A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  Gutierrez, the lawyer working with Doug, recognized that Chile was controlled by an economic mafia. He also knew that Chileans jousted with staplers and legal briefs more than stilettos or bullets. From his high-level perch, Gutierrez had the altitude and eyesight to narrow the list of suspects. Who was coordinating this ugly campaign? He suspected that Belisario Velasco, Chile’s vice minister of the interior and a heralded democracy activist who’d waged a clandestine campaign against the Pinochet dictatorship, was the architect of the anti-Tompkins sentiment. Velasco, said Gutierrez, “was going after Doug on a daily basis in the press.”

  Determined to calm the waters, Gutierrez phoned Velasco to suggest that rather than battle via headlines and press campaigns, they simply meet and hash out whatever had the minister in a dither. “I went there and we had a meeting. . . . One of the things he mentioned in the meeting was, ‘Look, you know that the DEA is worried about Mr. Tompkins, and you know if this leaks to the press, this is the end of the man in Chile.’”

  As he listened to the veiled threat to frame Tompkins that the powerful minister so calmly described, Gutierrez prepared his counterattack. “I said, ‘Look, Mr. Minister, Mr. Tompkins does not even drink mineral water. He does not drink coffee. Indeed, he does not consume any kind of drugs and he has nothing to do with drugs whatsoever.’” said Gutierrez. When Gutierrez related the latest threat against Tompkins to Ambassador Guerra Mondragon, who as the highest ranking US official in country was legally the head of the DEA in Chile, “The ambassador started calling Velasco every week, just sort of checking in, letting him know we were watching.”

  Velasco then planned an ambush to smear Tompkins. First, he invited the American to his office in the presidential palace to discuss the American’s extensive landholdings. During the brief encounter, Velasco asked about the properties Tompkins held in Argentina. But Tompkins dismissed any notion that he owned land contiguous along the borders of both countries. He felt confident that he’d put the matter to rest, noting with ease that his Argentine lands were hundreds of miles away. But Velasco pounced. The following day he held a press conference and denounced Tompkins. “He has admitted that he has lands on both sides of the border,” said Velasco in effect, bringing to the forefront the idea that the conservation lands threatened Chile’s sovereignty.

  Tompkins was naive about the approaching maelstrom. Only after months of ambushes and political sabotage to his conservation plans did he truly calculate the dimensions of the smear campaign. “We had no idea of the dark manipulations of Velasco, which became more evident over time,” Tompkins said. “So, we began to deal with these situations, seriously distracting us from the daily work of clarifying land titles, doing other negotiations, placing infrastructure, personnel, and everything else. Many things were left aside or simply thrown away.”

  “I was operating with a presidential mandate,” said Velasco when asked about his role in Le Affaire Tompkins. “One time when I was meeting with him in person he said, ‘Chileans should be thankful for the forest I’m preserving.’ And I replied, ‘That forest has been there for a thousand years, and no one is going to exploit it, because it’s too steep, and the machines can’t get in there to work.’”

  Tompkins’s lawyers worked overtime to squelch the dirty tricks, wasting countless hours as tax authorities demanded reams of documents with so little logic that it appeared they were on a fishing expedition. Gutierrez dug into the root of the problem, asking one mid-level tax supervisor why Doug was being given just forty-eight hours to respond with tax papers. “Whose instructions are you following?” he asked. “The woman in charge, who was very nice, said to me, ‘Look, I will look aside, and you just read the memo I have in front of me.’ And it was an instruction from the undersecretary [Velasco] to go after Mr. Tompkins and catch him on anything.”

  “Velasco had a personal dislike for Doug as a person, and he was the vindictive type. If Doug was a superhero, this was the supervillain,” said Gonzalez, the young aide. “I had no experience with diplomacy or any of that. And I would just say in the meetings, ‘Well, this is what’s going on. And here are the maps.’ And he hated that. At the time we thought the best course of action was just to be honest and open. Over the years, you learn that it doesn’t work that way.”

  Kris was buckling under the stress. “I thought the world was crashing down,” she said. In long discussions Malinda Chouinard encouraged Kris and explained that conservation battles were often fraught with controversy. Malinda cited a book that detailed the creation of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. “That was the first time I realized we were just part of an ongoing story,” said Kris. “Wherever conservation took place, this kind of animosity, this conflict, was inherent to the process.”

  Then an infiltrator stole internal documents from the local Tompkins office. “This guy Carlos Martinez came to us because he wanted to interview Doug for a big Chilean magazine, as a journalist,” said Morgado, the assistant working with Kris and Doug. “One night I was coming back to my office to check something, and I found him in my office photocopying papers. ‘What are you doing in my office?’ I asked. He tried to give a reply but couldn’t.”

  Soon the stolen papers and documents from the various Tompkins-led foundations appeared in press accounts lambasting environmental activists, and also surfaced later in the hands of a Chilean congressional committee investigating Tompkins. “Based on all this knowledge that we managed to get from Carlos and other sources, we established the threat that Tompkins represented,” said Hector Muñoz, chief of staff to Velasco, in a tacit admission that the Ministry of the Interior had received the stolen information.

  “There was something messianic about him,” said Carlos Martinez, the alleged document thief. “He felt he was saving a piece of the world. ‘It’s me against the world. Development is bad, progress is bad, there shouldn’t be anything here.’” Martinez, the infiltrator, had spent time preparing his role by flying with Tompkins and posing as a journalist as he picked Doug’s brain while they soared for hours over the land, Doug all the while chronicling the destruction of Patagonia. “What seemed negative to me about Tompkins,” said Martinez, “is that he would be controlling an important part of the country, and what he planned for it was a type of dam against progress and development.”

  “Political opponents have all kinds of dirty tricks and we see that every day,” Tompkins wrote to his colleagues. “We don’t know whether we can weave our way through all those things or not; we’ll just have to see. We take it day by day and try to use the best strategies and tactics possible to keep our project alive and going through. They face a terrible dilemma in trying to do something really drastic against us.”

  The harassment continued with low-flying airplanes buzzing the Reñihue homestead, at times just above the rooftops, and with cameras hung out the window to snap surveillance photos. Sergio Cardenas, an agent with the Chilean Agencia Nacional de Intelligencia described the harassment mission as nearly a full-time job. Cardenas flew in the planes to surveil Tompkins and described the ease with which the state harassed the renegade foreigner. “It was free to punch him,” said Cardenas in an interview. “So the government punched him, some members of Congress punched him. Those on the right punched him imagining that he was coming with Jews, and for appropriating territory, and those on the left punched him for being a gringo,” explained Cardenas. “Both Minister Belisario Velasco and President Frei understood that punching Tompkins was free; it had no associated cost.”

  A reporter asked Tompkins how he was handling the attacks. He explained that after realizing he was being ambushed, he joined the fray and he deliberately provoked fiery public debates and used controversy to grab the attention of government officials and the general public. Said Tompkins, “From my point of view, what is happening in Chile, as in many other places, is due to groups like ours that create a debate that attracts the attention of the government and the public in general. We should be proud of taking a
ction and being at the vanguard of this process. . . . These things are like every environmental battle everywhere: the forces of conservation vs. the forces of development. We’re kind of like lone soldiers fighting it out.”

  Yet the harassment went beyond a spirited public debate. When trees fell after big storms and washed down nearby rivers, Tompkins had his carpenters set up a temporary sawmill and use the fallen wood for building material. But when a journalist photographed the operation, two days later the local newspaper accused Doug of cutting down native trees. The headline was: “Tompkins is cutting down native trees to build.” “That was our daily bread,” said one collaborator. “People were always looking for a way to do a smear campaign.”

  “It was curious because you had a lot of business guys and entrepreneurs who were coming to open forestry companies and cut the trees. And there was no objection to that,” said Hernan Mladinic, a sociologist who had worked at a Chilean NGO fighting the export of native trees as wood chips. Tompkins hired Mladinic to build relationships into the highest echelons of La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace. The reception Mladinic received was cold: “This guy who was saying he was going to promote conservation, why should Chile tolerate this guy?” Another problem, Mladinic recognized, was that Doug Tompkins was deliberately outspoken. He was not a quiet conservationist. As Mladinic recalled, “Doug always told me that making a park is the easy part. Although there is controversy, usually people looked at it in a positive way. But when you start criticizing the development model? The logic of industrialization, of industrial agriculture, and technology? These things are dear for certain groups of people.”

  Despite the opposition, the distraction, and the threats, Tompkins continued his land purchases. He bought entire valleys, purchased volcanoes, acquired stands of old-growth trees. With substantial financial contributions from key allies in the US and Europe, Kris and Doug built a broad base of donors. Doug alone had spent $15 million buying land. But still a single key piece was missing: a 75,000-acre parcel smack in the middle of the proposed Pumalín Park. The missing piece was owned by a Catholic university in Chile’s main port, Valparaiso, and the university leadership wanted to sell the lands known as Huinay. The university was in dire financial straits and eager to unload the remote, unwieldy tract of forest. Tompkins met with the leaders of the university and explained his plans for conservation and environmental protection. They listened carefully and then asked about his stand on abortion. Was it true, the bishop queried, that Doug was forcing his workers to have abortions? Was his Deep Ecology belief a cover for antihuman beliefs? The arch conservative Catholic monsignor Jorge Medina initially agreed in private to sell Huinay to Tompkins, then abruptly made a public declaration that he was undecided. A week later, the archbishop of Puerto Montt, Bernardo Cazzaro, attacked Tompkins’s beliefs because they “put nature’s interests above those of humans.”

  “The Huinay property was owned by the Catholic University of Valparaiso,” recalled Velasco, the powerful minister. “And the director was a friend of mine for many years, Bernardo Donoso. I told him, ‘You’re not selling that property to Tompkins. Either the Chilean government is going to buy it, or we will find a company that will.’” The university ended up selling it to ENDESA, a politically connected energy conglomerate with close ties to President Frei. Velasco crowed over his victory, commenting, “Tompkins nearly had a heart attack, because it divided his lands in the middle, and he wanted an uninterrupted tract.”

  In ENDESA, Velasco found a powerful utility company willing to finance the government’s dirty work. With no viable business motive for purchasing forest lands, ENDESA, in essence, bankrolled the harassment plans developed by President Frei and his advisers in the Chilean presidential palace. ENDESA spent millions to buy a remote forest for the sole purpose of hindering Tompkins’s park plans. When his master plan succeeded, Velasco mocked Tompkins in the press. “Tompkins has no reason to feel threatened just because they decided to buy a piece of land in the middle of what he was planning as a park,” said Velasco with irony and glee. “He’ll just have to scale down his ambition; his park can be 270,000 hectares instead of 300,000.”

  Tompkins was irate. He lambasted President Frei “as just an engineer” and categorized the government operations against him as “diabolic.” He declared, “I don’t have time for this kind of show. I don’t deserve this kind of treatment by the authorities.” Huddling with his lawyers in Santiago, Tompkins considered the unthinkable: Had he lost the battle?

  Part III

  Chapter 12

  The Land of Shining Waters

  In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same. If it is unenvironmental, it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.

  —MOLLIE H. BEATTIE

  As Chilean authorities surveilled, harassed, and threatened Tompkins, on the other side of the Andes Mountains a group of Argentine conservationists looked on with curiosity at this gringo with cash and a love for nature. Opinion polls regularly found that Argentina’s populace held some of the most anti-US sentiments of any nation on Earth, yet the country’s conservationists admired Tompkins keenly. If his conservation plans weren’t all going to work in Chile, they wondered, would he give Argentina a shot? The invitation arrived from Argentine National Parks director Francisco Erize. Would Señor Tompkins be interested in touring potential conservation sites in Argentina? A list of biodiversity hotspots was delivered in a tone of collaboration distinct from the confrontations in Chile.

  Doug and Kris flew to Buenos Aires and then embarked on a whirlwind tour of Argentina. They visited a range of damaged but biologically valuable ecosystems. They viewed rain forests and glaciers and were offered the opportunity to save either whales or condors. Penguins or parrots. Argentina—the sixth-largest nation on Earth when measured by landmass—held a vast breadth of flora and fauna that was under attack by modern agriculture, forestry, and fisheries practices.

  As they toured Argentina’s ravaged ecosystems, Doug and Kris were aghast at the damage done by cows. Grilled steak was the national dish, beef exports were a source of billions in foreign revenue, and Sunday BBQs were a national pastime rivaling football. The native ecosystems were being decimated to clear space for cattle, and the government was lobbying the US to increase beef imports fivefold, from 20 to 100 tons a year. The Argentine government even appointed the tennis star Gabriela Sabatini as “beef ambassador” as part of a lobbying campaign. In Argentina, if it wasn’t cow, it wasn’t “meat.” When foreign travelers asked waiters for the vegetarian option, they were served chicken.

  As they flew back from the Yungas region in northwest Argentina, Kris and Doug stopped in the Corrientes province in northeast Argentina, where the Paraná River fed a vast tributary system near the borders with Brazil and Paraguay. The province of Corrientes was home to wetlands the size of the Florida Everglades, with floating islands populated by capybara, caimans, eagles, and egrets. A century-long trade in feathers and fur, as well as more recent massive monoculture pine tree farms, had driven many species to near-extinction.

  The floating islands were thick with poisonous snakes, dangerous sinkholes, and water pools teeming with piranhas. The tangled geography included dry grasslands, savannah, forests, and marsh. The unique mix of land and water sheltered pockets of biodiversity, including bands of orange howler monkeys and the nearly extinct pampas deer. Jaguar had been hunted to extinction in the zone and the maned wolf whittled down to a tiny population. “We landed there, and I really thought we’d landed in hell,” said Kris, describing her initial impressions of the wetlands known as Iberá. “It was flat and hot and buggy, and I didn’t see anything I liked or recognized and wanted out of there. But Doug did.”

  In Argentina the national parks were a source of national pride and, unlike in Chile, the Argentine parks were a significant source of revenue for the government. Doug realized that the legal framework for national parks was exceptionally strong in Argentina. Park fee
s might be siphoned along a dozen different illegal paths, but the parks themselves, he estimated, would be neither stolen nor sold.

  Four months after first landing on the remote airstrip in Iberá, Doug bought San Alonso, a 26,000-acre island in the middle of the wetlands. The island provided a strategic vantage point. Like a lighthouse watchman, Tompkins now had an observation post. His property had enough pasture for an airstrip, so by land and air, Tompkins photographed and documented illegal intrusions into the swamplands. He envisioned turning the entire ecosystem into a single park, and he figured the fight could never be rougher than dealing with the Chileans.

  * * *

  I think that more and more leading businessmen are deciding these conservationists don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to manage, because running a park is basically like running a business, and they can do it better. That’s why I think Doug and Kris have been so successful—they are businesspeople. They’re not tree huggers. That makes a big difference. We need more people like that, no doubt. . . . People say I’m hypercritical of conservationists around the world and in particular conservation organizations or governments and I always say—and I truly believe—that Kris and Doug are some of the greatest conservationists that have ever existed. They are in a class all by themselves. What they’ve accomplished in their lifetimes just from a conservation perspective, which started relatively late. Just think about if there were 500 individuals like them or 1,000 individuals like them on earth! The planet would be a completely different place. And there are not, there just aren’t. There are a couple of handfuls of people like them on earth, which is sad. But it’s spectacular what people can do if they set their mind to it.

  —J. MICHAEL FAY