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
Deportation flight lands in Venezuela; government denies criminal gang links
A flight carrying 175 Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States arrived in Caracas on Sunday. This marks the third group to return since repatriation flights resumed a week ago, and among them is an alleged member of a criminal organization, according to Venezuelan authorities.
Unlike previous flights operated by the Venezuelan state airline Conviasa, this time, an aircraft from the U.S. airline Eastern landed at Maiquetía Airport, on the outskirts of Caracas, shortly after 2:00 p.m. with the deportees.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who welcomed the returnees at the airport, stated that the 175 repatriated individuals were coming back “after being subjected, like all Venezuelans, to persecution” and dismissed claims that they belonged to the criminal organization El Tren de Aragua.
However, Cabello confirmed that “for the first time in these flights we have been carrying out, someone of significance wanted by Venezuelan justice has arrived, and he is not from El Tren de Aragua.” Instead, he belongs to a gang operating in the state of Trujillo. The minister did not disclose the individual’s identity or provide details on where he would be taken.
International
Son of journalist José Rubén Zamora condemns father’s return to prison as “illegal”
The son of renowned journalist José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, José Carlos Zamora, has denounced as “illegal” the court order that sent his father back to a Guatemalan prison on March 3, after already spending 819 days behind barsover a highly irregular money laundering case.
“My father’s return to prison was based on an arbitrary and illegal ruling. It is also alarming that the judge who had granted him house arrest received threats,” José Carlos Zamora told EFE in an interview on Saturday.
The 67-year-old journalist was sent back to prison inside the Mariscal Zavala military barracks on March 3, when Judge Erick García upheld a Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the house arrest granted to him in October. Zamora had already spent 819 days in prison over an alleged money laundering case.
His son condemned the situation as “unacceptable”, stating that the judge handling the case “cannot do his job in accordance with the law due to threats against his life.”
International
Miyazaki’s style goes viral with AI but at what cost?
This week, you may have noticed that everything—from historical photos and classic movie scenes to internet memes and recent political moments—has been reimagined on social media as Studio Ghibli-style portraits. The trend quickly went viral thanks to ChatGPT and the latest update of OpenAI’s chatbot, released on Tuesday, March 25.
The newest addition to GPT-4o has allowed users to replicate the distinctive artistic style of the legendary Japanese filmmaker and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away). “Today is a great day on the internet,” one user declared while sharing popular memes in Ghibli format.
While the trend has captivated users worldwide, it has also highlighted ethical concerns about AI tools trained on copyrighted creative works—and what this means for the livelihoods of human artists.
Not that this concerns OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which has actively encouraged the “Ghiblification”experiments. Its CEO, Sam Altman, even changed his profile picture on the social media platform X to a Ghibli-style portrait.
Miyazaki, now 84 years old, is known for his hand-drawn animation approach and whimsical storytelling. He has long expressed skepticism about AI’s role in animation. His past remarks on AI-generated animation have resurfaced and gone viral again, particularly when he once said he was “utterly disgusted” by an AI demonstration.
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