Career
During Michelle Bachelet's first term as President [ es ] from 2006 to 2010,Williams served as a regional ministerial secretary of public works in Antofagasta. This role made her the official responsible for the reconstruction in the area of the city following the 2007 Tocopilla earthquake. [3] Later,she worked as an administrative and financial manager for the Antofagasta Terminal International (ATI),a mining company that handled 60% of all mining shipments in Antofagasta Region. [4]
In March 2014,Williams became Minister of Mining,making her the second woman to hold the post since Karen Poniachik. [4] In this capacity,she immediately became president of the board of directors of the state-owned National Mining Company (Chile) [ es ] (ENAMI) and the Chilean Copper Commission [ es ] (COCHILCO).
During her term as Minister of Mining,Williams repealed the Ley Reservada del Cobre, [5] approved capital funding for the COCHILCO from Codelco, [6] and passed legislation for small copper mining businesses. [7] She was also responsible for the closure of the controversial Chilean-Argentine Pascua Lama and the Dominga projects, [8] [9] [10] and for the rescue of two miners following a flood in a mine in Chile Chico. [11]
Boric re-appointed Williams as Minister of Mining in August 2023,where she would replace Marcela Hernando. [1]
The Atacama Region is one of Chile's 16 first order administrative divisions. It comprises three provinces: Chañaral, Copiapó and Huasco. It is bordered to the north by Antofagasta, to the south by Coquimbo, to the east by the provinces of Catamarca, La Rioja and San Juan of Argentina, and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. The regional capital Copiapó is located 806 km (501 mi) north of the country's capital of Santiago. The region occupies the southern portion of the Atacama Desert, the rest of the desert is mainly distributed among the other regions of Norte Grande.
Chuquicamata is the largest open pit copper mine in terms of excavated volume in the world. It is located in the north of Chile, just outside Calama, at 2,850 m (9,350 ft) above sea level. It is 215 km (134 mi) northeast of Antofagasta and 1,240 km (770 mi) north of the capital, Santiago. Flotation and smelting facilities were installed in 1952, and expansion of the refining facilities in 1968 made 500,000 tons annual copper production possible in the late 1970s. Previously part of Anaconda Copper, the mine is now owned and operated by Codelco, a Chilean state enterprise, since the Chilean nationalization of copper in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its depth of 850 metres (2,790 ft) makes it the second deepest open-pit mine in the world, after Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, United States.
The National Copper Corporation of Chile, abbreviated as Codelco, is a Chilean state-owned copper mining company. It was formed in 1976 from foreign-owned copper companies that were nationalised in 1971.
Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria is a Chilean politician who served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018, becoming the first woman to hold the presidency. She was re-elected in December 2013 with over 62% of the vote, having previously received 54% in 2006, making her the first President of Chile to be re-elected since 1932. After her second term, she served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022. Earlier in her career, she was appointed as the first executive director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.
The nationalization of the Chilean copper industry, commonly described as the Chileanization of copper was the process by which the Chilean government acquired control of the major foreign-owned section of the Chilean copper mining industry. It involved the three huge mines known as 'La Gran Mineria' and three smaller operations. The Chilean-owned smaller copper mines were not affected. The process started under the government of President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, and culminated during the government of President Salvador Allende, who completed the nationalization. This "act of sovereignty" was the espoused basis for a later international economic boycott, which further isolated Chile from the world economy, worsening the state of political polarization that led to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.
Club de Deportes Cobreloa S.A.D.P., commonly referred to as Cobreloa, is a Chilean football professional club based in Calama, Región de Antofagasta, Chile. They compete in the Primera División. The club's home ground is the Estadio Zorros del Desierto.
The Snipe incident was a military incident that took place between Chile and Argentina during 1958 as a result of a border dispute in the Beagle Channel.
División El Teniente is an underground copper mine located in the Chilean Andes, 2,300 m (7,500 ft) above mean sea level. It is in the commune of Machalí in Cachapoal Province, Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins Region, near the company town of Sewell. This was established for the workers and their families.
The Chilean Law N° 13.196 known as Ley Reservada del Cobre was a highly controversial secret law issued on 29 October 1958 under the administration of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in order to allocate revenues from the copper mining corporations for the purchase and maintenance of Materiel of the Chilean armed forces. The law was replaced in 2019, with the armed forces' finances scheduled to come under the national budget by 2029.
Between 1830 and 1850, Chilean silver mining grew at an unprecedented pace which transformed mining into one of the country's principal sources of wealth. The rush caused rapid demographic, infrastructural, and economic expansion in the semi-arid Norte Chico mountains where the silver deposits lay. A number of Chileans made large fortunes in the rush and made investments in other areas of the economy of Chile. By the 1850s, the rush was in decline and lucrative silver mining definitively ended in the 1870s. At the same time, mining activity in Chile reoriented to saltpetre operations.
Environmental issues in Chile include deforestation, water scarcity, pollution, soil erosion, climate change, and biodiversity loss, especially in its industry-heavy "sacrifice zones". The country of Chile is a virtual continental island that spans over 4,200 kilometers. It is bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Andes Mountains on the east, and the Atacama Desert in the north; it is home to several important eco-regions, such as the Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests, a biodiversity hot-spot that harbors richly endemic flora and fauna, and the Tropical Andes, which stretches into northern Chile. The country has a wide variety of climates due to its large size and extreme geographical features including glaciers, volcanoes, rain forests, and deserts. Chile faces many environmental issues that impact both its people and economy.
Estadio Municipal "Zorros del Desierto" de Calama is a football stadium in Calama, Chile owned by the Municipality of Calama, it is the home field of the Cobreloa football team and sometimes used by Chile national football team to serve as home ground. This stadium was used like homeground of Deportes Iquique on Copa Libertadores 2017 and Cobresal in Copa Libertadores 2024. This is the Fifteenth largest stadium in Chile by Capacity in 2024.
During most of Chile's history, from 1500 to the present, mining has been an important economic activity. 16th century mining was oriented towards the exploitation of gold placer deposits using encomienda labour. After a period of decline in the 17th century, mining resurged in the 18th and early 19th century, this time concentrating chiefly on silver. In the 1870s silver mining declined sharply. Chile took over the highly lucrative saltpetre mining districts of Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific (1879–83). In the first half of the 20th century copper mining overshadowed the declining saltpetre mining.
Marcela Del Sol, also known as Marcela del Sol-Hallet is Chile-born Australian writer, known for her books ImmorTal and Kaleidoscope: My Life's Multiple Reflections.
The Ministry of Sports is an institution created in 2013 by then-President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, during his first government (2010–2014).
Cristián Eduardo Cuevas Zambrano is a Chilean trade unionist and politician.
José Alfonso Dulanto Rencoret was a Chilean politician and civil engineer who served as minister during Ricardo Lagos' government (2000−2006).
André Sougarret is a Chilean mining engineer who was the CEO of Codelco in 2022–2023. Previously he led the rescue efforts of the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, and has been director of El Teniente mine, and executive vice-president of Empresa Nacional de Minería. Following his leadership in the rescue of the 2010 Copiapó mining accident's 33 miners he was named "engineer of the year" and "mining engineer of the year" by the Chilean engineers' association. In the movie The 33 Sougarret was portrayed by Gabriel Byrne. The film incorrectly portrays Sougarett halting the rescue operation due to safety concerns, a decision he did not make in the real rescue effort.
Punta del Cobre Formation is a geologic formation of Early Cretaceous age cropping out in the interior of Atacama Region, Chile. The formation is of Early Cretaceous age. It is made of massive volcanic rocks, chiefly andesite, dacite, and volcaniclastic rocks representing "flows" and Volcanic breccia of basaltic andesitic and basaltic composition. The rocks of the formation belong to the calc-alkaline magma series. Rocks show intense hydrothermal alteration and hosts significant copper and gold deposits and lesser amounts of zinc and silver. The formation lies in a zone of small-scale mining that supplies the nearby Fundición de Paipote copper smelter. The copper and iron ores of the Dominga prospect are in part emplaced in Punta del Cobre Formation.
