ENVIRONMENT-CHILE: Activists Want Heads to Roll in Timber Smuggling Scandal

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Sep 1 2005 (IPS) - Environmentalists in Chile want the head of CONAF, the country’s forestry agency, to resign, accusing him of failing to enforce the ban on logging of “alerce” – a valuable endangered hardwood tree species – blocking inspections, and obstructing legal action against alerce smuggling rings.

A total of 26 people are facing charges in the case involving the illegal logging and smuggling of alerce in southern Chile. The scandal originally broke out in May 2004.

Among those facing prosecution is Mayor Nelson Schwerter of Fresia, a town in the southern province of Llanquihue.

Although CONAF (National Forestry Corporation) director Carlos Weber was arrested last year in connection with the case on charges of influence trafficking and bribery, he was released for lack of evidence after his arrest triggered an outcry among government officials and he was publicly defended by the agriculture and interior ministers.

The companies Baron Chile Limitada – owned by U.S. businessman Frank Pemberthy – and Forestal Sarao are implicated in the smuggling.

Alerce is listed as an endangered species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which banned logging of the trees in 1976.

The wood from alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) is one of the most valuable in the world. The slow-growing species can live for thousands of years. One specimen in Chile was found to be over 3,600 years old.

The alerce is a species of larch, a conifer that grows only one centimetre in thickness every 15 to 20 years. It can reach 70 metres in height and four metres in diameter.

Alerce trees are unique to the coastal temperate rainforests of Chile’s Los Lagos (lakes) region – their primary habitat – located between 800 and 1,200 km south of Santiago, and Argentina’s southern Patagonia region.

The wood fetches up to 500 dollars an inch (2.54 cm) in the United States, Japan and Europe.

But smugglers purchase alerce for a mere three dollars an inch from poor farmers in Chile who cut the trees on their own or work for logging companies that are supposedly harvesting trees that were already dead, taking advantage of a loophole in Chile’s environmental legislation that allows companies to sell deadwood.

The legal loophole allowing dead trees to be sold encourages the use of methods for killing the trees, like draining their sap or placing wires around their trunks, forestry engineer Mauricio González explained to IPS.

And because the wood of the alerce is so hard and impermeable, due to its slow growth, even trees in forests that have burnt down can be harvested for their wood.

In August, the international environmental watchdog Greenpeace reported illegal logging of alerce in the National Andean Alerce Park, a protected area in the province of Llanquihue, where the trees were cut down by the Forestal Río Puelo, a mysterious company whose property borders the nature reserve.

The revelation, which was the result of a six-month investigation including photographic evidence and maps, prompted the State Defence Council to meet with Greenpeace representatives on Aug. 18.

But the directors of CONAF “have chosen to remain silent, keep a low profile and try to hush up the reports,” said Rodrigo Herrera, a forestry engineer who is the coordinator of Greenpeace-Chile’s forests campaign.

Herrera told IPS that the Forestal Río Puelo company “is hiding behind plans for harvesting and selling dead trees,” as authorised by CONAF.

Socialist Deputy Fidel Espinoza, chairman of a congressional investigation commission created after the scandal first broke in May 2004, said “the destruction of the alerce forests is the country’s worst environmental disaster.”

“In the coastal mountains (in the Los Lagos region), 2,600 trees more than 2,000 years old were destroyed, right under the eyes of CONAF,” said Espinoza.

As the criticism mounted, Weber and CONAF regional director Pedro Bahamondes decided to dismiss Carlos Poblete, CONAF director of inspections in the province of Llanquihue, and two inspectors, on Aug. 22.

Two days later, Poblete published an open letter denouncing the existence of “a systematic and incomprehensible dismantling of CONAF’s oversight and inspection capacities since 2000,” when the government of President Ricardo Lagos took office.

Poblete said he had warned Weber of this situation in an internal memo in May 2001, after the start that year of “a veritable Greek tragedy for the oversight of the forests in the Los Lagos region, which possesses more than 1.5 million hectares of native forests that are under pressure from logging interests, but only 20 inspectors.”

Poblete, a forestry engineer with a masters degree from Spain, added that the funding for on-the-ground inspections were cut, and that the inspectors began to be assigned to other tasks, while aerial inspections of forests virtually ceased.

“Illegal logging of alerce in the first four years of the current government rose fivefold in comparison with the 1990-1999 period,” said Poblete in the open letter.

The former chief inspector of Llanquihue added that Weber and Bahamondes fired him in order to make him a scapegoat and thus silence criticism of CONAF, because “I have never been a very comfortable subordinate.”

According to Poblete, he had insisted on continuing inspections after the alerce smuggling scandal erupted, despite orders not to do so.

He also said he disobeyed instructions not to sign reports on illegal logging for the courts, and that against “institutional instructions,” he appeared before the judge handling the alerce smuggling case.

He also stood up to “institutional pressure” to sign a document that would have prevented the judge from summoning other inspectors to testify, and he gave his testimony to the congressional investigation commission, “from an independent viewpoint that was critical of CONAF’s official posture.”

Environmental organisations are demanding that Weber resign and that he be held accountable for the alerce logging scandal.

Weber, in the meantime, has kept mum in the face of the allegations from Poblete, who has been backed by the Forestry Engineers Association for the Native Forest.

Flavia Liberona, the head of the Native Forest Network, a local non-governmental organisation, commented to IPS that the dismissals in CONAF provided no solution to the illegal logging of alerce, because “the responsibilities are political, not administrative.”

A new bill on native forests, which has been making its way through Congress for 13 years, should eliminate the current regulatory framework that provides loopholes for the exportation of tree species that have been declared “national monuments”, like alerce, araucaria or South American monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), belloto (Beilschmiedia berteroana) and rauli or Chilean beech (Nothofagus procera), said Liberona.

The activist argued that it is essential for the Lagos administration to “send out clear signals, and to decide once and for all to put into place a policy that would effectively protect alerce” by removing the legal loopholes, such as the one authorising the harvesting of “dead” trees.

“On the political front, Carlos Weber and Pedro Bahamondes should assume responsibility for the scandal, in which the commercialisation of alerce has been linked to CONAF officials,” said Liberona.