Patagonia is burning. On 10 March, six fires broke out within a space of just two hours, kilometres apart, across Argentina’s Comarca Andina – a region of plains and mountains bordering Rio Negro and Chubut provinces.
These fires follow those that burned across the region in late January. Numerous towns and villages in both provinces have been razed to the ground, and thousands of hectares of forest have burned.
The map of the fires is fast-changing. They are spreading rapidly thanks to strong winds, drought, state incompetence and the vast plantations of highly flammable exotic pine which mark the region. A few thousand people, many of them small-scale farmers and rural workers, have lost their homes, their workplaces, animals and fields. Two people have so far died and many more are still missing. The area’s complex ecosystem of forests and steppe has been profoundly damaged and it will take years for it to be restored.
