I spent this summer in Chile conducting pre-dissertation research on the Chilean forest and pulp industry and four different social movements which aim to pressure the forest companies and the government to change various social and environmental aspects of the industry’s standard mode of operation.
Before going to Chile, I had followed the development of various conflicts between the forest and pulp industry and four different social movements; Acción por los Cisnes, a group based in Valdivia which spent 2005 fighting to close down a pulp plant which had drastically damaged a near-by wetland with its chemical effluent; the fisher community of Mehuín which continues working to prevent the construction of a pipeline which would redirect the liquid wastes of the pulp plant near Valdivia to the ocean near Mehuín and Maiquillahue Bay; a network of forestry worker unions which instigated a series of strikes in 2007 protesting low wages and inhumane working conditions; and finally, Mapuche groups which claim land owned by private forest companies and have carried out a number of occupations of these companies’ pine plantations.
Of these movements, I knew the most about Acción por los Cisnes (APC) and the forestry workers, and the least about the Mapuche movements. Previous to going to Chile this summer, I understood APC to be an environmental health movement and wrote a paper arguing that the situations the environmental and labor movements (APC and the forestry workers) were fighting against shared a similar historical origin in the processes which converted the Southern landscape from the 7th to the 10th regions of Chile from mixed subsistence agriculture, commercial agriculture and native forest land to pine plantation and transformed many inhabitants of those lands from campesinos and sharecroppers to wage laborers. The underlying argument was that this shared historical origin could contribute to the forging of solidarity between these two movements in their struggles to change particular aspects of the forestry model currently dominant in Chile.
This summer, one of my principal aims was to test out the arguments of that paper. I hoped to gather historical materials documenting the development of the forest and pulp industry as well as how the landscapes and livelihoods changed in Southern Chile with the implementation of different agrarian reforms. I wanted to talk with members of the different movements to better understand the development of and the motivations for their conflicts with the forest companies, as well as their opinions of the government’s role in the conflicts. I also wanted to find out if there were any ties or potential ties between the different movements, particularly between Acción por los Cisnes and the forestry worker unions. As an overlying interest, I additionally aimed to gain an idea of popular perceptions of the Concertación. Various press releases by the different movements have expressed negative opinions of the Concertación, making seemingly sensationalist comparisons between the military regime and the occasionally violent involvement of the Concertación government in the conflicts. I wanted to learn if the opinion expressed by members of these movements in newspaper articles concerning the similarities or continuities between the military regime and the equally long run of Concertación administrations were shared both within the movements and within Chilean society more widely. Finally, I wanted a more literally grounded understanding of the forest and pulp industry; what it felt like to be in the middle of a pine plantation, what it smelled like near a plant which processes wood chips into cellulose, and what the living conditions were like for workers involved in the planting and harvesting of pine.
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The bus stop across from the Mapuche farm where I stayed near Traiguén.
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I spent the first month in Santiago focusing mainly on the historical aspects of my project. I visited a number of bookstores, university libraries and the National Library, and met with Pablo Camus, a history professor of the Universidad Católica who recently published an environmental history of the native forests and the forest industry in Chile. While both necessary and quite useful, (I now have a large quantity of materials to add to an already overwhelming to-do reading list), the first segment of my trip paled in comparison to the second. At the start of the second half of my trip, I took an eleven-hour bus ride south from Santiago to Valdivia. Valdivia marks the southern reach of the forestry and pulp industry, is the site of the formation of Acción por los Cisnes, and happily turned out to be a very strategic home base for meeting up with participants of the different social movements.
This is where luck came into play. The spokesperson of Acción por los Cisnes with whom I had established email contact was traveling in the United States the exact dates I was in Valdivia. She sent me the contact info of a different spokesperson who turned out to be an extremely fun person and a wonderful resource. Not only one of the central figures of Acción por los Cisnes, he was also involved in almost all types of community organizing in Valdivia. He put me straight that despite its name, Acción por los Cisnes was not an environmental movement predominantly preoccupied by the effects of the pulp plant on the swans and the wetland, but rather, APC was a citizens’ movement formed to combat the feeling of vulnerability produced by both the dramatic sight of hundreds of swans dying and the government’s inaction before (verging on defense of) the pulp plant’s contamination of Valdivia’s Rivers. He put me in contact with an acquaintance of his who was a union leader of a group of sawmill workers. Through talking with this union leader and attending a union meeting, I got to learn about the different forms of working in the forest industry and at least one union leader’s perspective on labor relations within the forest industry under Concertación government.
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Pine plantations surrounding the farm.
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My Valdivia contact also happened to work on a team from the Observatorio Ciudadano de Derechos Humanos which collaborates with the now much smaller group of people near Mehuín who have resisted bribes from the forest company and continue to fight against its plan to construct a pipeline which would dump liquid effluents from a pulp plant into Maiquillahue Bay. I had the opportunity to accompany the team from the Observatory to a meeting of this group of fishermen and their families in which they strategized how best to stall the company and how to document the instances of police violence that had arisen during the conflict. This contact also worked with CODEPU, the Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo, and through CODEPU had collaborated with a number of leaders of different Mapuche communities on various issues having to do with the forestry industry—from the pine plantations’ drying out of the water supply of nearby Mapuche communities and long-term demands for territory to recent occupations of pine plantations and the government’s repressive response, both in terms of police brutality and unfair judicial procedures. I accompanied him on a visit to two leaders of a Mapuche community living on land recuperated by the government from private forest companies outside of Traiguén, in the ninth region. As shown in the pictures, their farms are surrounded by pine plantations, which many ironically call ‘the green army’.
It is extremely hard to summarize how these two months of pre-dissertation research have affected my thinking on my dissertation topic. It has certainly closed off some lines of inquiry (thank goodness!) and opened up unexamined territory. The short version of the end result of these experiences is that the argument in my paper—that the shared historical origin of the situations that APC and the forest unions are fighting could help the two movements work together to change the forestry model—does not connect too well with reality. I find far more compelling the prospect of comparing how questions of citizenship and citizen rights arise in the struggles waged by APC and the movements of the Mapuche against the forest companies and the government’s support of the companies, and on the historical side, examining how the processes which converted much of the Southern landscape to pine plantations are very much entwined with the making of the Chilean state and state-Mapuche relations. For this it looks like I will leave behind questions of environmental-labor movement alliances and enter the complicated realm of Mapuche land-claims. |
