Chile's President Ricardo Lagos, Finance Minister Nicol‡s Eyzaguirre and IDB President Enrique V. Iglesias chat on the banks of the Calle Calle River, in the southern city of Valdivia, where they lhad earlier signed documents for four loans totalling $443.5 million for Chile.Photo by W. Heinz

Contracts for IDB loans totaling $443.5 million were signed today in the Chilean capital of Santiago and the southern port city of Valdivia.

The four operations- for decentralization, technological innovation, support for indigenous communities, and civil society- were signed by Chilean Finance Minister Nicolás Eyzaguirre and Inter-American Development Bank President Enrique V. Iglesias. Chilean President Ricardo Lagos Escobar attended the ceremony as the honorary witness.

The operations included the following:

• A loan of $300 million to spur the country’s process of decentralization by strengthening regional governments and financing projects in education, health, sanitation, rural roads, urban street paving, rural electrification and telephony and flood protection, among others.

• A loan for $100 million to disseminate technological advances within the entrepreneurial sector, particularly to benefit small and medium-sized businesses through research and development, training, and building science and technology infrastructure.

• An $80 million line of credit to help improve the living conditions and protect the cultural identity of Chile’s indigenous communities. The $34.8 million loan signed today will help to finance the first phase of the two-phase initiative that will benefit 12,000 rural indigenous families living in 600 communities that belong to the Aymara, Atacama and Mapuche cultural groups.

• An $8.7 million loan for a program to strengthen alliances between civil society and the state by promoting citizens’ participation in public affairs.

• Yesterday, presidents Lagos and Iglesias participated in a signing ceremony for the Bank’s first private sector credit guarantee- for $75 million- to support the upgrading of the 109.6 kilometer toll road linking Santiago with Valparaíso, the country’s main port.

With the first of 16 seminars scheduled for tomorrow, delegates have begun arriving at the Estación Mapocho Cultural Center, the site for this year’s meeting. A total of 6,000 participants are expected to attend, making the Santiago meeting the biggest in the IDB’s history. In addition to the IDB governors, participants will include senior government officials, representatives of private sector firms, international organizations and nongovernmental groups, and the media. The official Board of Governors meeting will be inaugurated on Monday, March 19.

The meeting site, the Estación Mapocho, is a soaring beaux arts structure built on a steel framework at the beginning of the last century as a railroad station. In 1987 the station saw its last train, and the building was abandoned. In 1991, the government held a national competition to attract proposals for restoring the station as a cultural center that would preserve an important part of the country’s architectural patrimony.

The remodeling, which was done with a minimum of changes in the building’s appearance, was completed in 1994. An effort was made to use typically Chilean materials, such as the copper for the roof and native pine for interior furnishings. Today, Estación Mapocho, with its 16,000 square meters of space and a capacity of 14,000 persons, is the country’s largest building dedicated to culture. Past events taking place there have included appearances by physicist Stephen Hawkins, major political figures, writer Salman Rushdie, and pop star Rubén Blades.

The Estación Mapocho is run by a non-profit corporation. Its board is headed by Chile’s minister of Education, Mariana Aylwin, and its vice president is the mayor of Santiago, Joaquín Lavín.