Obama announces jobs summit
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But who was listening? “This continent is full of Chuquicamatas,” said a senior Chilean mining official at a seminar in Havana as the socialist government of Salvador Allende proceeded to nationalize Chile’s copper mines and introduce worker emancipation legislation in 1971. “The mining laws need to be revamped urgently. But who has the will, and the muscle?”
President Allende, an ardent admirer of Che, came to power as a result of the 1970 elections. Three years later he was overthrown in a military coup; while the nationalization of the copper mines was not reversed, trade unionists in Chile’s copper belt had to wait for another 30 years to legitimize the demands of those indigenous workers Che encountered along the road from Valparaiso to the Peruvian border. Locals around the Chuquicamata continue to claim that the Ernesto Guevara who visited the area in 1952 was nothing more than a brawling drunk, with a penchant for one-night stands. If Che had caught the boat to Easter Island, as one story goes, “there would have been no Cuban Revolution.” That may well be an exaggeration; but a good case can be made for the proposition that the huge open-pit copper mine of Chuquicamata, or Chuqui as it is commonly known in Chile, remained firmly etched in the psyche of the Argentinean revolutionary right until his death.