Argentina, Chile Sign Pact to End Their Border Dispute
The presidents of Argentina and Chile signed an accord Wednesday settling the final border dispute between the two South American countries.
The agreement draws the border through a glacial area known as the Southern Glaciers Field along the Andes mountains that divide the two countries.
As Presidents Carlos Menem of Argentina and Eduardo Frei of Chile signed the deal, they praised their nations’ improving relations.
Long suspicious of one another, Chile and Argentina nearly went to war in 1978 over a couple of islands in the Beagle Channel at Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the continent.
“Twenty years ago, in these days just before Christmas, our peoples were preparing for war. Today we prepare for peace, for the construction of a future worthy of our peoples,” Frei said.
“We leave behind decades, many decades of confrontation,” he added after the signing ceremony in Argentina’s Pink House presidential palace in Buenos Aires.
In December 1978, the Argentine military junta sent coffins to the Chilean border in preparation for a war over three small islands in the Beagle Channel. War was averted after papal intervention, but relations between the South American rivals have only really warmed after 1990. Wednesday’s treaty must still be ratified by the legislatures of both nations.
It divides 100 miles of territory in the far southern region of Patagonia known as Hielos Continentales in Argentina and Campo de Hielo Sur in Chile.
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