MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

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Chile insists with F 16 fighters

Chilean Defence Minister Mario Fernández confirmed his country's interest in a dozen Lockheed F 16 fighter bombers during a recent visit to the United States where he met with officials from the Bush administration. "This in normal and logical in the military rapprochement taking place between both countries", said Mr. Fernández, adding that this would help definitively leave behind the arms embargo of the seventies imposed on Chile following the Kennedy amendment. However Mr. Fernández stressed the new situation will not mean an excessive United States arms dependency, since "we have weapons from other origins, French, German, Spanish, British". During his contacts in Washington Defence Minister Fernández tried to determine the atmosphere in the US Congress for when President Bush requests authorisation to sell twelve of the sophisticated aircraft to Chile. Early this year ten influential US Senators, --out of one hundred--, anticipated their rejection to the sale arguing it was "unnecessary and unbalancing". Since July 1996 Chile and United States recovered institutional links in defence affairs, similar to those the country has with Great Britain, France, Italy, Sweden and Spain among others, which means holding regular meetings of a consulting bilateral committee. Mr. Fernández emphatically denied that the Chilean aircraft purchase is not an attempt to have closer defence or trade relations with the United States but a technical decision from the Air Force to replace obsolete equipment, supported by the Frei and Lagos administrations. "I don't see Chile in an immediate future reaching a military alliance agreement with Washington, similar to Argentina's, since 1997, when Argentina became a principal non NATO ally of the United States". Mr. Fernández invited his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld to visit Chile, and forecasted the F 16 sale could be confirmed before the end of 2001.

ENAP to cut staff

Staff form Enap, Chile's national oil company, in Punta Arenas are holding regular meetings with managers of the company and union leaders to agree on a redundancy plan. It's estimated that 200 of the 1,600 Punta Arenas bran