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During her term as Minister of Mining,Williams repealed the Ley Reservada del Cobre, [5] approved capital funding for the COCHILCO from Codelco, [6] and passed legislation for small copper mining businesses.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 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022. She previously served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2018 for the Socialist Party of Chile. She is the first woman to hold the Chilean presidency. After leaving the presidency in 2010 and before becoming eligible for re-election, she was appointed as the first executive director of the newly established United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. In December 2013, Bachelet was re-elected with over 62% of the vote, surpassing the 54% she received in 2006. She was the first President of Chile to be re-elected since 1932. Bachelet, a physician who has studied military strategy at the university level, previously served as the Health Minister and Defense Minister under her predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. She is a separated mother of three and identifies as an agnostic. In addition to her native Spanish, she speaks English fluently and has some proficiency in German, French, and Portuguese.
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.
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.
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 on 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 revolving chiefly around 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.
Caracoles was a silver mining district in what is now Antofagasta Region, Chile. At the time of official discovery in 1870 the district was located in Bolivia. The silver ores of Caracoles were discovered on March 24, 1870, by a Chilean prospecting team led by José Díaz Gana that had departed from the port town of Antofagasta. Subsequently the orescame to be extracted with Chilean capital and miners. It was the last major discovery of the Chilean silver rushes. According to Oreste Plath "some old miners believe that" Caracoles was discovered much earlier, presumably in 1811, by two Aragonese men who were escaping persecution during the independence era. Subsequently, the location of the outcrop is said to have been forgotten. The site of Caracoles evolved rapidly from a series of rudimentary shelts and huts in 1870 to a small hamlet in 1871. Afterwards the settlement continued to grow reaching a population of several thousand inhabitants.
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 is a Chilean politician and civil engineer who served as minister during Ricardo Lagos' government (2000−2006).
André Sougarret is a Chilean mining engineer who is currently the CEO of Codelco. 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.
A series of protests began in Panama on 20 October 2023 following the immediate passing of a 20-to-40-year mining contract between the government of Panama and First Quantum Minerals, the operator of Cobre Panamá, the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America, placed 20 minutes away from the western coast of Colon Province and within a protected area of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.
