While LA burned this January, fires at the other end of the Americas have fed a long-running political battle in Patagonia
In January 2025, the Anglosphere was transfixed by the personal tragedies and cinematic horror of the wildfires in Los Angeles and surrounding areas of California.
It’s easy to understand why. A televised apocalypse, covered 24/7 by the English-language media, taking place in a city embedded in the Anglosphere’s cultural consciousness, even for those who have never been there. The stories of tragedy on a human scale: the families forced to flee, then returning to burnt-out wrecks of places they once called home.
But then there’s the epic, larger-than-us, quality to an event that seems to pit humanity against nature, albeit one tinged with the inescapable thought: is humanity, in its reckless hunger to construct and consume, somehow to blame for nature’s revenge?
It’s a question as old as Noah’s Flood or the Epic of Gilgamesh: are natural disasters ever really just natural disasters? Alongside the victims of such disasters, do humans also need culprits – divine or earthly as the case may be – to make sense of them?
At the same time that storied LA neighbourhoods were being reduced to ash, forest fires were burning out of control at the other end of the Americas in Patagonia, thousands of miles to the south. (While these didn’t get the same wall-to-wall coverage as the fires in LA by the Anglophone media, there are some notable exceptions, including this article by Kristin Deasy for the LA Times).
In a fascinating piece for the Argentinian publication Revista Crisis – with lots of links for those who want to read more! – Hernán Schiaffini writes about the Patagonian fires from a local perspective. A “Patagonian by adoption” – so his bio says – Schiaffini places the fires in a rich local context. An anthropologist by training, he also identifies a universal human thread: the need to find someone to blame. “For whom does the earth burn?”, he asks. “The need to make sense of disaster feeds mutually antagonistic accusations”, he writes, “and rekindles old disputes”.
Fires are not new to Patagonia. What Schiaffini calls “possibly the largest forest fire in Argentinian history” took place in 2015, destroying 40,000 hectares. There was an extensive spate of fires in 2021, and others since. In 2025, fires have been concentrated around Epuyén in Chubut Province and El Bolsón in Río Negro Province. (When Translator looked at the at the area around El Bolsón on Google Maps in preparing this Dispatch, there was still an red flame icon indicating an ongoing forest fire and directing traffic towards the local government Facebook page for more information).
Forest fires are part of nature. But their dynamics and frequency are changing. Forestry engineer Hernán Colomb tells Schiaffini: “what might happen naturally every fifty or sixty years is today much more frequent than that, in part because of human impact”. At the same time, the spread of real estate developments into forested areas means that when a forest fire does take place, it is no longer over the horizon. Instead, something that previously happened out of sight and out of mind becomes a human problem.
The fires don’t just create victims. They generate wild, unsubstantiated rumours about who or what is to blame: whispers of drums of oil stocked in the forests, of nails being thrown onto the road to hamper fire response, or of a white Toyota Hilux said to have been seen driving off from a place where a fire began. It happened in 2021 too, Schiaffini recalls. An investigation into a car some linked to possible arson was eventually called off. The strongest hypothesis for how the fires started that year remains a faulty power line (under the responsibility of local government).
This time around the local governor of Chubut Province, Ignacio Torres, has blamed indigenous Mapuche – or “pseudomapuches” as he calls them. The forest fire issue has been folded into a wider ongoing confrontation between the Mapuche and the Argentine state about land rights. (Joe Lewis, the owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, has been tangentially – and controversially – involved in this through his ownership of a Lago Escondido in Patagonia).
In mid-January, the Mapuche community of Lof Pailako was evicted by police and the Argentinian national flag raised above the land, partly on the pretext of their alleged involvement in forest fires. A week later Torres blamed the “usual criminals” for what looked like the revenge burning of trucks and machinery on a farm linked to the family of a political ally. Torres pointed to the Buenos Aires phone numbers of some Mapuche to discredit their claims of indigeneity, calling them chantas, Argentinian slang for swindlers.
Independent Chilean media later carried a claim of responsibility for the farm fire from a Mapuche liberation organisation, while disclaiming any part in starting the forest fires. “We only attack the machinery and material interests of the bourgeois winka [a term for non-Mapuche people]”, the statement read, “not nature, not our people, nor even poor winka, even if they are fascists”. Torres and other politicians responded with promises to lock up the criminals and defend the sanctity of property rights.
Within all this Schiaffini sees a growing polarisation, animated by the notion that the fires wouldn’t have happened at all were it not for the Other: either (a) the indigenous Mapuches or (b) real reckless estate speculators and the government. But is this really true? “There are many more fires than we hear about”, Schiaffini writes – it’s only when there are political or economic stakes that the media latches onto them, creating a false impression that this must always be the case.
More complex questions of causality or stewardship remain unanswered while the same cycles of rhetoric and behaviour are repeated from year to year. (One example: the fire brigade workers who are “the heroes of the summer and forgotten of the winter”.)There are two certainties left, Schiaffini writes. One is that “how the fires are understood maps onto power relations”. The second? That the fires will – eventually – go out.
The full original article in Spanish by Hernán Schiaffini is available here: Incendios en el sur: lo que crepita detrás de las llamas, Revista Crisis, 10 February 2025.
Revista Crisis is an Argentinian magazine of politics and culture.
