Letter from Punta Arenas
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
SOUTHERN EXPOSURES Letter from Punta Arenas BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO PUNTA ARENAS POST-PINOCHET Chile is trying to slow, if not stop, the environmental degradation that accompanied the free-market...
...The maritime heyday of the city—when it had grand opera and masked balls and newspapers in several languages—ended with the opening of the Panama Canal...
...A new pipeline has just been dedicated in northern Patagonia to carry Argentine fuel to Chile (assuming good relations can be maintained between these often fractious neighbors, who even now have a border dispute in arbitration...
...soon one will be able to engage in these activities only when and where allowed...
...The impending law would not simply protect the indigenous species...
...a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary—pillars of the downtown business community—recalling how they were rounded up as suspected subversives, imprisoned and tortured in 1973, but declaring that they bear no grudges...
...Their numbers diminished rapidly, and then they were gone...
...The Parrillar Reserve, 31 miles southwest of town, is farthest...
...A visit to the newly renovated historical museum in the Victorian Menendez-Braun mansion in Punta Arenas provides the most likely answer: It will decline...
...There are scattered references, both positive and negative, to "Pin8," a pun on pinocho...
...Southern Chile has a climate corresponding to that of the Pacific Northwest and is similarly covered with cold-temperate rain forests...
...The far South (known collectively as the 12th Region, of which Punta Arenas is the capital) has a diversified economy, including ranching (2.6 million head of sheep, half the nation's total, as well as 130,000 cattle), fishing, coal mining, shipbuilding, logging, tourism, and the petrochemical industry...
...They have embarked on a campaign to convince the national government to invest in a new port for Punta Arenas that would be globally competitive again...
...The Magallanes Reserve, just 5.5 miles from downtown, is centered on the upper reaches of the Rio de las Minas, where coal and gold were mined at the end of the last century...
...Naturally, neither landowners nor the timber industry is happy about this...
...In a month I have seen two beggars and one babbling schizophrenic on the street?this in a city of 100,000...
...Huge subsidized housing projects are springing up in the hills behind town, block after block of monotonous yet functional prefabricated trailer-like units...
...The trick, of course, is to do this without derailing the engine of growth, the policies attractive to international investment...
...The principles of environmentally sound forestry trumpeted by conaf and embodied in the new law no doubt will be tested shortly...
...According to conaf, there are 11 "endangered," 26 "vulnerable" and 32 "rare" species of plants and animals that will benefit from its upgraded role...
...After they are exhausted, that prospect will loom again...
...Most of the land was logged or burned 40-50 years ago...
...So far, Santiago is wary...
...SOUTHERN EXPOSURES Letter from Punta Arenas BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO PUNTA ARENAS POST-PINOCHET Chile is trying to slow, if not stop, the environmental degradation that accompanied the free-market "Chilean economic miracle...
...One factor helping to bring the law into being is public indignation over the Fun-do Venecia case, involving the illegal logging of 10 1,000-year-old alerce trees on private land...
...It has many wonderful relics and photographs, and a small plaque that reads: "The Fathers struggled to protect the Indians and help them deal with the modern world...
...Today the public areas are nearly all located in regenerating second growth, and an interpretive nature trail explains ecological succession...
...But production has already peaked...
...Punta Arenas is not the ideal place to examine conditions in Chile as a whole...
...2,400 have followed...
...Consider the Law of the Native Forest, now moving through the legislative process...
...The issues can be seen concretely in the hills west of Punta Arenas...
...To complicate matters, Pinochet remains as head of the Army until 1997, and shows no inclination to retire...
...The authorities were able to levy merely token fines...
...Conaf has established two forest reserves that are popular picnicking and camping spots for the locals, but are seldom visited by foreign tourists (there is no public transportation to them...
...Often a common cold was enough to carry them off...
...It is time to move on...
...The coins issued by the Pinochet regime, showing a winged female figure breaking her chains and inscribed "Libertad 1973," are finally disappearing...
...To reach the Magallanes Reserve you travel west on Avenida Presidente Salvador Allende Gossens, actually a prolongation of Avenida Independencia...
...They reach great size but grow exceedingly slowly, and in the Pinochet years there had been a strong incentive to clear-cut the native forests and replant with fast-growing exotics like Monterey Pine, from California...
...Although in this way the harvest cycle could be speeded by a factor of two or three, all the indigenous biodiversity was eradicated...
...A new upscale hotel has opened downtown...
...Last February a contract was announced with a North American consortium called Trillium, for the exploitation of virgin forest across the Strait of Magellan on the Big Island of Tierra del Fuego...
...In the Sanctuary of Maria Auxiliadora in Punta Arenas is the Mayorino Borgatello Museum, dedicated to the labors of the Salesian missionaries to the Fuegian and Magellanic Indians at the turn of the century...
...it would give the National Forest Corporation (CONAF), the approximate equivalent of our Forest Service, broad power to regulate forestry on private land...
...Restoring social justice as a top priority, while keeping the economy in good health, was the most difficult task facing the post-Pinochet government of Patricio Aylwin...
...Alerce translates as "larch," but the tree is much more like a Giant Sequoia...
...Since enap currently supplies half of the nation's oil and all of its natural gas, alternative sources must be developed...
...It still confronts his newly inaugurated successor, Eduardo Frei (son of the previous president with the same name...
...The industry is threatening a challenge to the legislation on the grounds that it violates property rights—despite its having been modified so that aggrieved parties may appeal conaf judgments in the courts...
...The scars of what is openly referred to as "the dictatorship" are not very evident here...
...The National Petroleum Enterprise (enap) has an enormous infrastructure: storage and shipping depots, pipelines, refineries, and the world's most modern methanol plant...
...The last full-blooded Ona died in 1982 —as everyone in this town knows...
...The native trees, collectively called Southern Beeches, have unfamiliar names like coigue and lenga...
...Along the road to it there are seemingly endless ugly clear-cuts, and a sawmill is still operating at its edge...
...Punta Arenas' politics are gently Left-of-Center and the naming of that street may have been a bit of deliberate provocation, since the largest Army base in the region fronts on it...
...The "Chilean miracle" has obscured the fact that the country's social problems have not gone away...
...Oil and natural gas account for 30 per cent of the regional economy...
...Alas, good intentions are not always enough...
...Recent polls have consistently shown a high level of public support for environmental protection, and that has allowed a series of striking reforms to advance in Congress...
...One wall reads: "So long, General...
...Punta Arenas is the gateway to the Torres del Paine National Park, which is only beginning to achieve a worldwide reputation as a scenic and ecotouristic destination...
...Had oil and gas not been discovered, Punta Arenas would have sunk into quiet obscurity as the world capital of frozen mutton export...
...So, too, is the rancor...
...One person I met said the Allende designation was a disgrace—like calling it Avenida Hijo de Puta, "Son of a Whore Avenue...
...A proposed revision in the hunting and fishing laws, for example, promises to change the basic philosophy of regulation: In the past one could hunt or fish, except when and where prohibited...
...Its facilities are so far-flung that it operates its own transportation system for its employees and their families...
...Some people call the whole thing Independencia, out of inertia or political conviction...
...The Minister of Agriculture, Juan Agustin Figueroa, dismisses the complaints as "archaic visions of property rights that have no relation to the modern vision or to the indispensable need to protect the environment...
...within a decade the reserves will be depleted...
...It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and little visible poverty...
...But what will happen to the Magellanic economy once the oil boom here is over...
...it also attains great age and size, and is treated as a national treasure...
...The number of game wardens will be increased, too, as will their authority...
...thanks for all the death...
...Regulating sportsmen, however, is easy compared to regulating the extractive industries that were coddled by General Augusto Pinochet during his 15-year rule, which ended in 1990...
...so has a new backpacker's hostel...
...The first well was sunk in Tierra del Fuego in 1945...
...The graffiti are pretty tame...
...La Prensa Austral, the morning paper, prints the occasional reminder of the bad old days: an interview with an artist who was driven into exile in Canada, became a master carpenter, and has returned after 17 years hoping to resume his career in Punta Arenas...
...If there is to be a savior of the local economy, it will have to be tourism...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis...
...For the first time in living memory, sportsmen will need to produce licenses on demand...
...But civic leaders, remembering their roots, look with concern at their obsolete and deteriorating port...
...The Indians had to deal not only with the white man's ways, but his diseases...
...Yet even they acknowledge that the new controls are long overdue...
Vol. 77 • March 1994 • No. 3
