Greetings from the Sacred Valley of Peru. This show was recorded in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 2024. While the cultural and environmental landscape remains the same, political exigencies have accelerated in a negative direction from the perspective of Eduardo Galleano’s 1973 work, Open Veins of Latin America. Chile has elected a Pinochet acolyte, and son of a Nazi, José Antonio Kast, and we have to wonder, how are political memories in the world so short?
We did a recent show with Rights Action on Honduras, and the latest on the Hondurasgate scandal that no one knows about is that drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez was released by Trump, through the advocacy of Netanyahu’s Israeli murderous fanatics to continue their proxy-hegemonic dance in Latin America.
What does Israel want with a drug trafficking former president? They are creating a nation-state-club based on war, violence, and hate, with the victims, Palestine, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, the list could go on.
Trump pushed right-wing-stooge Nasry Asfura with threats to the Honduran people of bankrupting the state, and it worked, maybe the claims of fraud or more than just claims. They have now returned that country to the flavor of dictatorship sponsored by both U.S. political parties, began by Obama and Hilary Clinton in 2009, and lasted until 2022. It’s not a pretty picture, I’m sorry to say.
Then this sordid cabal got together with Javier Milei, Argentina’s inflationary nightmare known for chainsawing social programs and selling off publicly owned assets. The fraternity of fascists is attempting to subvert left-leaning governments in Mexico and Brazil and upcoming elections in Colombia.
The sordid fun continues in Bolivia, where workers are in open revolt against the neo-liberal Milei-style government of Spanish-born Rodrigo Paz Pereira. The movement which closed the airport for a while and shut down the entire society demanded Paz resign and new elections planned. Paz and his people, meanwhile, are looting Bolivia’s Central Bank, leaving the public coffers empty. They are doing the same thing they did with Venezuela and its gold.
This is why the U.S. wants pliant governments, so they can plunder the wealth of countries, and then proceed to bail them out with insane loans that will never be paid back. Milei’s regime also took the gold from Argentina’s central bank and won’t tell where it is. See any theme’s here? Is Chile next?
If you want to read more about this show on the Atacama Desert of Chile, click here to WilderUtopia for more details.
Here is a poetic taste…
Oficina Salitrera Chacabuco
By Wilfredo Dorador A.
Published 2007 in El Alfrarero del Tiempo by Editorial Numinor
Wilfredo Dorador is the father of the renowned University of Antofagasta academic Cristina Dorador, who specializes in the study of the microbiology of the salt flats (salitreras) of the Atacama that are so threatened by the present lithium boom. Chacabuco is an abandoned nitrate or saltpeter town in the Atacama Desert. It became a concentration camp during the Pinochet regime in 1973. To this day it remains surrounded by about 98 lost landmines, but we visited without getting blown up in 2025.
Oficina Salitrera Chacabuco
By Wilfredo Dorador A.
These are the streets
of my early childhood.
This is the salt
the loneliness that overwhelms them.This is the home of the absent sea.
And there are hands like the bread of the new encounter.
The pepper and its breeze,
the neighborly voices,
the pupils, the longings of my beloved;
the rumor of kisses that return.
Joy is the swarm towards the origin.
And there is laughter resurrected from long ago;
then, the names, the hitches.
It is my town revived
in its naked forces;
the sun that raised its energies,
crack of the reverberations;
will of endless fire.
In this square I learned spring
and in the backyard nostalgia
and orphaned forests,
I argued for knives.
And in this place the chains, the shackles
that silenced consciences of human crickets.
Next the rafts rotted,
the dynamite went over the top,
and the dogs cried all the absences.I am the last redeemed oak.
The angel of frost sings
corollary and cross of fire.
A crown of tin
is more of a being than thought.
I am the becoming of enpampaed seas,
I belong to the abyss of another time.
These are the Open Veins of Latin America, that continue to resound as either wondrous places where the angel of frost sings, or the site of plunder and murder. We really do have a choice in this world. I choose that frost angel, no matter how cold she might be…
