Skateboarding Takes Over Chile | GREETINGS FROM SANTIAGO

South America is skateboarding’s great untapped wellspring. The first to make their mark internationally were the Brazilians, of course, but in their wake almost every country in Latin America has made its own contribution to skateboarding on the world stage from Argentina’s Diego Bucchieri and later Milton Martinez to Peru’s Angelo Caro, Colombia’s Jhancarlos Gonzalez, Chile’s Matthias Torres and so on. One of the reasons for this emerging phenomenon is that skateboarding, with its relatively low requirements in terms of terrain on which to learn and cost impediment to beginning, is almost tailor-made for South America’s youthful gusto for life. It is often pointed out that skateboarding is massive in Brazil (indeed, the country has its own hermetically-sealed skate industry), but skateboarding is a gigantic movement in several South American nations today - Mike Vallely’s one-man demo in Mexico City in 2008 drew in excess of 100,000 devotees, by way of example. Of those largely