Thursday, August 13, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
ARGENTINA-URUGUAY: Dispute Still Simmering Below the Surface
Marcela Valente
- Although things have settled down, the dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over a paper pulp mill on a border river that has marred the fraternal relations between the two countries for the past four years continues to simmer.
The biggest impact is from the roadblock that local residents of Gualeguaychú have manned day and night for two years straight at the access to the Libertador General San Martín international bridge connecting that eastern Argentine city with the Uruguayan town of Fray Bentos.
The people of Gualeguaychú are protesting the pulp mill built by the Finnish firm Botnia on the Uruguay River – the border between the two countries – near Fray Bentos.
The protests began when plans for the factory were announced four years ago. Although the plant is located 22 km from Gualeguaychú, people in the town, which depends heavily on tourism and agriculture, are worried about the risk of pollution posed by the mill and the potential impact on tourism and fishing.
The Argentine city of 80,000 is located on the Gualeguaychú river, which runs into the Uruguay river. The Botnia plant’s 120-metre high smokestack can be seen from Gualeguaychú’s most picturesque beach resort, Ñandubaysal, across the Uruguay river.
The protesters argue that the installation of the plant was not approved by the bilateral commission set up to administer the Uruguay river. But the Uruguayan government.argues that the Argentine government was duly informed at the time and raised no objections.
The plant uses water from the Uruguay river in the process of producing cellulose or pulp, which is used to make paper. It also discharges effluents into the river, after a complex treatment process. According to the company, the treatment process prevents pollution, a claim that has been backed up by the monitoring activities of local environmental authorities.
When the permanent roadblock began two years ago, the protesters believed it was possible to block the start of operations at the plant. A few months earlier, the campaign managed to get another large pulp mill, which was originally to be installed near Fray Bentos by the Spanish firm ENCE, to move downstream on the Uruguay river to a location accepted by the Argentine government.
But the Botnia mill began to operate in November 2007, and has already exported more than 850,000 tons of cellulose.
According to reports, the plant is polluting neither the water nor the air, and there have been just a few episodes of bad odour when the machinery began to operate.
A Six-Month Environmental Performance Review of the plant was commissioned by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and carried out by Ecometrix, an independent Canadian environmental consulting firm.
The report, released in July 2008, says that “A comparison of the monitoring data pre- and post-commissioning of the mill shows that the water quality of the Río Uruguay has not changed as a result of the mill.
“The water quality between the mill and Fray Bentos is comparable to the water quality further upstream beyond the influence of the mill, indicating that the mill has not affected water quality within the Río Uruguay,” it adds.
But the members of the Citizens’ Environmental Assembly of Gualeguaychú reject the conclusions reached by Ecometrix.
“The people of Gualeguaychú are still concerned, and the traffic blockade will continue,” Environmental Assembly activist Alejandra Crimella told IPS. “In general, there are only two or three people watching over the roadblock because there isn’t a need for so many people around the clock, but if any problem comes up, we all head over there.”
An Argentine lawyer who had managed to get through the blockade a few months ago after going to court tried again to cross on Friday, Nov. 26, but was kept from doing so by around two dozen protesters who showed up quickly after they were summoned by the demonstrators “on duty.”
Crimella acknowledged that there are local residents who would like the roadblock to be lifted. But that “is not the majority view,” she maintained. “We knew that this would be a long-term struggle.”
The activist added that the Environmental Assembly members are not trying to demonstrate whether or not the plant is causing pollution, and simply said they “do not want” the plant to be located across the border river.
A former director of environmental affairs at the Argentine Foreign Ministry, Raúl Estrada Oyuela, told IPS he can fully understand “the sense of frustration and impotence shared by the people of Gualeguaychú.”
But he said the roadblock “is against the law, undermines the goodwill of those who would be expected to support the protesters’ demands, and inflames public opinion in Uruguay, where most people have refrained from analysing the negative consequences of the project and have limited themselves to complaining about the roadblock.”
With respect to relations between the two countries, the former official said the situation “could seriously complicate the relationship with Uruguay for even longer than the plant’s useful life, initially estimated at 50 years.”
He said the government of Argentine president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) “took a conciliatory position” towards Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez and attempted to carry out negotiations, which “Botnia frustrated.” But now, he added, “things have deteriorated.”
“Official public actions should begin to be carried out, to clarify the situation and the facts for the public, which has received nothing but propaganda from Botnia and expressions of complacency from the Uruguayan government,” he added.
The intransigent position of the people of Gualeguaychú, added to the Argentine government’s decision to back the movement, in a more or less explicit manner depending on the circumstances, has kept alive the tension between the two left-leaning governments.
The dispute has hurt tourism and transportation in Uruguay, and has affected the normally close relations between the two countries, which have shared cultural and historical ties.
Uruguay depends heavily on tourists from Argentina, who make up around 80 percent of foreign visitors to the country during the southern hemisphere summer, which just started. And most Argentine visitors arrive by land.
Although there are two other bridges joining the two countries over the Uruguay river, the Libertador General San Martín bridge is the southernmost one, and transportation companies and drivers must now use lengthier alternative routes.
Since the dispute broke out, Uruguay has constantly demanded, without success, that Argentina take steps to lift the roadblock.
Starting in 2004, the Kirchner administration continuously pressed the Uruguayan government to relocate the planned pulp mill. When it failed in its attempt, it turned to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, which is not due to hand down its final sentence until 2009 or 2010.
The Court must decide whether or not Uruguay violated the Uruguay River Treaty signed by the two countries in 1975, under which either of the parties must inform the other of any initiative on the banks of the river.
Kirchner also declared, at a political rally, that support for the local residents’ protests against the pulp mills on the other side of the Uruguay river would be “a national cause.”
When Kirchner was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández in December 2007, there were hopes of a gesture that would help generate a climate of understanding between the two countries. But that never occurred.
A year into the Fernández administration, Argentine sociologist and political scientist Vicente Palermo, one of the editors of the book “Del otro lado del río: Ambientalismo y Política entre Uruguayos y Argentinos” (From the Other Side of the River: Environmentalism and Politics Between Uruguayans and Argentines), is not optimistic.
“The technical reports indicate that the plant is meeting the environmental standards,” Palermo told IPS. “In other words, not only were the catastrophic predictions by the local residents not confirmed, but the factory has not created any problems at all.
“What is left of the protesters in Gualeguaychú is a small group that has an almost sect-like attitude and that has lost backing. But there is no political decision to remove the roadblock,” he said.
“The Argentine government has stubbornly crossed its arms” and is sitting back and not doing anything, said Palermo. “I think that by waiting for the verdict from The Hague it stands to cut its losses, but its attitude continues to affect relations with Uruguay.”
The expert was referring to Uruguay’s veto of Kirchner’s candidacy for secretary general of the Union of South American Nations. The Vázquez administration was the only government to explicitly oppose the former Argentine president’s bid to head up the new bloc.
Uruguayan Foreign Minister Gonzalo Fernández said there are other countries – which he did not identify – that also rejected Kirchner’s candidacy but “decided to let Uruguay assume the expense.”
He said the main reason the Vázquez administration opposed Kirchner was the tolerance that he and his wife have shown for the blockade of traffic between Gualeguaychú and Fray Bentos.
And he added that the tension is also delaying the dredging of the navigation channel between Uruguay and the island of Martín García in the River Plate, which is also shared by Argentina and Uruguay.
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