Santiago Places: Puerto Fuy

So last night I went out with family for a nice dinner..we made it to Puerto Fuy, an upscale restaurant on Nueva Costanera that specializes in a sort of seafood inspired fusion. It's not exactly cheap, (prices per plate range from 11,000-15,000), but unlike some other restaurants in its price range it delivers on both quality and service, in fact I would say it does more than just deliver, it excels.

A good place for an out of the ordinary night out for a bite. And the host and waiter pay stations have cool mini tablet PCs with touchscreens.

La Ciudad de Fotografos

Two weekends ago I made it to the outdoor documental film festival held in front of the museum of contemporary art in the barrio Bellas Artes. The documentaries were a collection of some historic reels -an interview with both Fidel Castro and Salavador Allende- and more contemporary titles as well.

The night finished with La Ciudad de Fotografos, a documentary by Sebastian Moreno about a group of photographers that documented public protests under the military regime. The film is told through the eyes of Moreno, whose whole recollection of the military government is based largely in the photographs taken by his father, one of photographers featured in the film.

These weren’t the foreign journalists working with Reuters or the AP, but rather Chileans who felt these events had to be captured on film and formed their own independent group to do so.

The film combined interviews with several of the photographers, the actual photos they had taken at the time and video that had been shot of them taking the photos during the protests.This was dangerous work, the military didn’t want these photos to get out. They had little options for publishing them due to government censorship. at times they would just hang them from their neck and walk through the center to get people’s attention. They were exposed to danger and the risk of detention at a time when people were going missing and being tortured.

While the documentary is about the photographers, it is also about those times that they lived and all the nuances of covering these public protests. It is also a tribute to how powerful photography is in shaping people’s perceptions. In one scene they show a magazine that is to be published, but all of their photos have been censured, every single one.

I highly recommend the film (not sure where you can find it though sorry, but the trailer can be watched here) to anyone who is a fan of photographer or interested in Chile's recent history.

Magic cheeses, Craigslist and the easy way out

As a result Craigslist and several other websites aimed at freelancers have been a frequent destination for my web browsing. If you have spent anytime on Craigslist at all you know that there are quite a few of these posts that promise some high paying figure “working from home” or as a “distributor” of some strange sports gel.

It would be quite nice to just rake in the cash by clicking on web ads or surfing the internet. It would be the easy way out, but I do have to admit, it would also be insanely boring.

The urge to believe that these things might work (and who knows, maybe they do?) seems to be some sort of primordial belief. It goes hand in hand with hope and desperation. Looking for something new, something bigger that will come and lift you out of your hopeless (sic) situation.

In Chile this sensation seems strong. While most Chileans are spared the desperate poverty of some of their neighbors, Chilean slums are much nicer than across the border in Peru or Bolivia, but still there is a large mass of people barely scraping by that haven’t got the things or financial freedom afforded to even the lower middle class in the US.

As a result there are always stories arising in the evening news about the most recent scams. Recently there was a group that called their victims pretending to be a TV executive and told their victims if they brought more cash with them to the studio than other unknown contestants they would win a free house or something. The victim then arrives and is greeted by a nicely dressed individual, who takes their cash and walks off. Middle aged woman seemed particularly susceptible to this tactic.

But there is no scam that seems to have attracted as much attention, both before it was revealed and in the aftermath, as the case of the magic cheeses.

Another characteristic of Chile is that foreign sounding names or companies seem to gain an instant credibility. So when French born “Madame Gil” showed up as a representative of a company called Fermex Chile, people listened.

She had a niche market at her fingertips and was generous enough to cross the world in order to find some “investors.” Starting with a US$ 500 investment, her Chilean partners would manufacture in their home a sort of cheese that could then be used to make cosmetics. It was a market sure to grow and only took 10 days to produce.

The investors, or as we should call them, victims, lined up and bought her package, started making the cheeses and delivering them to Fermex. At first some received a return on their investment, thus intensifying the buzz around the Quesos mágicos.

The buzz grew to an obsession in some places. An entire town in the south of Chile, Coltauco, was almost completely involved. As the word on the street grew, people sold their possessions, even their houses to invest more in this supposedly booming industry. In total Chilean authorities estimate Madame Gil pocketed some US$ 27.8 million through the magic cheese scam.

Then one day she was gone. A continuing stream of TV documentaries and interviews in the paper followed.

Eventually she was caught and is on trial in France. Authorities there have rejected calls to extradite her to Chile. Her victims have organized and hired lawyers, and a judge from France even came to visit some of them. However the investigation moves at a snail’s pace and the chances of her victims recovering their cash seems slight at best.

I realize, maybe it is a stretch to compare the “get paid for doing almost nothing ads” on Craigslist to a magic cheese scam, but when I read pages like this, I can’t help but think of Madame Gil.