A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  Although not a prominent public figure to most Chileans, Piñera was infamous in the upper echelon of Chile’s close-knit business circles as a dirty dealer. “His worst enemies are his former business partners,” concluded an author who spent two years writing an unauthorized biography of the man worth $2.6 billion. Fellow executives described him as the kind of colleague who’d execute your plan with impeccable attention to detail—right after he stole it from you. Several asked pointedly, “Is Piñera a crook or does he just get very close to the line?”

  As a young bank executive, Piñera had used contacts in the Pinochet dictatorship to avoid trial and a possible prison sentence for his role in a fraud known as the “Bank of Talca Scam.” He went on the run from an arrest warrant for nearly a month, while his political contacts delayed his arrest and provided enough time to design an end run around justice. In the ’90s, while Tompkins built his village at Reñihue, Piñera shrewdly gambled tens of millions of dollars placing bets on Chile’s recently privatized telecom sector. He also purchased large stakes in the national airline LADECO, which was rebuilt into a profitable regional airline. Piñera was a visionary speculator and relentless worker, often clocking fourteen-hour days while surrounding himself with brainy and bilingual MBAs from Chile’s Catholic University. Piñera was a passionate promoter of the free market, even arguing that “there is nothing the government can do that the free market can’t do better.”

  In November 2009 Piñera trounced all candidates in Chile’s presidential election and sailed to victory. With a billionaire, free-market president taking charge, the chances of stopping HidroAysén looked bleak. Then in the early hours of February 27, 2010, one week before Piñera took over the presidency, an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake rocked Chile, decimating the southern coastal towns near Concepción and leaving a path of destruction throughout central Chile. As aftershocks continued throughout the night, and as the outgoing Bachelet government botched the warning, tsunami waves killed 150 people on the coast, and life in Santiago was disrupted. Whatever plans Piñera had were shattered. His task was now rebuilding hospitals, schools, and thousands of homes destroyed by the massive earthquake. HidroAysén jumped into the chaos in search of a winning strategy.

  The CEO of ENDESA’s parent company, a powerful businessman named Pablo Yrarrázaval, donated $10 million in earthquake relief from the company coffers. Lest shareholders question the value of the disbursement, Yrarrázaval turned the donation into a PR show in favor of HidroAysén. First, he showed up at the presidential palace with a symbolic check the size of a coffee table, then pointedly asked the government to provide HidroAysén with “more objective” treatment and not to succumb to the “excessively large demands” of environmental protection legislation.

  Along with showering the national government with cash and the rural Aysén community with student scholarships, swings, and seesaws, ENDESA went on a hiring spree. The company padded its payroll with former ministers and government employees to lobby its case. Tompkins, however, was crushing them in the court of public opinion, so ENDESA offered a succulent monthly salary (reportedly above $25,000 a month) to Daniel Fernández, a smooth, self-promoting executive running Chile’s largest public TV channel, Television Nacional de Chile. Fernández was the perfect political operator for the job. Long accustomed to negotiating the corporate and government cliques that financed and governed Chile’s fledgling democracy, Fernández had what Chileans called “political wrists” that could twist in all directions. Under his stewardship, HidroAysén officials felt assured that they would regain public approval, which they assumed was all they needed to begin the nine years of construction and finally start operating the dams.

  With Fernández at the helm, the HidroAysén campaign against Tompkins now included rumormongering stories to the Chilean press that Tompkins had sired illegitimate children in the rural south. Tompkins took the provocation personally and directed the Patagonia Without Dams advertising campaign to showcase the powerful men behind the consortium. He targeted the business leaders financing the destruction of free-flowing rivers for short-term profits. “Doug set forth the theme,” recalled Elizabeth Cruzat, an accomplished designer working on the campaign. “We’ve got to unmask these people,” Doug told his media team. “We have to talk about the real motivations behind the HidroAysén project. We’ve got to show their motives for building the dams.”

  Cruzat and her husband, Patricio Badinella, designed advertisements featuring the face of Eliodoro Matte, the most powerful executive of Colbun. They doctored a photo of Matte to make him look like a wolf. Then they created an image with the wolf’s face wrapped in wool and added the body of a sheep. They gave Matte’s son, Bernardo, similar treatment. The full-page ads were published in Chilean newspapers with the tagline “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.”

  Chile’s insular elite sat up and took notice, having never been called out by name before. “Doug had this correct idea that people like the Mattes are aware of things like prestige or reputation,” said Patricio Badinella, the art director for the campaign. “And, rather than ENDESA, which was a huge anonymous corporation, Colbun was a company related to a well-known family name in Chile. Tompkins always thought we had to try to connect with them and show that what they were doing would erode their own reputation.”

  Tompkins always used a respectful tone and had met both Bernardo and Eliodoro Matte in person. He never forgot that he was a visitor in Chile and was careful not to make enemies gratuitously. He even invited the Mattes to visit Pumalín Park. When Doug called them up, he held spirited discussions as he outlined his defense of nature. To the Mattes he queried, “Do you want to be remembered in history as the family that destroys Patagonia?”

  Instinctively protective of Chile’s wealthy upper crust, Chile’s leading newspapers refused to publish many of the Patagonia Without Dams advertisements. So Tompkins borrowed a tactic from Greenpeace. He held a press conference highlighting the banned ads and stirred up a media storm in which the focus of the entire debate was whether or not to publish headlines, including “When Foxes Guard the Chicken Coop” and “Patagonia—Not For Sale.” Tompkins delighted in shining a bright light on Daniel Fernandez, the pricy PR consultant who was caricatured as a red devil with evil horns shaped like high-tension towers and an extension cord sliding out his butt.

  The HidroAysén leadership team was stunned. Tompkins made them look ridiculous. National polling showed a surge in opposition to the dams. From the initial 57 percent in favor, the Patagonia sin Represas campaign masterminded by Tompkins swung sentiment sharply against the project. Now only one in three Chileans supported the dam.

  Sebastian Piñera jumped into the fray, accusing the environmentalists of “being irresponsible and opposing everything.” While talking to construction industry leaders he warned, “If we don’t make the decisions now, we are condemning our country to blackouts next decade.” The president’s assertions unleashed yet another backlash. Academics, columnists, and historians alike were comparing Piñera to General Pinochet, who had famously reduced the future of Chilean government to the phrase “With me or with chaos.”

  HidroAysén officials next suggested that foreign meddlers were attacking Chile’s natural resources. Banking on xenophobia, they suggested that the environmentalists were fakes and that really the anti-dam campaign was a front by foreign electricity companies seeking to steal a great business opportunity from ENDESA. “Daniel Fernández is desperate. They are paying him to carry out the project and he is not achieving it,” mocked Sara Larrain, a member of the Patagonia Defense Council. “This is the desperation of someone who let himself become a mercenary for the company.”

  Tompkins continued to rattle the status quo. Every time the Chilean media—and increasingly the international press—reached out to him for comment, he lambasted the dam owners as nearsighted businessmen with no sense of national patrimony. “The passport is meaningless,” Tompkins said, addressing criticism that he was a fore
igner meddling in Chilean affairs. “It is really your behavior that determines whether you are a patriot. If you’re trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down the trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers, and oceans, you’re not much of a patriot. I see a lot of nationalists pumping their chests about being such patriots, and meanwhile they’re trashing their own country!”

  Tompkins even took the anti-dam campaign overseas. Newspaper and billboard ads ran on the side of London’s double-decker buses, in which Tompkins mocked the Chilean government’s plans to plunder Patagonia. “We were talking directly to the political class and telling them: ‘We accuse you!’” said Cruzat. “We placed ads in England to embarrass them, to say to the world, ‘Look! This is what they’re doing.’ For Chileans to be exposed like that was very shameful.”

  A myriad of different environmental groups now saw an opportunity to save the rivers and doubled down on organizing local opposition to the dam. Caravans of cowboys waving flags adorned with the Patagonia Without Dams logo garnered massive television news coverage as they rode horses in mass protests. A who’s-who of Chilean environmentalists plus hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers joined the uprising. In many ways, Tompkins was reviving his marketing skills from the Esprit years. At Esprit he had infused the catalog shoot with adrenaline and a sense of buzzing excitement. Even customers felt like they belonged to a larger movement. Now in Patagonia, and throughout the nation, those same talents lit a fire in the hearts of thousands of Chileans. But instead of promoting disposable clothing and short-term fashion trends, Tompkins was now promoting nature.

  When he first launched The North Face, Tompkins had stressed the beauty of the mountains, the lure of the outdoors. Now in Patagonia he was launching a campaign that once again appealed to the heart. “The prioritization of beauty is, in some ways, totally aesthetic,” said Nadine Lehner, an executive assistant to Doug and Kris for six years. “And in some ways it’s also this very nimble move to recognize what people gravitate toward and how to create a brand or create a feeling that people crave.”

  Tompkins knew precisely what motivated young people. Like the volunteers who donated their free time to pulling up weeds and fence posts at Patagonia Park and the hundreds who lined up to pose in the Esprit catalog, Tompkins, through his behind-the-scenes financing and strategy, now masterminded a unified campaign to save rivers and to protect Patagonia.

  Along the 1,700-mile-long route of the proposed line of electrical towers, volunteers went property by property, door to door, informing locals about the reality of accepting a massive tower in their yard. “A lot of groundwork went into this,” said Cruzat. “A lot of people talking to locals, saying, ‘They’re going to destroy the value of your lands if they build a tower here. You won’t be able to sell it because you’ve got a high-tension tower in front of the house. And you won’t be able to move because wherever you go, a tower will be there.’”

  In a desperate move, Chilean legislators offered a customized law for HidroAysén exempting the company from environmental impact assessments. Under the proposed legislation, dams could be “fast tracked” in the name of energy security. Tompkins and his team went ballistic. They fired off ad copy, editing and designing into the wee hours of the night, and launched yet another advertising blitz, this one depicting the businessmen as fat pink pigs with evil blue eyes and a mouthful of US $100 bills.

  The campaigns created a stir in Chilean society. Eliodoro Matte began long discussions with his son and heir, Bernardo. Was the investment worth risking the family’s reputation and their most valuable asset: the family name? Was Tompkins perhaps correct? Was the Matte dynasty investing on the wrong side of history?

  As the debate blossomed, demonstrations erupted in towns across Patagonia. Cowboys blocked traffic. Throughout southern Chile, a growing coalition supported the vision of Patagonia Without Dams. Even the salmon lobby, which abhorred Tompkins and was among his fiercest critics, fretted that the dams might damage lakes and rivers. They joined the anti-dam coalition. Ad by ad, march by march, industry by industry, the pro-Patagonia campaign surged. “With time, Doug started figuring it all out, and surrounded himself with people who knew how to manage politics in Chile,” said the activist Peter Hartmann. “Doug realized that sometimes you just have to be patient, and the only thing to do is wait.”

  When the HidroAysén consortium sent a fleet of pickup trucks to roam rural Patagonia in a ranch-to-ranch public relations blitz, it didn’t take long for the Tompkins team to respond. HidroAysén employees in the pickup trucks promised the rural landowners that the dams were a sign of progress, and that they would bring cash. The new lake, they swore, would not be an eyesore but rather a tourist magnet. Not only would the transmission towers be good for the economy but they meant fast cash to whoever signed up first. They tried to explain that the rural landowners were fortunate that instead of merely having the wires pass by, they would be handsomely paid just to let a simple tower be built.

  Searching for a way to counteract the company’s offensive, art director Badinella called up the offices of HidroAysén. He mimicked the drawl of a rural Chilean cowboy and asked the secretary at the company, “Whatdidyasay them company trucks looked like? I wanna be ready when they pass by.” The receptionist was helpful. The trucks, she explained, were white, with a blue logo on the door.

  Using that description, Badinella and Tompkins launched a radio campaign portraying the employees in the white pickups as hucksters on a mission to destroy the Patagonian way of life. The radio spots urged local farmers and ranchers to fight back. To defend their land. “Don’t even open your door!” the ads suggested. “Don’t let them on your property!” The seeds of a rural backlash were planted.

  The Patagonia Without Dams campaign also hired songwriters to write rhyming ballads known as payas to ridicule the dam project. The paya is a Chilean country music style built on spontaneous biting rhymes, like slap-down rap. In paya competitions two payadores banter back and forth, insulting one another in a verbal duel that leaves the audience on the floor in laughter. “There are some formats of the paya in which you can insult people, while in others you must be a gentleman,” explained Badinella.

  The Patagonia Without Dams campaign even designed comic-book-style ads featuring stories in which Don Epifanio, a whitehaired and wizened Patagonian cowboy, discussed the false promises of the dams in a conversation with his horse. The pro-Patagonia campaign added two new phrases: “Destruction Is Not a Solution” and “Chile Says No to HidroAysén.”

  Still, HidroAysén moved forward. By an 11 to 0 vote, the environmental committee for the Aysén region approved the project. The green light from local regulators soothed the worries of HidroAysén executives—finally, they were harvesting the fruits of funding local economic development schemes, student scholarships, and promises of subsidized energy tariffs for the region. Their 10,500-page environmental impact study was proof that they had studied every angle and answered everyone. Nine days later, the consortium’s victory lap was rudely interrupted by the largest public demonstration in Chile in over a decade.

  A crowd of some 70,000 people marched through central Santiago. The demonstration stretched for a mile—from Plaza Italia to La Moneda, the presidential palace. The protestors marched peacefully to Piñera’s office and delivered a letter. The Patagonia Without Dams campaign then lit the match of social activism. Long-simmering complaints and grievances were given a stage, and the anti-dam march helped unleash the demands of the Chilean people, which had been in a nearly thirty-year hibernation. Other social movements soon erupted with a hunger for justice and a cry to be heard. Piñera was weakened further with the eruption of another democratic uprising, this one led by high school students.

  When Piñera declared that public education was “a market commodity” and should be priced accordingly, the reaction was instantaneous. Hundreds of thousands of high school students, led by college students Camila Vallejo a
nd Giorgio Jackson, shut down the nation’s schools for nearly a year with sit-ins and marches. Tens of thousands of students occupied their high schools, living inside and raising money through selling tickets to live music concerts presented pro-bono by sympathetic bands. Piñera and the elite felt dumbfounded. What was happening to the social order?! How had teenagers become revolutionaries?

  Unlike their parents’ generation, these Chileans born after 1980 had not faced the bloody torture squads of General Pinochet and his feared DINA and CNI secret police. Not knowing the precariousness of Chile decades earlier, they felt little loyalty to the development model that had undoubtedly lifted millions from poverty. The teenage protesters provided even more bodies for the anti-dam campaign.

  The rowdy yet peaceful street protest demanding “Patagonia Without Dams” also reinvigorated a historical Chilean belief that tens of thousands of citizens taking to the streets could create a more equitable democracy. Throughout the nation’s history, rebellion has been a well-honed tool in the fight for social justice. By 2010, few marchers feared anything worse than tear gas, a light beating, or brief imprisonment. Tortures and disappearances were a thing of the past. As Chileans became emboldened, sparks of protest flared.

  Organizations that were not part of the Patagonia Defense Council launched their own anti-dam demonstrations. “People were coming to us and saying, ‘What time is the demonstration in Puerto Montt?’ And I’m saying, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m not organizing it,’” said Mladinic. “That was the moment we realized this was a big national wave, and unstoppable.”

  The government’s support for HidroAysén wilted. The project was suddenly bogged down by the invisible workings of bureaucrats who understood the project was, politically speaking, dead in the water. Political channels that HidroAysén officials had greased in preparation for the approval of their multibillion-dollar extravaganza were suddenly clogged as a political tide washed back upon them.