SANTIAGO — Once again, Chilean students have taken to the streets to protest the…
Alejo Contreras Staeding: A great Chilean Antarctic explorer
The first Chilean to reach the South Pole on foot, Alejo Contreras Staeding, still remains a key person in Antarctic research and explorations. This famous mountaineer and Antarctic explorer was born in Santiago where he studied in a German school. He was always interested in the white mountains and the cold remote places, like Antarctica. After he read Robert Falcon [...]
Great Chileans? Emile Dubois (part 3)
By Ben Angel The final instalment of Ben Angel’s series on Emile Dubois. Read Part One here – Read Part Two here The Trial of Emile Dubois It took some time for the police to figure out who they had. He entered the country using false papers, and rather than confirm who he actually was, [...]
Great Chileans? Emile Dubois (part 2)
By Ben Angel This is part two of Ben Angel’s profile of Emile Dubois. Read Part One here. Death of an Englishman The spring is when Dubois struck his first victim in Valparaiso. Amidst a growing crime wave, and growing criticism from the newspapers over the failure of the police to do anything about it, [...]
Great Chileans? Emile Dubois (part 1)
By Ben Angel A burst of steam escaped from the blastpipe into the chimney of the EFE locomotive. As the wheels creaked slowly forward on the Sunday afternoon train out of Mapocho Station in Santiago toward Valparaiso, a mildly disheveled, but still refined, passenger watched the city move past his window. As the train picked [...]
Great Chileans: Pablo Neruda
On Tuesday, Eduardo Contreras, the lawyer representing the Chilean Communist Party, filed suit in Appellate Court in Santiago in the wrongful death of world-renowned poet Pablo Neruda. Mario Carroza, who was assigned to determine validity for legal action related to crimes alleged to have been committed by the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, and [...]
Great Chileans: Arturo Prat
By Ben Angel Tourists sing praises about the sunny beaches of Iquique, but for Chileans, it’s the waters off the city’s coast that serve as its greatest source of pride. It was in these waters that the Battle of Iquique was fought, and the hero of that battle remains one of the most honored men [...]
Great Chileans: Oscar Hahn
Ben Angel Oscar Hahn was already one of the leading figures in Chilean poetry when he received the Pablo Neruda Iberoamericano poetry prize for 2011. Despite the fact that the prize carries Neruda’s name, this is only the second time that the award was given to a Chilean. The award-winning poet was born in 1938 [...]
Illustrious citizen: Gonzalo Rojas
By Ben Angel A great Chilean artist passed on the baton to the generations following him on Monday, when poet Gonzalo Rojas died in Santiago at age 93. After two days of public mourning and viewing of his coffin in the Central Hall of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile (Museo Nacional de [...]
Remembering Oscar Castro
Remembering one of Chile’s great poets and writers, Josefina Cabrera just finished launching a biography of Oscar Castro. The book launch took place on the 26th of March 2011 which just so-happened to be a day after Oscar Castro’s birthday. Cabrera who studied Oscar for about 2 years and recited many of his poems with [...]
Great Irish Chileans: Bernardo O’Higgins
By Ben Angel In the United States, the common claim is that everyone wants to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. The same claim could probably be made for here in Chile, but when you look at Chile’s history, there have been some rather prominent people who really were Irish. The most important “Gael-Sileánach” (Irish-Chileno [...]