because of the unique mineral constitution and structure of the glasses, which showed evidence of being bent and transformed while still liquid. Those details have been observed in other airburst remnants and wouldn’t look so violent in grassfire glasses.
Furthermore, the team found minerals that come from other space rocks, like troilite and cubanite. Such inclusions are similar to those collected by NASA during the Stardust mission, from dust of the Wild-2 comet in 2004.
“Those minerals are what tell us that this object has all the markings of a comet,” said Scott Harris, a planetary geologist at the Fernbank Science Center and a co-author of the study, in a Brown University release. “To have the same mineralogy we saw in the Stardust samples entrained in these glasses is really powerful evidence that what we’re seeing is the result of a cometary airburst.”
The current age estimate of the airburst remains a work in progress on the testing front. The youngest date estimate, made by another co-author, was about 11,500 years ago. “There’s also a chance that this was actually witnessed by early inhabitants, who had just arrived in the region,” Schultz said in the same release. “It would have been quite a show.”
If not for humans, depending on the timing, one has to pity the doomed giant ground sloths and other megafauna in the area. They would’ve been burned to a crisp in an instant.
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Deposits of dark silicate glass are strewn across a 75-kilometer corridor in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. New research shows that those glasses were likely formed by the heat of an ancient comet exploding above the surface. Credit: P.H. Schultz/Brown University
Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno.
In a study published in the journal Geology, researchers show that samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin. Those minerals closely match the composition of material returned to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission, which sampled the particles from a comet called Wild 2. The team concludes that those mineral assemblages are likely the remains of an extraterrestrial object—most likely a comet—that streamed down after the explosion that melted the sandy surface below.
“This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface,” said Pete Schultz, a professor emeritus in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “To have such a dramatic effect on such a large area, this was a truly massive explosion. Lots of us have seen bolide fireballs streaking across the sky, but those are tiny blips compared to this.”
The glasses are concentrated in patches across the Atacama Desert east of Pampa del Tamarugal, a plateau in northern Chile nestled between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west. Fields of dark green or black glass occur within a corridor stretching about 75 kilometers. There’s no evidence that the glasses could have been created by volcanic activity, Schultz says, so their origin has been a mystery.
Some researchers have posited that the glass resulted from ancient grass fires, as the region wasn’t always desert. During the Pleistocene epoch, there were oases with trees and grassy wetlands created by rivers extending from mountains to the east, and it’s been suggested that widespread fires may have burned hot enough to melt the sandy soil into large glassy slabs.
Deposits of dark silicate glass are strewn across a 75-kilometer corridor in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. New research shows that those glasses were likely formed by the heat of an ancient comet exploding above the surface. Credit: P.H. Schultz/Brown University
But the amount of glass present along with several key physical characteristics make simple fires an impossible formation mechanism, the new research found. The glasses show evidence of having been twisted, folded, rolled and even thrown while still in molten form. That’s consistent with a large incoming meteor and airburst explosion, which would have been accompanied by tornado-force winds. The mineralogy of the glass casts further serious doubt on the grassfire idea, Schultz says. Along with researchers from the Fernbank Science Center in Georgia, Chile’s Universidad Santo Tomás and the Chilean Geology and Mining Service, Schultz and colleagues performed a detailed chemical analysis of dozens of samples taken from glass deposits across the region.
The analysis found minerals called zircons that had thermally decomposed to form baddeleyite. That mineral transition typically happens in temperatures in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—far hotter than what could be generated by grass fires, Schultz says.
The analysis also turned up assemblages of exotic minerals only found in meteorites and other extraterrestrial rocks, the researchers say. Specific minerals like cubanite, troilite and calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions matched mineral signatures from comet samples retrieved from NASA’s Stardust mission.
“Those minerals are what tell us that this object has all the markings of a comet,” said Scott Harris, a planetary geologist at the Fernbank Science Center and study co-author. “To have the same mineralogy we saw in the Stardust samples entrained in these glasses is really powerful evidence that what we’re seeing is the result of a cometary airburst.”
More work needs to be done to establish the exact ages of the glass, which would determine exactly when the event took place, Schultz says. But the tentative dating puts the impact right around time that large mammals disappeared from the region.
Analysis of the glass samples revealed a mineralogy that was consistent with a cometary origin. Credit: P.H. Schultz/Brown University
“It’s too soon to say if there was a causal connection or not, but what we can say is that this event did happen around the same time as when we think the megafauna disappeared, which is intriguing,” Schultz said. “There’s also a chance that this was actually witnessed by early inhabitants, who had just arrived in the region. It would have been quite a show.”
Schultz and his team hope that further research may help to constrain the timing and shed light on the size of the impactor. For now, Schultz hopes this study may help researchers identify similar blast sites elsewhere and reveal the potential risk posed by such events.
“There may be lots of these blast scars out there, but until now we haven’t had enough evidence to make us believe they were truly related to airburst events,” Schultz said. “I think this site provides a template to help refine our impact models and will help to identify similar sites elsewhere.”
Other authors of the study were Sebastian Perroud, Nicolas Blanco and Andrew Tomlinson.
Planetary scientists unravel mystery of Egyptian desert glass
More information:
Peter H. Schultz et al, Widespread glasses generated by cometary fireballs during the late Pleistocene in the Atacama Desert, Chile, Geology (2021). DOI: 10.1130/G49426.1
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Vast patches of glassy rock in Chilean desert likely created by ancient exploding comet (2021, November 2)
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Scientists in Chile have discovered the fossil of a so-called “flying dragon” dinosaur — the first of its kind found in the southern hemisphere.
The Jurassic-era creature, an early pterosaur, was found by paleontologists in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
The “dragon,” which roamed the earth 160 million years ago, has a long pointed tail, wings and sharp, protruding pointed teeth.
The remains, previously only ever found in North America, were unearthed by Osvaldo Rojas, director of the Atacama Desert Museum of Natural History and Culture.
The discovery suggests migration of the species between North and South America which are believed to have been linked in a supercontinent called Gondwana.
“This shows the distribution of the animals in this group was wider than what was known up to now,” Jhonatan Alarcon, a University of Chile scientist who led the investigation, told Reuters.
The discovery suggests migration of the “flying dragon” dinosaur between North and South America.Alamy Stock Photo
”There are pterosaurs of this group also in Cuba, which apparently were coastal animals, so most likely they have migrated between the North and the South or maybe they came once and stayed, we don’t know,” Alarcon said.
The Atacama Desert has become a hotspot for fossil discoveries. The barren, martian-looking landscape was submerged by sea waters in prehistoric times.
Detail of the discovery were published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
