Chile’s Wildfires: Another Pinochet Legacy

 

People who lost their homes and crops did not have fire insurance and could not recover those losses

Abstract: When wildfires broke out in Chile in 2024, I began a redux of my previously published photo essay about Chile’s 2017 wildfires – the worst in the country’s history. In the years since, more severe wildfires have scarred the landscape, with 2024’s fires the deadliest on record.

Media blames the fires on climate change, El Niño, higher temperatures, strong winds and drought. While true, another major contributing factor to the wildfire disasters is widespread plantations of highly combustible pine and eucalyptus trees.

Chile has approximately 2.2 million hectares of these flammable plantations that fuel the out-of-control wildfires and firestorms.

The human toll in 2024 is over 100 killed with hundreds missing. More than 43,000 hectares have burned. This year’s wildfires and firestorms have been catastrophic.

Vast expanses of industrial pine and eucalyptus plantations grow on land stolen from Mapuche and rural communities during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet under Forest  Law 701. Today the same Pinochet constitution is still law in Chile as is Law 701.Wildfires are another of Pinochet’s deadly legacies.