ENVIRONMENT: Greenpeace Films Death of a Jungle in Argentina

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 31 1998 (IPS) - Greenpeace activists began to film and take photos Friday of the destruction of the Yungas jungle – one of Argentina’s biologically richest ecosystems – by bulldozers opening a path for the construction of a pipeline to transport gas to northern Chile.

Claudia Acosta, a spokeswoman for the international environmental watchdog, told IPS the activists had set up a station in the jungle from which to document and later publicise the destruction of the jungle home of the Kolla indigenous community, under the threatening gaze of security agents who set up their own camp nearby.

The planned documentary and photo exhibit is seen as the last resort in the wake of the failure of lawsuits attempting to block the project. An initial federal court ruling favourable to the environmentalist and indigenous claimants was overturned by an appeals court.

The Nor Andino consortium, headed by the Belgian company Tractebel in association with the U.S. company Sothern, Chile’s Eldenor and Argentina’s Techint, has now been given the green light to go ahead with the project, while Greenpeace has been prohibited from staging protests, under threat of prison sentences.

Amidst what the Kolla community describes as a “war setting,” the consortium has begun burying a 70-km pipeline which is to supply gas to northern Chile.

Bulldozers began to open 12-metre wide swaths in the jungle after installing “danger” signs near the homes of the Kollas, a community which has staunchly resisted the project and suggested an alternative path for the pipeline each time it was consulted.

“The company’s problem is that if it lays the pipeline in farther south, the unfeasibility of the project will be made evident, because another consortium, Gas Atacama, is building a parallel pipeline there with the same objective: to pipe gas to northern Chile,” Acosta remarked.

The longer Gas Atacama pipeline is preferred by Greenpeace and local indigenous groups, even though it is not totally harmless to the environment and way of life of local residents. The consortium is comprised of the U.S. firm CMS Energy and Spain’s Endesa, which ensure that there is much more gas than their pipeline will be able to handle.

The two consortiums, which each plan to invest around two billion dollars, are thus caught up in what environmentalists describe as an “absurd” race to reach the northern Chilean city of Antofagasta first.

“This is an economic war in which the environment is being sacrificed,” Acosta asserted.

The Nor Andino pipeline will not only cross the Yungas jungle, one of Argentina’s two most biologically rich ecosystems, but will destroy archaeological sites and cemeteries of the Kolla people, who have subsisted in the jungle for centuries without potable water, electricity – or gas.

The ancestors of today’s Kollas were considered the guardians of the extreme southern tip of the Inca empire.

The Yungas jungle is a mountainous region of three million hectares which encompasses southern Bolivia and four provinces of northwestern Argentina: Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca and Tucuman.

The jungle is home to the last 200 “yaguarete”, South America’s largest sub-species of jaguar. Yungas (which means “abundance” in a local indigenous tongue) also provides a habitat for toucans, ocelots, pumas, a number of species of frogs, a huge variety of insects and 60 percent of Argentina’s bird species.

The Ente Nacional de Gas, the state body which authorised the project, gave the go-ahead after contracting a group of environmentalists which was given 15 days to draw up an impact study. Nor Andino also hired special advisers, and claims to have adopted measures to minimise impact on the environment.

But Greenpeace remains highly sceptical.

“Techint contributes 10,000 dollars a year to the Wildlife Foundation, which after supporting us at first was forced to accept the creation of a Yungas reserve, which in our view is only ‘green make-up’,” said Acosta.

From their jungle station, Greenpeace activists warned that they would not give up their fight and would do all they could to block the project, confident that they would be able to count on widespread support once viewers witnessed the death of a jungle.