International
The mother who decided to walk 1,300 kilometers in Chile to get an expensive medicine and save her son from a serious illness
Walking the more than 1,300 kilometers that separate the commune of Ancud in Chiloé from the Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago in Chile may seem like a chimera to many.
Not so for the Chilean Camila Gómez, a mother who completes this challenge with the goal of raising 3.5 billion pesos (US$3.7 million) to buy a vital medicine for her five-year-old son and make visible the cause of patients with rare diseases in Chile.
Time is pressing. His son, Tomás Ross, suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a severe ailment that worsens quickly. If you do not receive the drug as soon as possible, it will be difficult to stop the disease.
“It is a very expensive medicine and a disease that in Chile has no opportunities, but there are opportunities abroad,” Gómez tells BBC Mundo.
Thousands of Chileans turned to Gómez’s case, whose determination went viral in the country.
The mother left Ancud on April 28 with Marcos Reyes, president of the Duchenne Families corporation in Chile, who also has two teenage children with the disease.
It was precisely Reyes who suggested the idea of the walk to Gómez.
“We walk for all the children and families who suffer from the disease. Time is running out,” Gómez said in an interview with the 24-hour national news.
The goal, in addition to raising funds and making their causes visible, is to get Chilean President Gabriel Boric to “bring a bill to Congress” that allows to improve the coverage of rare diseases in the country, as Reyes explains to BBC Mundo.
“He was born healthy, without any problem or complication, until at the age of four we realized that he had difficulty climbing stairs and performing some types of physical activity,” Gómez said on social networks.
“Until that moment there was no cure, but for a few months we have had a hope; in the United States the first drug was approved whose objective is to stop the progression of the disease,” Gómez continued.
This drug is marketed as elevidys and is administered intravenously in patients who, like Ross, are between four and five years old.
There are several types of muscular dystrophy, although Duchenne is the most common form and also one of the most severe.
The disease is unleashed due to a defective gene that results in the absence of dystrophin, a protein that helps keep the body’s cells intact.
Patients can develop problems when walking and running, fatigue, learning difficulties and cardiac and respiratory deficiencies due to the weakening of vital muscles in these functions.
The British national health services indicate that it normally affects young children and that people with this ailment usually live until they are 20 or 30 years old.
Gómez talks to BBC Mundo this Sunday, May 12, in “a little pause, while eating a little.”
It has already been more than two weeks of a journey that has about half left.
At the time of speaking, he is at the Púa toll booth, in the Araucanía Region, still more than 600 kilometers from the capital.
“This journey is crazy, but we think it’s turning out more than imagined,” says Gómez.
The first week was hard, but the mother says that with the passing of the days everything is getting easier.
“It’s impressive how the body adapts to the rhythm and it’s not so terrible anymore,” he says.
He is also helped by the emotional impulse he received by surprise last Friday, May 10 on the occasion of Mother’s Day.
Her son Tomás found her in the city of Temuco, accompanied by her father Alex Ross, to give her a hug, a bouquet of flowers and a recharge of encouragement.
“The boy knows that his mother gathers talks to find him a remedy, but he was only there for a while and turned to Chiloé. Because of the disease he has, he shouldn’t be cold,” Alex Ross tells BBC Mundo.
By May 10, the family had managed to raise more than half of the funds.
Gómez documents his tour on his social media accounts, where he receives thousands of messages of support, hundreds of thousands of views in his videos, the attention of the press and the company of other walkers who join in some sections of his tour.
“This has grown so much that I must help with the whole logistical issue: I look for accommodation, food, I assist them on the route with dry clothes, I look for podiatrists, kinesiologists and medicines,” says Alex Ross.
Camila Gómez and Marcos Reyes expect to arrive in La Moneda at the end of May, depending on the weather conditions.
A long way to make its causes visible that goes beyond the more than 1,300 kilometers that they will have traveled at the end of their journey.
International
China shows at the UN its “condemnation” of Israel for the “violation of Iran’s sovereignty”
The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Fu Cong, showed the “condemnation” of his country against the “violation of the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Iran” after the air attack launched by Israel against multiple targets in that country, the official newspaper Diario del Pueblo reports this Saturday.
That media echoes Fu’s speech to the UN Security Council on Friday, in which he demanded that Israel “immediately stop all its military actions.”
“China (…) opposes the expansion of conflicts, and is deeply concerned about the serious consequences that may arise from Israel’s actions. The intensification of regional tensions does not interest any of the parties involved,” said the Chinese emissary.
Beijing called on Tel Aviv and Tehran to “resolve their disputes through political and diplomatic means, and maintain peace and stability at the regional level jointly.”
In Fu’s view, the Israeli attack will have a “negative impact” on the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program: “China has always been committed to the peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and consultations, and opposes the use of force, illegal unilateral sanctions and armed attacks on peaceful nuclear facilities.”
This Friday, China had already expressed its willingness to “play a constructive role” to curb the escalation of tensions and facilitate conciliation, in line with its traditional position of active neutrality in the region’s conflicts.
The Israeli attack, which according to Tehran caused dozens of deaths, including senior military commanders and at least six nuclear scientists, targeted key facilities such as the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Numerous civilian casualties were also reported.
Israel justified the offensive by claiming that the Iranian regime is secretly developing a program to manufacture nuclear weapons.
For his part, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, promised a “severe response” and assured that the attack would reveal the “evil nature” of Israel.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also expressed concern about the bombing, at a time when Iran and the US The United States is holding talks about the Iranian nuclear program.
International
Donald Trump’s government pauses its program of indiscriminate raides against migrants
The government of US President Donald Trump has decided to pause its campaign of discretionary roundings against migrants in certain areas due to its apparent concern about the growing unpopularity of these methods, according to The New York Times newspaper on Friday.
According to an email to which the newspaper has had access and the confirmation of US officials, the Executive has ordered the Immigration and Customs Control Service (ICE) to pause the beatings that affect the agricultural industry and the hospitality industry.
The spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed in a statement that “the president’s instructions” will be obeyed and the portfolio will also continue to “work to get the worst illegal foreign criminals out of the streets of the United States.”
The decision points out that this campaign of discretionary arrests to try to deport large-scale immigrants is harming industries and electoral constituencies whose support Trump wants to retain for next year’s legislative elections.
The new instructions were transmitted to ICE in an email sent last Thursday asking that “all investigations/law enforcement operations be suspended in work centers in the agricultural sector (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and hotels.”
These new guidelines come in turn after more than a week of intense protests in Los Angeles against this immigration policy and that Trump himself admitted that the raids seem to be affecting the agricultural sector, which in states like California, where beatings have intensified, depend almost exclusively on immigrant labor.
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has implemented an aggressive policy of hard hand against immigration and as a sample of his Cabinet officials recently held a meeting with the ICE leadership to order them to carry out 3,000 arrests a day, a mandate that seems to be behind the intensification of the raids.
International
Trump says he knew “everything” about the attack on Iran and assures that the dialogue remains open
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington “known everything” about the Israeli attack on Iran and that the dialogue on Tehran’s nuclear program “is not dead.”
“We knew everything and I tried to avoid Iran all this humiliation and death. I tried hard to avoid it because I would have loved to see an agreement,” Trump said in an interview with Reuters.
The US president insisted on what he wrote today about the attack on social networks, where he said he gave an ultimatum of 60 days to Tehran to reach an agreement.
“We knew practically everything. We knew enough to give Iran 60 days to reach an agreement and today it is already 61 days,” he explained in the interview, in which he said he did not know what the current situation of the Iranian nuclear program is after the attack launched by Israel, which also ended the lives of key military leaders of the Persian country.
Regarding the dialogue between the US and Iran about the nuclear program of the ayatollahs, Trump assured that “he is not dead”, that “an agreement is still possible” and also recalled that on Sunday a sixth round of dialogue is scheduled in Muscat (Oman) that they consider is now in the air.
“We have a meeting with them on Sunday. Now, I’m not sure if that meeting will take place, but we have a meeting with them on Sunday,” he said.
The United States and Iran have held five rounds of talks on the Iranian nuclear program since April, with Washington demanding that Tehran discard its capabilities both to manufacture an atomic bomb and to enrich uranium, something that the ayatollahs considered unacceptable.
Both Israel and Trump himself had warned of possible preventive attacks on the Persian country due to this refusal by Iran.
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