Argentine Land Fight Divides Environmentalists, Rights Advocates

"The social justice movements have been extremely poor at understanding ecological effects of their actions -- they're not green movements," said Tompkins, 67. "Concern about things like topsoil, which is the most valuable part of the land and often suffers under agrarian reform, is not being heard through the din of the need for the social redistribution of land. But that redistribution, for those who are not capable of handling it, will be a terrible blow to the future."

Since 1990, Tompkins and his wife -- Kristine McDivitt, the former chief executive of the Patagonia outdoor clothing company -- have bought about 4.7 million acres in Chile and Argentina. Their strategy is to identify properties in danger of ecologically damaging development, buy them, then create private parks that they eventually turn over to the local governments.

In Chile, they bought a large swath of land on the southern coast, creating a private park that they eventually turned over to the Chilean government to create the Parque Pumalin, which is roughly the size of Yosemite National Park. They did the same thing with the Monte Leon National Park on Argentina's side of Patagonia. Last year, they donated about 210,000 acres to Chile to form part of the Corcovado National Park.

Tompkins said he eventually hopes to do the same thing with his 741,000 acres in this species-rich wetland region. So when he hears D'Elia and others calling for his land, he sees an irony so thick that it appears nonsensical to him.

"They're shooting at the guy -- the only guy, practically, from the private sector -- who is buying land and then nationalizing it!" said a fired-up Tompkins, eating a bowl of granola for breakfast in the living room of the ranch house he keeps on the property.

Argentines, he said, don't understand his style of philanthropy. When he talks about eventually donating the land to the government, they suspect a catch. D'Elia has publicly hinted that he believes Tompkins is an agent of the U.S. government. That his property sits near the Guaraní aquifer -- the third largest source of fresh water in the world -- has raised suspicions that he is trying to gain control of South America's water supply. Some say that a U.S. military base about 450 miles away in Paraguay is indirect evidence that Tompkins and the U.S. government might be working together.

The Benetton expropriation effort, meanwhile, centers on two families of Mapuche Indians who say that parts of his vast land holdings are ancestral property that belongs to them. Though Benetton offered to donate a portion of land to the Mapuche groups, the offer was rejected.

"The Benettons can't donate land that isn't theirs," Rosa Chiquichano, a representative of the Chubut province government, told Clarín newspaper.

A spokeswoman for the Benetton family, which owns 2.2 million acres in various provinces of Argentina, said a judge had previously ruled that the Mapuche groups have no legal rights to the land.

Such hectoring points to cultural differences that separate the American and European landowners from the residents who have lived in the region for centuries and want to hold on to traditional practices -- not legal rulings and fine print.

Tompkins traces the beginnings of the discontent to an American style of land management that is resented here -- specifically, his efforts to hold his neighboring landowners to environmental standards.

He recently financed a legal case against a local forestry company trying to build a dike through wetlands. It was the kind of environmental complaint that is made every day in the United States, but not in a region of Argentina where private ranch owners -- or estancieros -- have held most of the political power for centuries.

"Suddenly they see someone come in and say, 'Hey, what about the rules?' " Tompkins said. "That sort of galvanized people into action against me."

Kirchner's position on the issue remains cloudy. Though Mendez is the local representative of Kirchner's wing of the Peronist party and D'Elia is a longtime ally, Kirchner and other high-level government officials have tried to distance themselves from the controversy.

They label it a local dispute requiring a local solution. Kirchner hasn't publicly supported D'Elia's actions, but he hasn't condemned them, either. Last week, Kirchner was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, where he was trying to woo foreign investment; on Wednesday, he rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Tompkins, meanwhile, continued working on his property, overseeing projects such as the clearing of eucalyptus trees -- a non-native species that he is trying to replace with vegetation naturally found in the area.

"The Argentine government should look very carefully not at what passport someone carries," Tompkins said, "but at how they behave economically and ecologically."