Early Friday morning a DAP aircraft with over fifty passengers left Punta Arenas, extreme south of Chile, on a chartered flight for Santiago and then Mendoza, Argentina to be present at this evening’s Chile-Uruguay match for the Copa America.
In response to increased air traffic this past decade, the Ministry of Public Works has formed a plan to improve and expand the airports of Chile including Punta Arenas.
Another group of Chilean students from Punta Arenas will be travelling to the Falkland Islands next September in the framework of the exchange program agreed between city officials and Falklands’ authorities, according to a report in La Prensa Austral.
The Chilean Army is currently clearing four fields planted with anti-personnel mines in Tierra del Fuego and will move to another four once the job is finalized, reported the Commander Gonzalo Echeverria, from the 5th Engineers Battalion seated in Punta Arenas.
Humpback whales, once hunted nearly to extinction, started returning to Chilean seas in the 1990s. By 2003 so many had appeared that Chile created a protected coastal area, Francisco Coloane with marine park in it to assure the whales would have the nutrients they need to thrive.
In the coming three years hydrocarbons exploration and exploitation in the extreme south of Chile will receive investment equivalent to over 400 million US dollars making Punta Arenas a hub for the regional oil industry.
Governor Liliana Kusanovic, from the extreme south Chilean Magallanes region has resigned alleging the need to care for family affairs and denying any link with January’s gas prices strike which paralyzed the region for a week. Ms Kusanovic’s resignation, which belongs to the ruling coalition, was accepted and made public Monday.
Argentina’s government is opening a new path to Tierra del Fuego that will give travellers, who once had to pass through Chile to reach the southernmost tip of the continent, the option of skipping Chile altogether.
Recovering 250 cruise vessel calls a year, --as in 2006 and 2008--, is the Chilean government target with the bill it has sent to Congress which would authorize Chilean and foreign flagged vessels to operate their on board casinos while sailing in territorial waters, currently specifically banned.
Mining and Energy Minister Laurence Golborne met with the Citizens’ Assembly of Magallanes Region (ACM) (extreme south of Chile) after the first of a series of meetings intended to resolve the Magallanes’ gas subsidy controversy.