Reportage • Yasna Mussa • February 29, 2024 • Leer en castellano

“The most important thing is to take care of the place where you’re from. If you don’t, who else will?” asks Ana Paula Fuentes.

She’s sitting in a deck chair surrounded by the ashes of what was her home until a wildfire destroyed it during the first weekend of February. Several tents provide shelter for the three families who lived on this plot in Villa Independencia in the hills surrounding Viña del Mar, Chile. 

The entire landscape is gray. Several Chilean flags wave as if to remind us where this piece of land is, as the fire destroyed everything. What’s left are the burned out remains of what were once the homes of more than 30,000 people.

The fire began on Friday, February 2. The hills burned through the weekend, destroying a large part of the city and killing 134 people. It took three days to get most of the outbreaks under control. More than 13,000 homes were destroyed. This was Chile’s most significant tragedy in more than a decade.

Viña de Mar is a coastal city about an hour and a half from Santiago. It is known internationally for its music festival and as a vacation spot for domestic and foreign tourists. 

But the postcards that flit around the world showing off the city’s beautiful landscapes don’t depict the dozens of hills that are filled with informal housing, which have populations that multiply every passing year.

These so-called “encampments” are a harsh reality in Chile, where there are 113,000 informal homes, according to 2023 data from Fundación Techo-Chile.  

Viña del Mar, which is also known as Garden City, is the municipality with the most informal settlements in the country. These encampments were not only hard hit by the fires, but also the last places to receive aid from the city and the state.

María Guerra is 63 years old and, as we speak at midday, she is having lunch with her son and neighbors on a makeshift bench in what remains of her home.

Just before the fire devoured everything in its path, Guerra was visiting her cousin up the hill. They watched the embers dance across the landscape. 

In the distance, a huge cloud of black smoke filled the sky. The flames reached the Botanical Garden across the street in no time. Guerra had only minutes to react and run.

“The fire came out of nowhere,” said Guerra, still in disbelief as she reflects on what happened. 

Thirty years ago, she and her family arrived to what was then a land occupation. They built their houses as their budgets allowed: they improved the roof, got electricity, sought out water, etc. There was no sewage and authorities never formally recognized the settlement, which Guerra believes explains why nobody maintained the ravines, which were choked with weeds and flammable garbage. 

During the blaze, fire trucks couldn't enter the area to put out the flames that destroyed her home and everything around it because the unpaved streets were too narrow.

Although this zone is highly sensitive and vulnerable to fire, no one prepared residents or told them where to go in the event of an emergency, Guerra explained. Her account coincides with an investigation by the digital outlet Ciper, which found that the municipality didn’t have an updated Emergency Plan or an Evacuation Plan in force. 

On February 5, the Chilean government announced an initial assistance plan, which includes a recovery payment of up to 1,500,000 Chilean pesos (about US$1,500), in addition to tax relief and wage subsidies. President Gabriel Boric’s administration surveyed the damage and set up shelters to receive thousands of victims.  

Sharing meals in a burned out community

Berta Maureira slices a carrot as she prepares the day's menu: rice with chicken and salad. She stirs a large pot under an awning on the hillside in the Monte Sinai neighborhood of Viña del Mar. She and other women provide lunches and dinners to almost 300 people who, like her, have lost all of their belongings. 

Her mother, Berta Vergara, with whom she shares her name and sense of solidarity, hands out plates to a couple of neighbors who come to ask if there is enough left over for them. “We worked together from the very beginning in order to get by. We created this eating area,” says Maureira. “Neighbors come from all over to help prepare and serve the food.”

It's hard to get to Monte Sinai, which is high up in the hills. It takes about 10 minutes by car from downtown and three times as long in public transportation. When I visited in the first week of February, there was no bus, so I had to take a cab to a concourse where aid was being delivered. From there, I scrambled up the slippery slopes of dirt and rock to get to the encampment. 

Most of the roads are blocked and those that remain open are narrow. Everything in sight seems to be in the process of being rebuilt. Although the government set up shelters to house the thousands of people affected, many, like Maureira, her mother and her entire family, have chosen to stay where they are, sleeping in tents or in their cars. They fear that the lot that they’ve fought so hard to acquire will be taken from them. 

“They are about to be legalized,” said Maureira, referring to the process of receiving a formal title for her property.

This is not the first time that she and her neighbors have come together. During the pandemic, they formed an itinerant canteen and delivered food to those in need, even those in neighborhoods on the other side of the city.  Since the fire, some medical organizations and local institutions have reached out to help. What really worries this mother of five is the mental health of the little ones, who suffered the trauma of seeing everything that they knew consumed by fire. 

“The children are in bad shape. They saw everything and had to leave with just the clothes on their backs,” said Maureira, her voice breaking. “They saw their parents panic and people run. They watched people lose their pets.”

Feminist networks

One of the feminist organizations that showed up after the fire in Viña del Mar is the Coordinadora 8 de Marzo from Valparaíso, a neighboring city about 15 minutes away by car. Valparaíso is known for its colorful hills and, in this case, it was spared the impact of the fire. 

What immediately struck them as most important was to reach out in solidarity and help address the basic needs of those impacted by the emergency. 

Once they were on the ground, they got in touch with grassroots organizations, cultural centers, emergency foodbanks and self-managed spaces and built a network that could coordinate how and where to operate. 

From the outset, Valparaíso’s Coordinadora 8 de Marzo sought to reflect upon and channel their concern about the abandonment of the city and the drought, exclusion, and environmental degradation that worsened the tragedy. They soon realized what they first had to do was to react and pitch in. 

“We wanted to go out and make statements, but then we realized that everyone was in survival mode,” said Valentina Álvarez, the spokesperson for the Coordinadora. She noted that local authorities were slow to arrive, particularly to more distant places up in the hills. 

Over the medium term, the challenge is to put the fire in a political context. “It’s important to talk about the fact that an economic model based on profit creates the conditions for situations like these,” said Álvarez, referring to the drought and what she considers the plunder of water and forests. “Our territory has been sucked dry. The environmental deterioration of this region is obvious.”

She also notes that the fact that so many informal settlements were affected by the fires underscores the government’s failure to provide better housing. Many of the destroyed buildings were made of light and flammable materials. Some were prefabricated wooden houses, assembled by the inhabitants themselves, others were built with concrete blocks reinforced with boards, with zinc roofs, sheet metal and plastic. 

“This government marginalizes [people] and, as a result, a poor person can’t get a mortgage. This kind of housing is the only thing that folks can access in a context like this,” she said. 

Peoples’ needs are changing as the days and weeks pass. Valparaíso’s Coordinadora 8 de Marzo maintains regular contact with social leaders and affected residents. Its members emphasize the role that the communal preparation of food has played, historically done and coordinated by women, in their ability to organize. 

In the rush to respond, there was some neglect of the gendered dimensions of the crisis, although menstrual hygiene kits were later added to emergency supplies. There was also the issue of childcare, and feminists began to help support to children affected by the fires. 

Macarena Pizarro is a muralist and activist with Las Kabras del Pinte, a community collective made up of eight women and gender and sexual dissidents that is active in Viña del Mar and that focuses on art and culture.  Her compañeres experienced the flames up close and united as a single body to help, lend a hand, give a hug or whatever was needed. 

As soon as they confirmed that everyone in their collective was okay, they started organizing.

Since then, Pizarro and her collective have been a presence in the hills, entertaining the children, and organizing events as well as workshops on mural painting, painting and juggling. They also cook using large communal pots and do their best to address needs as they arise. 

“We’re going to paint a big mural with the slogan, ‘The people help the people.’  We want to beautify the place because people are upset and scared,” said Pizarro. “If a fire truck passes by, they get nervous.” The sound of sirens trigger residents, taking them back to that night of chaos and desperation. 

For now, feminist and grassroots organizations agree that one challenge is to maintain an active presence on the ground, as the number of volunteers gradually shrinks. “We’re still here and have tried to include everyone,” said Pizarro.

As the Chilean summer winds down, people are beginning to return to work or go back to school, and the quantity of volunteers in the affected areas is decreasing.  “A medium-term challenge has to do with how we are going to politicize this emergency, how we are going to interpret what took place, and how we organize ourselves moving forward,” said Álvarez.