Free Republic

One by one, they are singing, the men who used to do dirty deeds for the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, whether the United States will attack, and whether Maduro will fall. But these Venezuelans sniff change in the air. As more countries exit Venezuela’s orbit, more allegations are likely to emerge. Two of the men are in prison here in the U.S.: Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former spy mastermind, and Cliver Alcala Cordones, a former general, both of whom have written letters to President Donald Trump airing...

Dec. 17 (UPI) -- Latin America's political shift toward conservative governments was reinforced this week when Chileans elected far-right politician Jose Antonio Kast for the 2026-2030 term. It was the largest vote total ever recorded in a presidential election there. Chile's result strengthened a regional trend that is reshaping domestic political balances and points to closer political and economic alignment with the United States. Chile became the latest country in the region to deliver an electoral swing by handing victory to the opposition and rejecting the ruling coalition's candidate backed by President Gabriel Boric, a leftist. The outcome reflects a...

Amazing things are happening in Latin America. We have Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and now José Antonio Kast in Chile, who just beat Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara with 58% of the vote. The dude is a devout conservative Christian and father of nine: Kast ran mainly on a platform of cracking down on crime and mass immigration, and celebrations in the streets began as his victory was announced. Thousands of Chileans flood the streets to celebrate the win of pro-Trump populist Jose Antonio Kast Rist.Chile has defeated communism today..pic.twitter.com/WsGL43NKWG— Daily Dose of Chaos (@DailyDosOfChaos)...

HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TNND) — The conservative candidate in Chile’s presidential election has won. José Antonio Kast, a former lawmaker on the far right, defeated Jeannette Jara, a liberal ex-official of the current administration. Kast won in the Sunday runoff race with over 58% of the vote, a margin he reportedly said is like a "broad mandate” that carries a “tremendous responsibility.”

A lithium deposit discovered in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border may hold up to 40 million metric tons of the rare metal — possibly the largest ever in the world, which could have a massive impact on the electric vehicle industry, according to a new study. The deposit hidden within the McDermitt Caldera is estimated to hold between 20 million and 40 million metric tons, which would be nearly double the current record of about 23 million metric tons found over the summer beneath a Bolivian salt flat, researchers reported in Science Advances. It would also greatly boost...

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — President José Jarí of Peru said his government on Friday would declare a state of emergency along the country’s southern border and deploy more armed forces to the area as a large number of Venezuelan migrants venture north from Chile, where anti-immigrant sentiment has surged during a fraught presidential campaign. Hundreds of thousands of migrants escaping crises in their home countries or seeking better opportunities abroad long have traversed the continent and the Peruvian border to build new lives in Chile, one of Latin America’s most stable and prosperous nations. But scores of people without legal...

Germany, France, Canada, and Belgium are among 12 nations that signed on to the “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” documenting the so-called “threats” that free speech and the free press pose to what U.S. President Donald Trump refers to as the climate “con job.”Signed at the United Nations’ COP30, the UN’s annual climate confab, the declaration marks the first time that “information integrity” has been on the docket for COP’s Action Agenda.The rise of independent media, social media, and the internet has created a source of non-establishment news that has elevated legitimate criticism of the so-called man-made climate-change...

On Friday, I mentioned that the good people of Chile would go to the polls on Sunday to vote for a new president among other things. As I mentioned, the country's 39-year-old socialist president Gabriel Boric is not very popular, and his approval rating has been around 30% or lower throughout his entire presidency. A lot of that has to do with crime. Homicide rates doubled on his watch, and organized crime, particularly from Venezuela, exploded in Chile. Mass migration from Venezuela — and Haiti — changed entire neighborhoods in the country seemingly overnight and put pressure on infrastructure. The...

Latin America’s most market-friendly country veers right as surging crime and illegal immigration rattle voters Chileans rallied behind hard-line conservatives in elections Sunday as rising anger over crime and immigration pushes the mineral-rich country to the right, setting the stage for a possible alignment with President Trump.In the first round of a presidential vote, some 70% of voters backed the four leading right-wing candidates. José Antonio Kast, a 59-year-old ultraconservative former congressman, secured 24% of the vote, earning a spot in the Dec. 14 runoff vote.Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party, allied with President Gabriel Boric’s leftist government, placed first...

Justin Raimondo: An American Neo-Fascist By Stephen Schwartz FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2005 Dennis “Justin” Raimondo is a minor celebrity in the U.S., thanks to a 10-year career as an amateur demagogue in the libertarian milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area, a political environment where anything goes and nothing matters. He has the familiar personality traits of the type: “sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance combined with gaudy erudition.”  He poses as a conservative but maintains a website at antiwar.com, that features anti-American cranks like Noam Chomsky and is hugely popular with the left – not surprisingly since it...

This isn’t simply a protest vote; it’s a seismic shift that positions figures like José Antonio Kast to capitalize on a fractured electorate and a growing conservative wave.

According to a statement released by the University of Exeter, traces of 76 stone chacus, or funnel-shaped traps, have been spotted in satellite images of northern Chile by Adrián Oyaneder of the University of Exeter. The dry-stone walls of the chacus stretch downhill for hundreds of yards, and end in pits surrounded by enclosures. Hunters would have driven vicuña into the traps and then collected them from the pits. Oyaneder noted that the trap builders sometimes employed natural features in the landscape as arms of their traps. He has also found evidence of settlements in satellite images of Chile's Western...

Many questions about the famous moai statues on Easter Island, Chile, have long eluded scholars—from their cultural significance to how they were made and transported. A recent study in the Journal of Archaeological Science by archaeologists Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona poses the theory that the 92-ton statues were transported in a vertical position, with movers using ropes to “walk” the moai across the island and onto their ahu, or platforms. This theory is supported by the oral traditions of the island’s Indigenous Rapa Nui people, which reference the moai “walking” from...

According to a Phys.org report, large numbers of megafauna bones discovered at archaeological sites in three South American countries suggest that humans regularly consumed giant sloths and giant armadillos between 13,000 and 11,600 years ago. Luciano Prates of the National University of La Plata and his colleagues examined animal bones recovered from 20 archaeological sites across Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and determined that more than 80 percent of them at 15 of the locations belonged to megafauna. It had been previously thought that Ice Age hunter-gatherers in the region hunted the large animals occasionally, but survived day to day by...

The Senate confirmed 107 of President Donald Trump’s nominees in a single vote on Tuesday evening, significantly clearing the backlog of the president’s picks awaiting floor consideration. Senators voted along party lines to approve the large group of nominees, which included former football star and ex-Senate candidate Herschel Walker and former White House personnel director Sergio Gor. The mass confirmation of the president’s picks comes after Senate Republicans changed chamber precedent to expedite the confirmation process, citing months of unprecedented obstruction from Senate Democrats. Trump has nearly 300 civilian nominees confirmed following the massive group vote. The 107 individuals confirmed...

The FBI has determined that in the next six to 18 months, the Venezuelan government will try to use the members of TdA in the US to threaten, kidnap, and kill US-based Venezuelans critical of the Maduro regime. The FBI has said that Venezuelan officials are "likely using" members of the Tren de Aragua gang in order to destabilize the United States as well as other countries, according to a new report from Fox News. This comes after President Donald Trump has said that the government of Venezuela has purposefully been sending the terrorist gang members into the US. According...

In 1985, a unique skull was discovered lying on Yamana Beach at Cape Shirreff in Antarctica's South Shetland Islands. It belonged to an indigenous woman from southern Chile in her early 20s, thought to have died between 1819 and 1825. It was the oldest known human remains ever found in Antarctica.The location of the discovered skull was unexpected. It was found at a beach camp made by sealers in the early 19th Century near remnants of her femur bone, yet female sealers were unheard of at the time. There are no surviving documents explaining how or why a young woman...

An American teenager has been detained on an Antarctic island, creating a major delay in his attempt to fly his small plane to every continent that is being followed online by more than a million people. Chilean authorities stopped Ethan Guo, 19, after he submitted a false flight plan, according to the BBC's US partner CBS News. His deviation from that plan in the air had "activated alert protocols", Chile's General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics said in a statement. Mr Guo was taken into custody after landing on King George Island, home to a number of international research stations and...

The first few images from the Rubin Observatory have dropped, and there are more coming later today. A mosaic of 678 images taken over seven hours of observation shows the Trifid (top right in pink) and Lagoon (center) Nebulae. Image Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially unveiled its first images, and truly, it is going to be as revolutionary as people expect it to be. Thanks to its incredible eye on the cosmos, which is the largest digital camera in the world, the images are absolutely breathtaking – and we can’t even share...

NEW YORK (AP) — The largest digital camera ever built released its first shots of the universe Monday — including colorful nebulas, stars and galaxies.The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on a mountaintop in Chile, was built to take a deeper look at the night sky, covering hidden corners. Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, it will survey the southern sky for the next 10 years.The observatory’s first look features the vibrant Trifid and Lagoon nebulas located thousands of light-years from Earth. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles. A gaggle of galaxies known...