Word: bachelet
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...tearing up roads and bridges, reducing homes and hospitals to rubble. Many residents on the country's shoreline survived the quake only to drown shortly after, when a tsunami sucked boats and houses into the sea. Describing a "catastrophe of unthinkable magnitude," Chile's President Michelle Bachelet vowed to explore whether the country's tsunami-warning system had failed and, with water and food running low, deployed troops to combat looting, search for survivors and restore order. (See pictures of Chile's massive earthquake...
...Indeed, attempted shows of competency sometimes seemed to hinder getting assistance out to the shattered communities. On Monday night, for example, a brigade of troops was delayed three hours so that President Michelle Bachelet could arrive to see them off. The troops themselves were rather green, according to Peter Murphy Lewis, an American professor of political science at the University of Chile, who flew to the badly hit city of Concepción in a Chilean air force Boeing 707 with 340 of the troops. "Many of the soldiers," he says, "were saying stuff like, 'Wow, we are so high...
Surreal was the operative word. Even supporters of Bachelet like Lewis quickly realized that the task of helping the victims of the earthquake was going to be enormous. As the President herself told TIME, no one in command really knew how bad the situation was outside of Santiago because of the breakdown in communications and what turned out to be inaccurate information. On Wednesday, travel to and communications with Concepción, the big city closest to the 8.8-magnitude quake's epicenter, was still difficult. Lewis arrived there early Monday evening with the Chilean military to find a city...
...Bachelet has taken to the airwaves to tell quake victims that there is no food or fuel shortage. But on Wednesday morning in Concepción, says Lewis, "there were thousands of stranded cars and trucks in the city because there is no gas." He adds, "Building up social trust is more important right now than physical rebuilding," perhaps because of the reign of terror under the 17-year military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Chileans still have a wary relationship with security institutions - an instinct exacerbated by the post-quake inefficiencies of the government. "You can see it clearly...
...Bachelet, however, offered a different account, telling TIME that local firefighters had warned residents to evacuate after a strong quake in a simulation exercise two weeks before last weekend's tremor hit. "When I was in Constitución [a town north of Concepción on the coast], they told me that two weeks earlier, the local firefighters ran an earthquake rehearsal," she said. "They taught the population that if they could not stand up while it was trembling, it meant they had to go up into the hills because there was the possibility of a tsunami...