Fires in Chile; Again

Fire season 2024 in Chile, and once again we were there to experience the tragic chain of events.

Just before we arrived in Chile, in early January 2024, forestry experts from CONAF, Chile’s semi-private forest service, updated their annual science- and data-based wildfire prediction: the continuously dry, increasingly hot summer months from late December 2023 through February 2024 would make wildfires inevitable throughout middle Chile. That’s a warning that should be heeded, since it covers an area from the Aconcagua River valley just north of Santiago including the coastal vacation area of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, and extends to the Bío Bío River that cuts Chile in half about 600 kilometers further south. It’s the part of Chile where most Chileans live.

Thirty years ago, Chile’s most influential newspaper, El Mercurio, reported on the front page the following (translation mine):

“FIRES IN VALPARAISO, VIRTUALLY UNDER CONTROL.  Damage is huge from two giant forest fires, and several smaller ones, that have affected the highest neighborhoods of the city. Approximately 2,000 hectares were consumed by the fires, burning three houses and two warehouses in its path. The Minister of Interior traveled to the region, providing 50 million pesos to help pay for the costs of extinguishing the fires and to build ten houses for the affected families.”

This year, on February 5, 2024, three decades later, the headlines in the same newspaper declared (again, translation mine):

“MOST LETHAL FOREST FIRE ON RECORD LEAVES AT LEAST 51 DEAD AND MORE THAN 3,000 HOMES DESTROYED IN THE REGION OF VALPARAISO”.

Unfortunately, that headline was too optimistic. After the fires were finally put out, Chile had suffered the deadliest disaster since the 2010 earthquake and tsunami. Around 8,000 homes were destroyed and 134 residents in the affected areas had died, unable to escape from the torrent of flame that swept through the hills above the city of Viña del Mar. That is fewer deaths than in the Australian fires of 2009 (173), but more than in Greece in 2018 (104) and Hawaii in 2023 (115), all global headline-grabbing wildfire tragedies. That Chile now joins this group is beyond sad. It begs analysis, and action.

Two months after the fire, investigators confirmed what everyone thought, that the fires were intentionally set. But, since few arrests are made of perpetrators of wild fires, general opinion at the time was that again, no one would be held responsible for this fire. Arson is a very difficult crime to prove.

The firefighters that CONAF puts on the front lines in combatting forest fires, and the volunteer firemen who risk their lives to fight all types of fires, are often held up as heroes in an almost impossible attempt to save lives and property at risk in these terrible fires. 

But in this case, after several weeks of investigations, it turned out that the fire was set by a CONAF temporary employee and a volunteer fireman from one of Valparaiso’s many bombero units. The fireman knew how to set and get a good fire going, while the CONAF firefighter was in a position to surreptitiously execute the fire. One was motivated by a sick desire to see fire occur, and the other by a personal need to work and get paid to fight more fires. In a rare case of investigative success, these two men who were responsible for this fire were arrested and tried for their deadly crime.  

It’s been pretty clear for a long time that Chile has a big problem with forest fires. We could go further and suggest that Chile has a cultural problem with fire, per se. Really, do citizens of most relatively better-developed countries, especially those in the “West”, where Chile firmly sits, burn their churches, their historic buildings, their libraries and museums, and their favorite touristic neighborhoods like Chileans did in 2019? They called that rampage a “social uprising”, an “estallido” (so did we, in several postings on this blog at that time). There were many reasons why Chileans protested at that time, but it’s hard to deny that setting fire to 70 subway stations and more than 300 grocery stores in a three-day period exposes a worrying streak of pyromania in Chile and Chileans, fertile ground for sociological and anthropological studies.

Fire does have some historical validation in Chile. They say that during the 1820s, fire was an important factor in the success of the pro-royalty, anti-Chilean government gang of bandits led by the Pincheira brothers, who raided farms, stealing livestock, women, and children around the Chillán area. It seems a spy named Betancur would light fires to send signals to the brothers, warning them of government military movements out to capture them.

And we know that fire was used extensively to clear Chile’s native forests and matorrales for agriculture when the southern half of the country was being settled, and farmers continued to use fire well into the Twentieth Century to clear crop residue after harvest, so new planting could take place.

You can go back in this blog and read about a most terrible wild fire year in Chile in 2017, where a fire in the Maule region consumed 1,200 homes and left 11 dead in the village of Santa Olga, and a more historical piece written with greater detail on  wild fires and firefighting in Chile. Much has changed in Chile since those postings were written, but the challenges presented by wild fire remain.

Over 570,000 hectares of forests, pastures, farms, tree plantations, and fruit orchards including valuable vineyards were burned in the fires of 2017, nationwide. Until then, the fire year 2014-15 had left the greatest area burned, reportedly more than 130,000 hectares. (Note: the fire year in Chile is measured from July to the following June, with the peak danger occurring from December to the following March, Chile’s summer months.) The 2016-17 fires took on global interest not so much for the number of deaths, actually the number was relatively small, but because of the scope and nature of the fires.

It was during the fires of the summer of 2017 that the term “megaincendio” gained currency. Calling a fire a mega fire highlighted the fact that these fires now covered much larger areas than before and, as such, were increasingly difficult to track, combat and extinguish. Additionally, because of the extreme heat produced at the head of the advancing fires, and the speed with which the fires advanced across the countryside, the firefighting community also coined the term “tormenta de fuego” (fire storm), a sixth-generation type of forest fire.

After the terrible fire year of 2016-17, the area burned per year thankfully subsided to earlier levels of around 100,000 hectares, until the fire year 2022-23. It seems as if the fire demons, and the culprits who set the fires (most fires in Chile are man-made), were just waiting for the new government of Gabriel Boric to take power, to test the ability of the new government to deal with extreme emergencies like a wild fire. During President Boric’s first year, over 400,000 hectares burned in wild fires, including the small town of Santa Juana, on the Bío Bío River, where 13 people died.

 

The tragedy of Santa Juana was on the front pages of print media for days, and President Boric made a grand effort to show he would move quickly to help the residents of Santa Juana and the surrounding rural area recover from the fire. Recovery is a stepwise process, and since the fire season transitions almost immediately into the opening of the school year, one of the first tasks after a fire, besides providing shelter for families, albeit temporary, is to make sure the schools can open and children can be learning in spite of the disaster that has beset them and their families. The children of Santa Juana were able to return to school according to schedule, but the rebuilding of homes has taken much longer than residents expected.

The fire in February of 2023, and the specific situation of Santa Juana, revealed once again that it is in the urban-forest interface where adequate fire prevention and protection is the most lacking, resulting in preventable deaths. This is especially true where the vegetation surrounding towns and cities is monoculture plantations of fast growing introduced species like radiata pine and eucalypts. These exotic species have been the basis of the wood and fibre producing sector for decades in Chile, and the Mayor of Santa Juana surely knows the pros and cons of living in an area that, to a great extent, lives thanks to the development of the forest industries and the tree plantations that supply them. After this fire, though, she became a strident voice for better fire control in tree plantations, especially those that butt up against towns.

It is important to note that in some cases, like Santa Olga in 2017 and Santa Juana in 2023, the towns over time grew and expanded closer to the forests, after the forests had been planted. Whether the homes are built too close to the forest, or the forest is planted too close to a town, is a distinction without a difference if your home and family happen to be in the path of a fire. But it points to two distinct aspects of the challenge of developing public policies to prevent and suppress wildfires: territorial planning especially of the urban-rural interface, and forest management as regards fire, especially of dense, homogeneous tree plantations.

The fire this year, 2024, on the outskirts of Viña del Mar and neighboring towns of Quilpué and Quillota, started in the neighboring Peñuelas Forestry Reserve where 8,500 hectares burned. The fire spread into the highly valued National Botanical Garden on the outskirts of Viña del Mar, where four employees died protecting the valuable plant collections. Established in 1917, 90% of its collections holding 1,500 species was destroyed. Fortunately, the valuable unique collections of native vegetation from Rapa Nui and Juan Fernandez Islands survived the fire.

The fire burned through 16 villas, or neighborhoods, most established in the 1960s; 30% were built by the government SERVIU (the autonomous Housing and Urbanization Service, linked to the Ministry of Housing), while 70% were precarious informal self-built housing. Some of this housing benefitted from basic infrastructure, but many did not. Essentially, these are poor, high risk areas for fire, where there are no good escape routes for inhabitants, limited access for firefighters and their equipment, and where there is little or no source of water available for firefighting.

According to early reporting done from the scene, inhabitants were told to evacuate when it became clear the fire in Peñuelas was a threat. Investigations of the events coming out now many weeks and months later suggest the early warning projections by CONAF of the area threatened by the fire were not accurate. Many survivors claim the instructions of when and where to go were not clear, for sure in part because of the speed with which the fire advanced. 

But it is also true that many inhabitants would not leave, regardless of the timing and value of the instructions; they felt they needed to stay to protect their property, even if their homes were destroyed. Many were poor. They were families with “irregular” home ownership, many were single mothers with children and the elderly living with relatives. Only 40% of those who turned up after the fire to register for humanitarian assistance from the government could prove ownership of their home or the land it was on. They did not leave in the face of the fire, even if they could, because they felt they had to stay put to protect their property from usurpers who surely would take advantage of their plight and take their “metro cuadrado”, their square meter of dirt, so to speak, even if it only contained a burned-out structure.

Using aero photos of the area consumed by the fires, and now with the help of drones that take fantastic close-up views of anything you point their cameras at, we have become much more aware of one worrisome aspect of the housing situation in Chile, the growth of tomas, or landgrabs, the rapid, usually considered illegal, establishment of informal housing.

 

There are reportedly 1,400 tomas (sometimes referred to as campamentos) throughout Chile, in which more than 100,000 families live, mostly on the outskirts of  population centers, the most notable being near Arica, Alto Hospicio (outside of iquique), Viña del Mar, and San Antonio. 

The largest toma, Alto Molle, is located in the hills above the port city of Iquique, near Alto Hospicio, in the Atacama desert. This toma has at least 19,000 inhabitants, stretches over 129 hectares and continues to grow. It was started in 2019 by 100 families, mostly Bolivian imigrants, and reportedly houses the headquarters of “Tren de Aragua“, the Venezuelan terrorist group that has Chileans terrified of this new dimension of organized crime in their country.

There is another toma on the outskirts of Chile’s busiest port city, San Antonio, directly west of Santiago and a bit south of Valparaiso/Viña del mar. The toma Cerro la Virgen was established by 900 families on 217 hectares of private land. Legally, the landowner could attempt to remove these squatters, a feat that borders on the impossible, especially in terms of the political rejection of such a massive uprooting of families, many with children and babies. Even if they could figure out how to remove this group, where could they go? In this case, the landowner reportedly would like to sell the land to the government, for more than 50 million US$. If this option is taken, the project becomes a huge public housing project that must start over with establishment of the basic infrastructure.

But it can be done, and probably should be done in this case, as well as in several other places throughout the country where tomas are appearing and growing. It is not lost on many observers of this situation, that simply finding a solution to one illegal toma of land may in fact encourage others with the not unrealistic hope that they too will ultimately be given the land they squat on. But the present situation is untenable, and a solution will take bold and costly action.

Chile has an officially declared housing deficit of 600,000 social (low cost) housing units, but there may be over 900,000 families without homes. The capital, Santiago, reportedly has over 40,000 homeless living in the streets and parks, a situation not historically normal. In 2022, President Gabriel Boric set a four-year target of 260,000 new homes to be built in his administration (2022-26). That is clearly not enough to eliminate the deficit. At the same time, given the very slow recovery of Chile’s economy from the doldrums of the pandemic and the costs of the 2019 social uprising, the housing sector reports at least 110,000 unsold housing units on the market.

Immigration, legal and illegal, across Chile’s northern border with Peru and Bolivia has greatly exacerbated the housing shortage. More than half a million Venezuelan immigrants now reside in Chile, and given today’s situation in Venezuela, a new wave of immigrants from that country is not out of the question.

Over five decades ago, when my Peace Corps cohort served in Chile, the Frei Montalva government designed several massive home building programs to respond to the growing problem of exta-official land seizures by homeless citizens. One such program was called Operación Sitio, in which extensive areas of buildable home sites were procured by the government and turned over to groups of families who participated in self-help construction of their homes. It has been suggested that this type of effort is now needed to face the housing needs for victims of fires like the ones this year, as well as the burgeoning housing demand now precariously squatting in the tomas throughout the country.

Another suggestion we heard while discussing the housing needs for fire victims, on the bolder side of the ledger, would be for the Chilean government to “redirect” a portion of the Peñuelas Forest Reserve to housing for the victims of the fires which started in the Reserve to begin with. A type of payback, that surely could be arranged with more “out of the box” thinking and problem solving.

If you add the discouraging housing deficit to equally disturbing national health care and pension deficiencies, and consider the official projections of very weak economic growth for the next several years, it is dificult to imagine Chile getting back any time soon to the relatively enthusiastic feeling the country had during the Ricardo Lagos administration. In 2000 he predicted that Chile would reach “development” status by 2010. He was always an optimistic man, but many of us who go back and forth to Chile, spending time in Santiago and traveling throughout the country, shared Lagos’s optimism. But in 2007 Michelle Bachelet’s Minister of Hacienda, Andrés Velasco, pushed that projection down the road to 2020, and in 2012 President Piñera suggested Chile would not be considered developed until after 2025. President Boric has yet to predict when he sees Chile reaching developed-economy status, but the outlook is that Lagos-like euphoria over the economy in Chile is a ways off in the future.

Images in the global press of the tragic Viña del Mar/Quilpué/Quillota hillside fires of 2024 showed Chileans and tourists calmly sunning on the beaches below, seemingly indifferent to the horrendous scene just a few kilometers up the hills above them. Shortly after the fires were extinguished, they held their annual week-long Festival de la Canción, during which the mayor of Viña del Mar, happily imbedded in the festivities each night, held a large sign lobbying for a “new forest fires law”. The whole scene over those days was extremely bizarre, normal summer vacationing and populist politicizing, while many Chileans were obviously suffering just up in the hills behind Viña del Mar.

Over the years, CONAF, the Chilean government’s main institution to combat wild fires, has had its budget for fighting fires greatly increased, more and better firefighting aircraft added to their arsenal, and greatly expanded and better trained firefighting brigades. Although municipal fire departments in Chile are staffed with volunteers, they are increasingly better equipped to deal with the growing number of fires. In fact, to fight the fires around Viña del Mar in February 2024, 1,200 firefighters and 160 trucks from 8 regions were deployed.

Chile’s forestry and forest industry sector is in the process of reformation, which is long overdue, but will, eventually, sort out the institutional requirements for a sustainable forest industry, a world-class system of terrestrial and marine biological reserves, modern public and private wild fire prevention and suppression capacity. But it is not there yet.

At the same time, the private companies that own the two million hecares of tree plantations have adopted fire protection regimes, relying on fairly sophisticated air and ground monitoring and suppresion methods to protect their forests, often joining with CONAF to combat fires throughout the country.

Sadly, in the interface where the forest meets people in their cities, villages and homes, fire will continue to produce homelessness and death; these are the areas where people are still poor, and still ill prepared to combat fire. The next fire season in Chile will become active in just a couple of months from now. The hot, dry winds will come, bringing fire and destruction. The people will struggle against the impossible strength of the fires, some fires will be put out, others will burn until there is no more fuel. The response will be valient, but it will be too late, too little, and too slow. There will be valient efforts to comfort and provide relief to the victims.

And, we will try to be in Chile to see how things go. As you can tell, we are guessing it will go about as it did this past season, but hope springs eternal.

Posted by David Joslyn on August 8, 2024, in Leesburg, Virginia