The Flames of Dispossession: Fires of the Forestry Business
Join us on the 26th of April (7pm EDT, 4pm PDT) for a screening of the documentary film “Llamas del Despojo: Incendios del Negocio Forestal” (The Flames of Dispossession: Fires of the Forestry Business) and to hear from the filmmakers and experienced activists who are working to make the situation on the ground in Wallmapu visible to the world and a source of inspiration for the global climate justice movement.
Register here.
Film Screening & Panel Discussion
Global Justice Ecology Project, Biofuelwatch, and OLCA (Observatorio Latino Americano de Conflictos Ambientales) invite you to an online screening and panel discussion of the documentary film “Llamas del Despojo: Incendios del Negocio Forestal” (The Flames of Dispossession: Fires of the Forestry Business). Verónica Gonzalez, one of the filmmakers and members of OLCA, will take part in the panel discussion.
“Llamas del Despojo: Incendios del Negocio Forestal” (The Flames of Dispossession: Fires of the Forestry Business) is an independent movie project that reports on the the wildfire and plantation forestry crisis in the heart of Wallmapu, unceded Mapuche territory in Southern Chile.
Background Information
In the wake of another industrial tree plantation fueled fire season wreaking destruction across the traditional territories of the Mapuche people, international climate activists are increasingly scrutinizing the financial connections between the Chilean wood product-pulp-biomass energy transnational corporation Arauco, and asset managers Vanguard and BlackRock, which are headquartered in the USA and are the biggest institutional shareholders in the conglomerate that owns Arauco.
This film dives into the company Arauco and how they use fire as a tool to usurp the lands of rural campesino and Indigenous communities. Decades later, in the aftermath of substituting hundreds of thousands of acres of native forest with highly flammable exotic pine and eucalyptus tree plantations, the landscape literally exploded in climate change driven conflagrations, as was seen in the tremendous fires of the austral summer of February 2023.
The reality is this: Every year more and more territories in south-central Chile and Wallmapu suffer from mega-droughts and ravenous forest fires that destroy everything in their path. The film features community members and researchers who point to the forestry industry as one of the main culprits, together with a government incapable of preventing and containing these catastrophes. Far from fire being a new problem, the Mapuche and peasant memory recalls the times of the dictatorship, when the forestry business used fire as a method of dispossession to cement its regime.
Many climate activists have rightly focused on the dangers and harms of asset manager investments in fossil fuels. When Vanguard and BlackRock prop up transnational forestry companies like Arauco the cultural and environmental harms from the monoculture plantation model are devastating for current and future generations.
Join us on the 26th of April to hear from the filmmakers and experienced activists who are working to make the situation on the ground in Wallmapu visible to the world and a source of inspiration for the global climate justice movement.
The documentary is produced by the audiovisual collective Ojo de Treile, in collaboration with the newspaper Resumen.cl, the socio-environmental organization La Güiña and the audiovisual production company Tabula Rasa. With original music by singer-songwriter Juan sin Tierra.
