Category: Chile

Outgoing president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, has accepted an invitation to travel to Bolivia for the inauguration ceremony of president-elect Evo Morales and is awaiting approval from the Senate for the proposed visit. The invitation was extended personally by Morales and would make Lagos the first Chilean president to attend such an event in Bolivia since the two countries broke off diplomatic relations in 1978 because of a long-running dispute over Bolivian access to the sea. President-elect of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, has also been invited but has yet to confirm whether she will attend the ceremony due to take place this Sunday, 22 January.

The world’s largest specialty fertilizer and inorganic industrial chemical producer, SQM, headquartered in Chile says it is to buy two subsidiaries of Dutch chemical group DSM. The acquisition of the companies, located in Chile and the Netherlands, will allow SQM to produce iodine and derivative products in Chile and distribute them abroad. It is not known how much the deal is worth. SQM recently bought a fertilizer manufacturer in UAE as part of its expansion plans.

President-elect of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has invited both the outgoing and incoming presidents of Chile, Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, to attend his inauguration ceremony in Bolivia on 22 January. Morales has said he wishes to discuss important political and economic matters, no doubt encompassing the sensitive topic of Bolivian access to the sea, the issue that caused diplomatic relations to be broken off between the two countries in 1978. Neither Lagos nor Bachelet have confirmed whether they will attend, although Bachelet has said she wishes to improve and deepen relations with both Bolivia and Peru.

Early indications in Sunday’s second-round election in Chile gave a clear victory to Michelle Bachelet, meaning that the country has elected its first female president. Bachelet, representing the ruling centre-left party, had polled 53% of the vote against the 46.8% of rival, conservative businessman Sebastian Piñera, with two-thirds of the vote counted. Second-round elections were called after neither candidate won more than 50% of the votes in December’s first round poll.

Chilean Masisa, Latin America’s leading wood board manufacturer, has issued two tranches of local inflation-linked bonds worth $163 million in total. The company issued $69 million worth of seven-year bonds priced at 4.59% and $94 million worth of 21-year paper, priced at 4.79%. The funds raised will be used to finance expansion and investment projects in Chile and abroad.

Chile’s exports in 2005 rose to just shy of $40 billion – up 23.5% compared with 2004, while imports rose 31.7% to $30 billion – pushing the trade surplus to record figures of just over $9 billion. Exports were given an unexpected fillip by exceptional international copper prices; Chile is the world’s largest copper producer.

Record prices for copper, Chile’s top export, strong industrial production and investment drove Chile’s year-on-year GDP growth rate to 6.1% in November. Economists forecast growth will slow a little this year to 5.5% on weaker copper prices and higher interest rates to contain inflation. Consumer prices rose 3.7% last year, the highest in five years.

Chilean state-owned copper company Codelco said a walkout of service workers has not affected production. Maintenance, service, and construction employees stopped work after the government rejected demands for a $963 bonus per worker. Copper prices hit a new record as markets anticipated that unrest would disrupt production. Copper for March delivery rose 4.90 cents to $2.0975 per pound in New York.

Peru filed papers in Santiago to extradite former president Alberto Fujimori from Chile to face charges of corruption and human rights violations. Chilean police held Fujimori, 73, in November after he arrived in Santiago from five years exile in Japan. Chilean officials rejected Peru’s initial request to expel Fujimori and said instead they would await a court ruling on his case.

Contract workers at Chile’s state-owned Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, have decided to go on strike demanding a one-off wage bonus from the government. The workers are keen to see a share of the windfall from this year’s record copper prices. Codelco uses around 28,000 contract workers and is dependent on them for many of its processes. Union officials say they expect around 6,000 workers to strike.