The Haitian Connection?

In 1978, when I first visited Chile, the default choice for coffee junkies was semi-soluble Nescafé, and that’s still common here. It didn’t bother me personally, because I don’t drink coffee—how can something that smells so wonderful taste so awful?—but my fellow travelers often searched desperately for espresso or even a freshly brewed cup from grounds.

Café Haití was Santiago's original café con piernas, but more drinkable than Nescafé.

At that time, just about the only place to do so was Santiago’s Café Haití, a chain of standup coffee bars that was notorious for its café con piernas ("coffee with legs"), served by attractive young women in micro-skirts and other form-fitting clothing. The clientele was overwhelming male (and machista) but, on occasion, female clients couldn’t resist what appeared to be the best available caffeine fix. My own wife, given her Italo-Argentine background, reluctantly became one of them.

Taken last year, this screenshot summarizes the size of Chile's immigrant communities.

Why the chain’s founder chose that specific name is unclear—the source of his coffee seems likeliest to have been Brazil or Colombia—but in recent years Chile has become the country of choice for emigrants from the impoverished Caribbean country, and Haitians are a visible presence in the capital and elsewhere. For what it’s worth, Chile was the second country in the Americas to abolish slavery, after Haiti itself.

Caleta Camarones is an historically Afro-Chilean community.

Even though I have a background in colonial Latin American history, I’d never seen much evidence of the Afro-Chilean heritage. The only precise location I can identify is the coastal village of Caleta Camarones, midway between the Atacama desert cities of Arica and Iquique, whose four-time mayor Sonia Salgado once stated that “Our ancestors arrived here together with the conquerors.”

My Haitian immigrant waiter at Ostras Azócar

The Haitian presence is something different, though, and it’s increasing. The first Haitian I ever encountered personally was a waiter at the classic seafood restaurant Ostras Azócar, who told me more than a decade ago that he learned his fluent Spanish through listening to radio broadcasts from the neighboring Dominican Republic. He now has a family here, and has recently opened his own small business.

I see many Haitians in the Renca neighborhood where I’m staying at present and, at best I can tell, most of them are speaking Haitian Creole (I certainly don’t recognize it as standard French, of which my knowledge is admittedly limited). At a downtown Santiago gas station, I recently had a conversational exchange with a Haitian janitor whose Spanish was likewise limited but was clearly making an effort to communicate.

Haitian options are becoming part of Santiago's fast-food scene.

Most Haitians appear to occupy menial jobs, but there are some indications of entrepreneurship as well. Not far from my Renca accommodations, there’s a sandwich shop that offers Haitian dishes alongside the standard completos (hot dogs) and churrascos (grilled beef). That suggests, at least, a hopeful foothold in the dominant Chilean culture, though there’s certainly been some anti-immigrant sentiment here. I’ve not yet sampled the food there, and it’s unlikely ever to match the impact Peruvian cuisine has had.

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Dakar 2016? With Luck, DOA

In the early 1980s, when I was researching my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herding in the Chilean Andes, Horacio Larraín was my local mentor. Then a professor of geography at Santiago’s Universidad Católica, he helped get approval for the project (funded by the Inter-American Foundation). We still see each other occasionally, though he has since retired to the northern city of Iquique and the interior desert village of Matilla.

A longtime aficionado of the Atacama Desert, Horacio is (like me) concerned with the human and environmental destruction wrought by the annual Dakar Rally, which relocated from Africa to South America in 2009. Since then, Dakar has killed both participants and spectators, and damaged or threatened countless archaeological sites and ecosystems in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Last year, a Spanish competitor smuggled 1.4 tons of cocaine back toEurope; this year, there’s been only one death, but two participants – a Dutchman and an Italian – were arrested into Antofagasta for off-route wanderings that damaged an archaeological site.

I’ve only ever seen Dakar at its starting point in BuenosAires (as pictured above in 2010), but I know the Atacama and deplore what this senseless event has done to it. I rarely if ever do guest posts but, in this case, I have translated Horacio’s open letter as published on the website Piensa Chile (Think Chile), where you can see the Spanish-language original.

I have edited Horacio’s essay for brevity and taken some liberties for clarity in English (I am not a professional translator, though I’m confident I have conveyed the meaning), and all the hyperlinks are mine. The photographs below display some of the landscapes and features that Dakar puts at risk.

Open Letter: A Critical Opinion on Dakar and the Preservation of Cultural Resources

In recent years, we have fought a difficult battle against this Rally which is presumably a sporting competition, but which really destroys landscapes and cultural heritage. To summarize, this Rally is a competition and pleasure for the rich (the entry fee is US$240,000) to try out the latest model vehicles before they hit the international market.

This pseudo-sport competition contains the following essential faults that make it totally incompatible with serious and responsible protection of the natural and cultural patrimony of our Tarapacá region:

1) There’s a maliciously false idea that “there’s nothing in the desert” and that, for that reason, you can go anywhere and drive through any part of it. Archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, paleoecologists and paleobotanists know perfectly well that the subsoil is genuine mine of findings of the past, but all of them hidden from view today. For that reason, a superficial glimpse (which they seem to request) can detect little or nothing.

2) Many times, specimens of extinct fauna from the Tertiary and Quaternary, with extraordinary scientific value (species new to science) have been found on the desert flats.

3) The Pampa del Tamarugal is marked by numerous ancient trails, full of history, as manifested by the cultural artifacts tossed or left along them. Thus we can learn about the nitrate industry and the borax industry, of their abandoned settlements and their ancient ways and circuits of exchange. The ancient routes constitute living history for anyone who knows how to read them. For us archaeologists, they are bearers of culture, genuine archaeological sites.

4) One of the oldest and most venerable routes, the Quahpaqñanor “Inka Trail,” crosses the Pampa, from Quillagua to the north along the Salarde Llamara. Some months ago, we verified that the Dakar heavy support vehicles of 2012 and 2013 followed this same Inka route for more than 30 km, a criminal act that we reported, as the Camino del Inka Study Group (Universidad Nacional Arturo Prat) to the National Monuments Council in 2014. We received no reply.

This inaction and apathy by regional and national authorities worries us. It especially alarms and disturbs us that, to hear their declarations, our repeated scientific proof seems to carry no weight with them, and they are demonstrating an unfortunate absence of cultural consciousness.

Even a schoolchild is capable of understanding our fears and shock, on seeing how they expose the vulnerable desert landscape and destroy its surface, on which there was life thousands or millions of years ago that’s hidden to our eyes today. We could cite numerous cases of noteworthy findings in the open flats, where there’s nothing visible today except for some stones.

The Pampa is not a desert lacking life and bygone human activity: it is an open book for anyone who wants and has learned to read it. And that, necessarily, is the job of the scientist who talks about the danger that these off-road competitions involve, that they respect nothing, they trample and destroy, competitors and spectators alike, leaving thousands of new marks, marks that unfortunately will last for centuries.

For us, Dakar is a true hurricane, highly destructive, whose only objective is to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the powerful automotive industry and appease that hunger for bread and circuses to a bored and deprived humanity that lacks any greater cultural stimulus.

My Own Perspective

The Atacama desert, and corresponding parts of neighboring countries, should not be ecological sacrifice areas to fossil-fuel “sports.” With luck, Dakar 2015 will the last of its kind, or one of the last, but that will require the governments in question to remove subsidies and forego the international publicity they think benefits them - not to mention the damage Dakar does to their countries.

For earlier commentaries of mine on Dakar, please go to this link. 

Background-Plus on Chile's Latest Earthquakes

A few weeks ago, as I sat at my desk outside the central Chilean city of Talca, a low rumble passed through the ground – in area that suffered dramatic damage in the monumental earthquake of 2010. It was brief and, as a resident of Northern California, this tremor didn’t especially disturb me. Over the next couple weeks, though, I read about frequent seismic activity in northernmost Chile, in and around the port city of Iquique (pictured below) and, last Tuesday, a big one struck.

According to the US Geological Survey, the April 1 event measured 8.2 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter 59 km northwest of Iquique. This would put it almost directly opposite the semi-ghost town of Pisagua (pictured below), an erstwhile nitrate port that also, infamously, served as a de facto prison camp in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Both Pisagua and Iquique occupy wave-cut terraces that are vulnerable to seismic seawaves, and reports say that a two-meter tsunami hit Iquique’s harbor, destroying numerous small fishing boats.

There are also cracked pavement on local streets and landslides in desert canyons that have blocked roads, but only a handful of deaths – the Atacama desert, unlike the Chilean heartland south of Santiago, is thinly populated and the quality of construction is relatively high. There are few adobe buildings in Iquique, as much of its historic downtown (pictured below) consists of wooden structures built of Douglas fir imported from the United States in the 19th century. Those structures are often more flexible than adobes, though they’re more vulnerable to fires.

I haven’t visited the area for almost two years but, given my long experience there, I expect the recovery to be much quicker than that of the 2010 event. Aftershocks continue, including a powerful 7.6 on Tuesday that was closer to Iquique.  Still, as the photograph below of the 1868 tsunami that struck the more northerly city of Arica shows, it could have been a lot worse.

Better Than Ever: Bolivia's "Access to the Sea"

Political irrendentism has a long ignoble history in South America, and I’ve recently written about the topic in the context of Argentina’s emotional claim to the Falkland Islands. In the course of my travels, though, I’ve often come upon aspects of another equally contentious territorial issue, Bolivia’s territorial access to the Pacific, which it lost in the catastrophic Guerra del Pacífico (War of the Pacific, 1879-1883). In that conflict, Chile acquired all of the present-day Antofagasta Region, which belonged to the presently landlocked La Paz government, and also gained substantial territory from Bolivia’s ally Peru.

Acquisition of the area, which comprises about a quarter of modern Chile’s territory (not counting its Antarctic claims), made the country wealthy through its mineral nitrates, but the industry declined with the production of petroleum-based fertilizers after the 1920s. After Chile assumed control, the Bolivian settlement of Cobija (pictured above), which once had a population of 1,500, gradually deteriorated to the point where, today, it’s a cluster of crumbling adobes that’s now home to a handful of fishing families. Scenes from the 2008 James Bond flick Quantum of Solace were shot here, though it was not identified as such in the film.

Soon, though, Bolivia is taking its claim to the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, in hopes of getting “access to the sea,” despite a 1904 treaty that presumably settled the issue once and for all. Bolivian President Evo Morales is every bit as adamant on the matter as his ideological ally, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is on the Islands issue (which Argentina, however, has refused to submit to The Hague).

What’s ironic is that, for all of Morales’s posturing, its access to the Pacific is better than at any time in the country’s history. Bolivian exports enjoy the use of two excellent paved highways from their own highlands to the Chilean coast: from La Paz to the port city of Arica (pictured above) and from Oruro to the port of Iquique (pictured below), at minimal cost. Should Bolivia manage, somehow, to obtain a territorial concession on the Pacific, the only “advantage” might be the ability to extend a naval presence that is now limited to Lago Titicaca and the rivers of its Amazonian lowlands. Potentially destabilizing to the region, that’s a far higher price than Bolivia should be willing to consider.

To the North: Ash-Free Argentina & Chile

After writing three separate posts about the eruption of Volcán Puyehue, which remains on red alert, I’m suffering from volcano fatigue. Since southern Chile and Argentina are lesser winter than summer destinations anyway, I’ll use today’s post to make suggestions about ash-free travel in the northern deserts and moist forests and wetlands of the two countries, where it’s presently possible to make air connections from Buenos Aires and Santiago, where international airports are once again open. The destinations that follow are actually better in winter, when milder temperatures are the rule.

Esteros del Iberá

Perhaps the most underrated destination in all of Argentina, the Iberá marshes of Corrientes province are a cornucopia of subtropical wildlife, where it’s possible to come face-to-face with caimans, capybaras, howler monkeys, marsh deer, and perhaps even a maned wolf - not to mention nearly 350 bird species. Estancia Rincón del Socorro offers expensive luxury tours and accommodations, but nearby Colonia Pellegrini offer alternative services for every budget from shoestring backpackers up.

Cataratas del Iguazú

Unlike Iberá, the Iguazú falls are world-famous, even appearing in commercial cinema epics such as Moonraker (1979), The Mission (1986), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Recent theme-park transformations have made visiting the falls a less adventurous experience than it once was, but there’s no denying the visual and aural impact of thunderous whitewater that plunges vertically over a basalt escarpment half again as high as Niagara, and more than twice as wide. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Quebrada de Humahuaca

Like Iguazú, the Humahuaca canyon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for its imposing natural landscapes, archaeological sites, and an indigenous heritage that recalls the Four Corners area of the southwestern United States. At its highest altitudes, winter nights can get cold, but July and August are warm and dry during the daytime.

Iquique

The capital of Chile’s Tarapacá region, the coastal city of Iquique has a mild dry climate all year - even as the winter solstice approaches, the forecast daytime temperatures for the coming week are in the mid-60s (around 18° C). That may not be warm enough to swim in the chilly Pacific - though wet-suited surfers enjoy big winter waves from storms at sea - but it’s warm enough to enjoy the city’s Victorian architecture, the nearby nitrate ghost towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura (another UNESCO World Heritage Site, pictured above), and the pre-Columbian geoglyphs that cover the hillsides of the Cerros Pintados.

San Pedro de Atacama

The best-known destination in the Atacama desert, San Pedro is a genuine colonial village that’s also become a magnet for travelers ranging from full-moon party-goers to the most selective of those for whom cost is no object - at the all-inclusive Hotel Awasi, for instance, the guest to guide ratio is one to one. Like Iberá, though, San Pedro also offers cheap to moderately priced alternatives for everybody to visit sights such as the frigid but flamingo-filled lakes of the altiplano, the geyser fields at El Tatio, and pre-Columbian ruins at Catarpe and Quitor.

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Desert Waves, Dusty Diamonds & Rocky Greens

In February of this year, Chile’s massive 8.8 Richter scale earthquake made international headlines but only the specific timing was a surprise - like the Pacific Coast of North America, Chile is one of the world’s most seismically active areas. The February event was unique only in its scale - three years ago, for instance, the coastal Atacama Desert town of Tocopilla suffered a little publicized 7.7 quake that destroyed 7,000 homes and, even today, more than 500 families are living in simple shelters known as mediaguas.

When I first visited Tocopilla, in the early 1990s, it was a ramshackle town with a small port and huge thermoelectric energy station that still powers the massive copper works at Chuquicamata, some 130 km to the east. At that time, coastal Ruta 1 from the city of Iquique was only a dusty but scenic gravel road in an area with some of Chile’s most impressive beaches and best surfing, with little or no competition for waves. Southbound, my aging Argentine Peugeot pickup could barely make the steep grade over the hill where the Galleguillos tunnel has now simplified communication between the two cities, which are about 230 km apart. The larger port of Antofagasta is 180 km farther south.

At that time, Tocopilla’s most unexpected site was its downtown baseball stadium where, on a sunny day with a cool breeze off the Pacific, I stopped briefly to watch a team from the local Asociación de Beisbol Tocopilla work out. Despite grand ocean views, the field itself was barely a sandlot - in reality, it was a hard dirt surface on which you wouldn’t want to dive or slide, and you certainly wouldn’t want to crash into the concrete outfield walls while chasing a long fly ball. Nevertheless, baseball (owing its origins to the US presence in the copper mining industry) has been played here since 1928; in 2005, Tocopilla defeated Iquique for the national championship. Other diamonds, such as the one pictured here at the nitrate town of María Elena, are scattered throughout the region.

That was then, and this is now: on my last visit to the city, in December 2008, it was even more ramshackle, and the outfield was where those 500-plus families were still living in their mediaguas. This week, though, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera met local residents and pledged to finish a new hospital and build another thousand houses by next year. Then, perhaps, the Asociación de Béisbol can think about regaining the championship.

Baseball, meanwhile, is not the only unexpected sporting presence in Tocopilla. About 20 km north of the city, at the Tocopilla Golf Club, the “greens” consist of crushed black volcanic rock and the fairways are the brownest around (except for planted, or rather emplaced, plastic palms). The ocean views, though, are hard to equal anywhere this side of California’s Pebble Beach.

Pichilemu's Public Schools To Become "Surf Schools"

With a Pacific coastline that stretches for more than 2,500 miles (over 4,000 kilometers), much of it resembling the state of California and Mexico’s Baja California, Chile makes an ideal destination for surfers. From the desert coast of the Norte Grande, where the cities of Arica and Iquique make the best bases, to the headlands of the Chilean heartland, north of Viña del Mar, there are almost endless options for surfers. Because the community of Chilean surfers is relatively small, the competition for waves is not what it would be in, say, Southern California.

That could change, though, if mayor Roberto Córdoba of Pichilemu - Chile’s almost undisputed surfing capital west of the Colchagua valley wine district about three hours southwest of Santiago - has his way. Pichilemu (whose Punta de Lobos point break appears here) is already home to the Campeonato Nacional de Surf, the national surfing championships, but according to the Santiago Times, the mayor plans to introduce surfing as an elective course in four of the town’s poorest performing schools.

The idea, says Córdoba, is to encourage an activity that has economic potential - there are several surf schools and rental equipment in town - and also to provide a recreational outlet for disadvantaged kids who are otherwise bored and, sometimes, in trouble. That many of these kids could become professional, as the mayor seemed to imply, is doubtful, especially as the cost of equipment, training, and travel is well beyond the means of most of them. Still, the idea of making them participants, rather than just observers, seems worth the effort.

Competing in Chilean Skies

Since the early 1980s, Chile’s privatized flagship LAN Airlines has dominated the country’s airways with upwards of 80 percent of domestic passenger traffic, and by consensus it’s one of the region’s best - if not the best - air carriers.
Its international service is probably superior to any other airline flying to South America from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific. It is also solvent.

Within Chile’s borders, since the late 1980s, a long list of competitors - Aerocontinente, Air Comet, Avant Airlines, Ladeco, and National Airlines - has come and gone. In recent years, Sky Airline appears to have achieved viability but, given the hard times for the global airline industry, you never know.

Given the difficulties of competing with LAN, it’s surprising to see a new Chilean carrier, Principal Airlines, about to begin services from Santiago to the Atacama Desert cities of Antofagasta and Iquique. According to Mercopress, Principal is a direct descendant of National Airlines and has operated as a charter carrier since 2003. Services are due to start June 18 and, even if the company eventually fails, there are some good deals to be had for the moment - fares will start around US$50, which is more than competitive with bus fares on the 18-hour overland route to Antofagasta.

Diverting Dakar: San Pedro de Atacama Says No to Fossil Fuel "Sports"

Earlier this year, for the first time, the famous Paris Dakar Rally took place in Argentina and Chile, the first time it had been held outside Africa. The rationale for shifting the race was fear of terrorism along parts of the African route, while Argentina and Chile are countries with no recent terrorism problems.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t problems with Dakar, including at least three deaths: one French motorcyclist died in a remote part of the Argentine province of La Pampa, and an Argentine support vehicle killed two Peruvian motorists in a head-on collision on Ruta 43, just north of the Chilean city of Ovalle. That’s not to mention, of course, the environmental damage caused by Hummers and other massive machines kicking up dust and tearing up the fragile Atacama Desert.

The 2010 Dakar will once again race through Argentina and Chile, but it will not come anywhere close to San Pedro de Atacama, where the organizers had hoped to arrange a rest day. Chilean government officials, under pressure from archaeologists and conservationists, had expressed doubts about any such use (or abuse) of Chile’s archaeological capital and its spectacular surrounding countryside (pictured here). The organizers finally decided to seek alternatives.

Those alternatives include Antofagasta, Calama, Copiapó and Iquique. Except for Iquique, which has its own historical heritage in and around the town, all of these are industrial and mining towns where the environmental impact should be minimal. Calama, though, is a little too close to San Pedro for comfort.