Patagonia Crossroads: Jobs Fade but Tourists Pour In

The Patagonian wind sweeps into the city across immense rural flatlands empty of trees, billboards, gas stations or farms--just scrub and gravel flanking a long straight road that runs south toward the bottom of the Earth.

The wind ruffles bales of wool in the industrial park and raises dust in a gloomy landscape of shack towns and housing projects. The wind swirls in the downtown plaza, prairie-empty at siesta time except for youths in backward baseball caps and heavy-metal T-shirts, the universal uniform of rebels with no place to go. They loiter by the historic gazebo, fish for coins in pay phones, hitchhike in packs and cruise in old Ford Falcons.

In the nearby courthouse, the case files document their aimlessness and rage. The eruption of juvenile crime here is a symptom of socioeconomic distress in Argentine Patagonia, a sparsely populated wilderness of deserts, forests, mountains and glaciers whose end-of-the-world allure has long captivated writers and explorers.

Patagonia, however, has reached a curious crossroads. Even as factories shut down, protesters block highways demanding jobs and young people leave, foreigners are flocking here. Tourism is a growth sector. The solitude, natural wonders and cheap land--as low as $20 an acre--attract foreign celebrities who buy country estates the size of counties.

The outsiders could bring a providential infusion of investment. But they also represent the latest version of the natives’ perennial fear that their destiny will be controlled from afar, whether by bureaucrats in Buenos Aires or magnates abroad.

“We don’t want to become peons in our own land,” said Mario Cimadevilla, a state legislator in Chubut, the province where Trelew is located.

Recently the owners of Benetton, the Italian-based clothing business, bought almost 2.2 million acres of sheep ranches in Chubut and neighboring Santa Cruz province. Media tycoon Ted Turner and his wife, Jane Fonda, own an 11,000-acre estate near the chic mountain resort of Bariloche. Foreigners such as Wall Street financier George Soros are among the nation’s top landowners.

Argentines have reacted less vehemently than politicians in neighboring Chile, who accused Esprit clothing tycoon Douglas Tompkins of sinister motives when he set up an 800,000-acre nature reserve in southern Chile. The international attention, enhanced in October by the spectacular televised backdrop of President Clinton’s visit to Bariloche, means more income and jobs, according to Jose Corchuelo Blasco, a federal lawmaker from Chubut.

But Corchuelo has proposed legislation that would let provincial authorities scrutinize planned land purchases by foreigners in Argentina’s six southern provinces.

“We know that Patagonia signifies something mysterious, clean and pure to foreigners,” he said. “The land purchases are not a priori a negative impact. But the investors have a lot of power. We want to make sure they protect the natural riches. This is a great reserve of potential tourist development.”

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The ecological riches in the vast Valdes Peninsula, an hour’s drive northeast of Trelew, have almost doubled the number of tourists during the past five years. The chance to see families of frolicking whales or to walk up to sea lions and penguins on nearly deserted beaches attracts Europeans and young people especially, according to Dario Gatica, the manager of El Faro hotel in the far southeast corner of the peninsula.

The hotel operates in a compound surrounding a still-functioning lighthouse on the eastern edge of the peninsula, a landscape of rocky coasts and roaming sheep that has not yet been reached by phones or television.

“You won’t see a McDonald’s around here,” said Gatica, 34, an affable native Patagonian who returned to Argentina to run the new hotel after he spent half a year working as a newspaper deliveryman in Southern California. “Everything is preserved in its pure and natural state.”

Chubut’s attempt at economic “reconversion” is based on tourism, fishing and the export of off-season fruit to northern markets--the seasons here are the reverse of North America.

The architect of the reconversion, Gov. Carlos Maestro, has lamented an exodus of “intellectuals, professionals and entrepreneurs.”

Life has always been harsh because of the weather, the distances and the limited infrastructure and cultural life. But Patagonia has inspired poetry and adventure. The real-life Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid hid out in Chubut. Charles Darwin conducted studies on the coasts during the historic voyage of the Beagle. English writer Bruce Chatwin chronicled his wandering encounters with gauchos, expatriates and eccentrics in the book “In Patagonia.”

And there has been prosperity. In addition to the ranching economy that made Argentina a wool supplier for the world, in the 1980s the government promoted special tax-incentive zones to stimulate development of factories.

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Working-class Argentines migrated in droves to the textile mills of Trelew, oil fields farther south and electronics plants on the island of Tierra del Fuego off the southernmost tip of Patagonia.

“They called it ‘Fantasy Island,’ ” said Beatriz Potesta, who moved from Buenos Aires to work in the Aurora Grundig metal works in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego. “You could make a lot of money. They paid a bonus for living in a cold-weather zone. There was lots of overtime. Salaries were high. People came from all over, a lot of young families with kids.”

The fantasy evaporated in the 1990s. Wool prices plummeted, making profit difficult even for huge operations. Ranching dynasties faded, and peasants were forced off grazing-depleted land and into cities.

Moreover, the free-market restructuring of the Argentine economy hit remote provinces hard. The privatized oil industry chopped jobs. International competition steamrollered inefficient factories that were no longer propped up by the public sector. Provincial and municipal governments, among the few employers around, tightened payrolls.

Economic disruption contributed to social problems such as crime in small cities like Trelew, with a population of 93,000. During the past five years, the province’s crime rate rose from 146 crimes per 10,000 to 226 per 10,000, according to the federal Justice Ministry.

Judicial Secretary Alejandro DeFranco in Trelew offers examples: The Avila boys just got locked up again; they bashed in a girl’s head with a bottle. A 12-year-old with five gun-related arrests on his rap sheet got sent to reform school after his gang killed a youth. Half a dozen students were caught with guns, scaring authorities into a proposal that seems more likely in Los Angeles County than southern Argentina: metal detectors in schools.

“It has all the problems of a big city,” said DeFranco, whose job makes him a mix of investigator and court clerk. “It is tough in every respect: economically, culturally, the climate. The maximum desire of an 18-year-old here is to go to a big city to study or work. And not come back.”

A sense of rootlessness and desolation fosters youthful alienation, DeFranco said. Deprivation often pushes young migrants from Bolivia and Chile, as well as from rural indigenous tribes, into trouble.

“With the shutting down of sources of work, the slums around the city have grown,” DeFranco said. “You have domestic violence, alcoholism. What has increased terribly is the use of guns by minors. I would say it has doubled in five years. And the overall involvement of minors in crime.”

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Judicial authorities and social workers are scrambling to create a juvenile justice system from scratch. Despite the alarm, the crisis is manageable compared with other cities and nations, authorities say.

“The great advantage is that this place is so small: We know exactly who the criminals are,” DeFranco said.

More profound is the economic situation, he added. “It creates a passive attitude among those who stay,” he said. “It is like they are waiting for a miracle. And it never comes.”

In Tierra del Fuego, 1,000 miles to the south, a temporary miracle came thanks to the desperate efforts of the workers at the former Aurora Grundig factory, the biggest private employer in the province.

The factory sits on the coast of the bay of Ushuaia, a landscape framed by mountains, islands, fog banks and low clouds that create an atmosphere appropriate for the geographic portal to Antarctica. The scenery still evokes the awe felt by seafarers of yore who saw the flaming bonfires built by indigenous tribes and christened the place “Land of Fire.”

Two years ago, the metal works was on the brink of joining the list of closures that had reduced the number of plants there from more than 100 to about 40. When the German-based company decided to stop manufacturing televisions and washing machines in Ushuaia, the labor union came up with a proposal that preserved 500 jobs: Renamed Renacer (Rebirth) Metalworks, last year the plant became the first employee-owned factory in the nation.

“This was not an ambitious project to say we are going to make big profits,” said Potesta, a former supervisor who became one of three directors of the employee council that runs the new company. “The idea was to save jobs. It was not easy. This first year was very tough.”

Having scraped through the first year with reduced schedules and salaries, the workers hope to expand production this year. They know that the collapse of the company would be a hard blow to the community. Labor lawyer Clemente Vidal, an advisor to Renacer, recalled that the shutdown of a far-smaller plant in 1995 resulted in a clash with police that left one worker dead and a police officer charged with murder.

Like nearby provinces, Tierra del Fuego sees tourism as the industry of the future. The former penal colony has made the most of its colorful history as the Siberia of Argentina. During the Christmas season, foreign tourists filled a defunct turn-of-the century prison that has been transformed into a museum, and holiday travelers also rode a picturesque, steam-engine train through lush alpine countryside that re-creates the railroad used by inmate work gangs.

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But tourism jobs are still relatively scarce. Tourists do not buy televisions or washing machines. Potesta’s 18-year-old son will soon move to Buenos Aires to study, like so many who left and haven’t come back.

“I can’t tell him not to go if he wants to build a future,” Potesta said. “I don’t see a lot of expectations for young people here. Visitors come here and tell us, ‘What a beautiful place.’ And we are working so hard we don’t realize it. We cannot enjoy what we have.”