Valparaíso suffered at least one loss, a person who died from cardiac arrest when s/he heard that fuckhead announcing a tsunami. He was taken into custody (the fuckhead).
Now the rumor goes that the false alarm was set off so people would leave their houses to be robbed. nice. I personally think he might have just been crazy (but then I watched "incident at loch ness" recently).
There is this town further south - another one that begins with "C" - where they cleaned out the entire supermarket - and I mean sparkling clean. And that was the only supermarket in town! So I'm not talking those "looters" who take what they need and are not given - but total pieces of shit who take everything and leave others such a mess, in such a mess. (I'm certainly not feeling bad for Líder - the evilness of this chain would valid a post in itself.) Strangely, the attitude I encountered in response to this supermarket incidence, was: El Chileno es así - Chileans are like that. This is not the first time I heard this.
Here the supermarkets are cleaned out the regular way: lines till the back, atmosphere of panic and confusion (times ten of the usual). There is heavy policing. Somehow this does not make me feel so safe. The atmosphere is still of paranoia, but all goes relatively orderly.
It's just ridiculous. Polemics on bloggs still talk the language of "shoot the Communist bastards/dogs/scum/vemrin", "Allende equals anarchy", the military will sort it out "as usual" etc. I don't get it. There is "we are like that", there is the "viva chile" for God-knows-what (mostly said without any context/supportive evidence), then there is this image of Chileans as friendly and cariñoso, as I mentioned in another post, and also as showing solidarity. Which I find the most ridiculous, given the extreme inequality of this society, the extremely clasist structures, permeated by racist reasoning (more "Indian" looking vs "Spanish" looking/last names etc).
The explanation for this solidarity myth, according to R, is the teleton, the one charity event, which collects money for disabled kids. And the companies supporting that event, such as Lider, do not give an actual peso, they just raise prices on their products, tell consumers if they buy those they do a good deed, and thus have an enormous free advertising and public relations campaign.
Okay, that did not have anything to do with the quake. I just needed to express my confusion.
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