Treading on Chile’s toes

Harebrained ideas usually come from North America, but now the South seems to want a piece of the action. Three Chilean architects want to dig a 150-kilometer-long tunnel from Bolivia to an artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. (That’s almost three times the length of the Channel Tunnel.)

Why do this? Well, because Bolivia is landlocked and would really like a port on the Pacific so they can ship their natural gas and minerals and finally start earning some real money. Chile took their coast away in the War of The Pacific 130 years ago. Apparently this is still a touchy subject, because the reason for the tunnel idea is that nobody wants to “tread on Chile’s toes”, according to the Financial Times.

Bear in mind that Chile is a country with 6,435 kilometers of coastline. Is it too much to ask that they give, say, 20 of them to Bolivia? To patch up old grievances, sort of like when Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt. Would they even know it was missing? If Peru (2,414 kilometers of coastline) chips in, they could give Bolivia a wafer-thin corridor to the sea. Wouldn’t that be being the bigger countries?

Or how about just letting poor Bolivia (literally one of the poorest countries in Latin America) ship whatever they want through a Chilean harbor? Sweden ships iron ore through Narvik in Norway, so what’s the problem? Do they really have to go underground? And who says the ground doesn’t belong to Chile and Peru?

I can’t imagine this project every being carried out, but it certainly has a good shot at placing among the dumbest ideas of the decade.