Above photo: Protest against industrial tree plantation- fueled megafires outside of a Tree Biotechnology conference in Concepcion, Chile in 2017. Genetic engineering of trees is being conducted in Chile with the aim to expand industrial timber plantations to new regions. Langellephoto.org.
Chile’s Wildfires: Climate, Colonial Forestry, and the Mapuche Struggle.
Chile is once again engulfed in catastrophic wildfires. Fueled by extreme heat, prolonged drought, and high winds, fires tearing through the central and southern Ñuble and Bío Bío, regions have killed at least 19 people, forced mass evacuations, and destroyed hundreds of homes. Authorities have declared states of emergency as firefighters and community brigades struggle to contain blazes advancing with terrifying speed.
See this drone footage from GJEP colleague and journalist Nicolas Salazar of the ruins from last week’s megafire in Penco Lirquen, near Concepción.
These fires the predictable outcome of climate change layered onto a highly flammable landscape engineered by decades of political and economic decisions—decisions rooted in dictatorship, neoliberalism, and the violent dispossession of Indigenous Mapuche communities.
The fires this year follow a grim trajectory. In February 2024, Chile experienced its deadliest wildfires on record. Before that, the fires of 2017 shocked the world as the worst in the country’s history, killing at least eleven people, destroying more than 1,500 homes, displacing thousands, and burning over 500,000 hectares.
This reality was documented in 2017 by an international delegation from the Campaign to STOP Genetically Engineered Trees, which traveled to Chile to examine the social and environmental impacts of the forestry industry and its links to the historic wildfires of that year.
The delegation, sponsored by the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA) and Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP), arrived in Santiago in March 2017. Participants traveled through fire-scarred landscapes and Mapuche territories, gathering testimony from communities that had long warned the plantation model was a disaster waiting to happen.
The fires had begun in January 2017. Entire villages were reduced to ash, and charred hillsides stretched across the countryside.
In 2024 GJEP returned for 3 weeks and interviewed members of communities that had lost everything in the 2023 fires. The 2026 fires are threatening the family farm of GJEP’s local organizer.
These devastating fires, once unimaginable, are now becoming annual phenomena. Climate change has intensified heat waves and drought across south-central Chile, drying soils and vegetation to tinder. But climate change alone does not explain why fires here burn hotter, faster, and more destructively than in many other regions.
Seeking Accountability After the Fires
In the wake of the devastating 2023 wildfires, residents who lost their homes, farms, and livelihoods formed an alliance to seek accountability for the role of industrial forestry in exacerbating the disaster. GJEP interviewed members of this alliance who have filed a class action lawsuit against timber giant Arauco, alleging that the company’s extensive pine and eucalyptus plantations significantly contributed to the severity and rapid spread of the fires.
The lawsuit represents a growing effort by affected communities to challenge the plantation forestry model and hold corporations legally responsible for its deadly social and ecological consequences.
Industrial Tree Plantations: A Firestorm Waiting to Happen
Pine and eucalyptus plantations dominate large swaths of the Chilean countryside, replacing biodiverse native forests that once retained moisture, moderated temperatures, and acted as natural firebreaks. When fire enters a plantation landscape, it spreads rapidly through uniform rows of flammable trees, generating intense heat and airborne embers that can leap kilometers ahead of the fire front.
Communities living adjacent to these plantations—often Indigenous and rural—are left uniquely exposed.
Dictatorship, Neoliberalism, and the Roots of Disaster
To understand why Chile’s landscape is so vulnerable today, it is necessary to look back to September 11, 1973—the day General Augusto Pinochet seized power in a coup supported by the United States that overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende.
Under Pinochet’s dictatorship, which murdered, disappeared, imprisoned, and tortured tens of thousands of people, Chile became a testing ground for neoliberal economic policies promoted by U.S.-trained economists known as the “Chicago Boys.” State assets were privatized, unions were banned, and corporate power was consolidated.
Forests were no exception.
In 1974, the regime enacted Forest Decree Law 701, which subsidized the expansion of industrial tree monocultures. The law triggered the massive spread of pine and eucalyptus plantations to supply pulp and paper mills, accelerating the destruction of native forests and transforming Chile’s ecology.
The Dispossession of the Mapuche
For Mapuche communities, the plantation economy has meant land theft, displacement, and cultural devastation. The invasion of Mapuche ancestral territory—Wallmapu—intensified under Decree Law 701, as Indigenous inhabitants were evicted and marginalized to make way for corporate forestry operations.
During the Pinochet era, the Mapuche land base was reduced from an estimated 10 million hectares to just 350,000 hectares—approximately 3% of their original territory. Since the return to civilian government, some lands have been reclaimed or returned, but often in fragmented parcels that form a “dispersed mosaic” rather than a contiguous homeland.
Today, many Mapuche communities are surrounded by plantations that drain local water sources and place them directly in the path of recurring fires. When disasters strike, these communities are often the last to receive aid and the first to be criminalized for defending their land.
Mapuche guide shows an international delegation from the Campaign to STOP Genetically Engineered Trees an expanse of pine plantations and clearcuts on ancestral Mapuche land. The delegation was investigating the link between these industrial tree plantations and the worst-ever wildfires in the Chile’s history that had occurred in January of that year. (2017) Photo: Langellephoto.org
Climate Change Meets Colonial Forestry
Chile’s wildfires are the result of a lethal convergence: a warming climate colliding with a colonial forestry model imposed through violence and maintained through corporate subsidies and political inertia.
As long as industrial monoculture plantations continue to replace native forests, and as long as Indigenous land rights are denied, Chile will remain trapped in a cycle of fire, displacement, and loss.
The flames burning today are not only consuming trees and homes. They are exposing the long, unbroken line connecting past dictatorship to present catastrophe—and challenging society to imagine a future rooted in ecological restoration, Indigenous sovereignty, and climate justice.
