By: Rachel Sayers
Produced & Edited By: Andrew Davis
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| Patagonia National Park. Photo © Conservacion Patagonica |
On the southern
tip of South America lies a land of rugged beauty. To the west, the jagged
peaks of the Andes dominate the sky, broken only by the deep fjords running
through their midst. To the east rests the world’s second largest icefield,
running for nearly 8,000 miles before giving way to a land of wide open plains
and coastal volcanoes.
Vast and
untamed, the Patagonia region is one of the world’s last remaining frontiers.
As with all frontier lands, its wild nature has attracted the usual variable of
characters—the natives, the settlers, and the rich barons, all vying for lands
they believe to be theirs. On the frontier, ownership is uncertain, boundaries
remain in constant flux, and the people are at the mercy of those with the
power to take what they wish.
At the center of this struggle for land are the Mapuche, aboriginal people whose history in the region dates back as far as 500 B.C. Their struggle for land is waged against several facets, including foreign conservationists, mining companies, and gas conglomerates funded by the very government who swore to protect them.
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| Portrait of a Gaucho. Photo © Alex Proimos, Creative Commons |
According to
the International Labor Convention 169, indigenous peoples must be consulted
before the government can authorize any sort of extraction on their land.
Unfortunately, according to Alejandro Parellada from the International Work
Group for Indigenous Affairs, ambiguous laws and corruption in the judicial
system have made land titles difficult to garner for indigenous tribes.
“The lands we
used yesterday to raise our animals or support our farms, have today been
destroyed. Dozens of new tracks and paths are opened everyday, all kinds of
machines circulate by the hundreds, wells drilled in record time have
transformed our community landscape, spills and explosions have occurred over
and over in the last few weeks, many of them concealed by YPF,” The Mapuche
Confederation said in a statement.
The lack of
government regulation comes as little surprise when you consider that Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF),
the largest oil and gas producer in Argentina, became renationalized in 2012.
“There are many interests at play on the lands
claimed by the country’s indigenous peoples,” Parellada said. “The significant
implementation gap in legalizing indigenous land rights has been going on for
20 years and the path is a long and complicated one. We need the action of
regional and international groups, people without vetted interests, to really
make a difference.”
Greed, however, is
not at the heart of all the wealthy barons interested in the Patagonia region.
For Doug Tompkins, a U.S. billionaire famous for founding outdoor-clothier The
North Face, conservation and a deep love for the natural wonders of Patagonia are
the argumentations for his purchase of more than 2 million acres in the region.
Tompkins founded
the Conservation Land Trust in 1992 as a non-profit with a focus on protecting and
restoring the wilderness lands in Argentina and Chile, expanding it to include two
other NGOs in the following years. According to its mission statement, Tompkins
believes in the philosophy known as deep ecology, whose main platform runs on
the belief that human beings have no right to reduce this richness and
diversity of nature except to satisfy vital needs.
Tompkins, and
others like him, are currently buying up vast tracts of land in the Patagonia
region and transforming them into environmentally pristine land to be given
back to the government as national parks. Thus far the billionaire has donated
more than 880,000 acres back to the government, opening two national parks and
expanding the boundaries of five others.
Opponents of
Tompkins state he is doing little except robbing the indigenous and local people
of these natural wonders and stifling the development of natural resources in
areas where people have depended on them, economically, for generations. Alison Kelman, who works
for Tompkins Conservation, disagrees.
“You come in and
turn a culture and its current economy on its head, there’s bound to be initial
opposition,” Kelman says. “It’s different, but [the locals] are beginning to
fundamentally understand the purpose of a national park and the economic
potential it has. It's slowly integrating itself into the surrounding towns and
we’re receiving lots of support.”
Kelman also stresses
that Tompkins Conservation works diligently with the local landowners and
indigenous people to be sure that they are willing to sell, even offering ‘land
swaps’ to give them access to land elsewhere. For those who wish to stay, local
classes and certification programs are given to find jobs within the park and
to integrate ecotourism into their economy.
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| Patagonia National Park. Photo © Conservacion Patagonica |
Legal Action
Other foreign
landowners have not been so accommodating. The Benneton Group, an Italian
clothing manufacturer who currently owns more than 2.5 million acres in the
region, is infamous for evicting entire communities of Mapuche people from their
land.
According to the Parellada, the problem once again lies in the state making indigenous people’s access to legal land ownership complicated and unnecessarily difficult.
According to the Parellada, the problem once again lies in the state making indigenous people’s access to legal land ownership complicated and unnecessarily difficult.
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| Patagonia National Park. Photo © Conservacion Patagonica |
“Important
progress is being made in the indigenous organizational process, with
coordination between different local organizations, and they can put pressure
on the provincial and national governments to meet their legitimate demands,”
Parellada said.
As more
indigenous communities continue to fight for their constitutional right to land
ownership, the landscape of the Patagonia frontier will continue to change.
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