Argentine Land Fight Divides Environmentalists, Rights Advocates

CONCEPCIÓN, Argentina -- From a flat patch of tree-studded savannah, the gaze stretches for miles: across a small pond where a marsh deer stops to drink, and over swampy wetlands where herons gingerly high-step.

Above it all, a small airplane drones. At the controls is Douglas Tompkins, an American who owns everything underneath him, paid for from the millions he earned as the founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing lines.

"It's an amazing piece of land," Tompkins said shortly after landing. "Extremely rich with biological diversity."

Now, many Argentine officials and social activists want to confiscate the property he says he bought to create an ecological preserve. They think that he and other wealthy foreigners who have bought enormous swaths of the Argentine and Chilean countryside are trying to wrest control of a continent under the guise of environmental preservation.

"We believe this is a new way of trying to dominate the South American countries," said Araceli Mendez, a congresswoman who represents this region and sponsored legislation last month that would expropriate Tompkins's land. "It is dangerous for the defense of our national security to have the concentration of so much land in the hands of foreigners."

Since the 1990s, the relatively cheap and expansive acreage of Argentina has attracted millionaires in search of unspoiled estates, including household names such as Ted Turner and Sylvester Stallone. But last month, Argentina's undersecretary for land and social habitat declared war on such land purchases with one highly symbolic act: He marched onto Tompkins's land, cut down a fence and called for the expropriation of the property.

Days later, he stood alongside the ambassadors of Venezuela and Bolivia -- two countries that recently have implemented measures to redistribute land from wealthy estate owners to the poor -- and made his intentions even clearer.

"We want to tell everyone: We're going to continue cutting down fences," said Luis D'Elia, the government secretary. "What is more important, the private property of a few, or the sovereignty of everyone?"

D'Elia, a former protest leader who recently joined President Nestor Kirchner's government, this month identified another target he plans to go after: Italy's Luciano Benetton, a clothing magnate who owns more Argentine land than any other single private landowner and who also espouses strict environmental stewardship.

Not only do these battles pit South American nationalism against foreign investors, they are drawing a bold line between two activist movements -- environmentalists and social justice advocates -- that are often grouped together under the same "progressive" label.

When Mendez presented to the National Congress the legislation to expropriate Tompkins's land, she was backed by some of the country's best-known human rights advocates, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other groups that famously fought against Argentina's dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Catholic Church joined the chorus this month, issuing a 128-page document that warned against the "foreign-ization" of Argentine territory. Environmental groups, such as the Argentina Wildlife Foundation, have generally backed Tompkins.