Legally protected lands across the Global South are becoming targets for capitalist exploitation, revealing conservation as a tool of modern imperial expansion.
The arson attacks that engulfed the protected forests of the Andean-Patagonia region serve as a reminder that Western conservation models, which dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands, are another tool of imperialism. To protect those lands, we need Indigenous sovereignty over them from Latin-America and the Caribbean to Africa.
Revolutionary Pan-Africanist Thomas Sankara, once declared at the International Conference on Trees and Forests in Paris in February 1986 that the “struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannas.”
What transpired in the Andean-Patagonia region earlier this year embodies precisely what Sankara described. On January 5th, 2026 arsonists set fire to Patagonia's native forests, triggering massive blazes that scorched up to 52,000 acres in Argentina's Chubut province. Later, on January 16th 2026, 30,000 hectares were also set on fire in the Biobío and Ñuble regions in Chile. The inferno forced the evacuation of around 50,000 people (in both countries) and destroyed homes and rural structures across the region. The fires engulfed parts of Los Alerces National Park, a UNESCO GWorld Heritage site, and other protected areas in the Andean Mountains that boast spectacular natural features such as clear water-lakes and contiguous forests of alerce trees, much of it gone up in flames. Media coverage has focused narrowly on the arson attacks against protected lands in the Andean-Patagonian region and the suspected direct motives. Yet these fires raise critical questions about the relationship between conservation, imperialism and Indigenous struggles over those lands.
Arson for profits on protected lands
Official investigators determined the fires were caused by arson, yet this is not the first time Patagonia forests burned under suspicious circumstances. Several viral accounts by residents have accused Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers allegedly visiting as tourists of starting the fires. While some have dismissed these claims as antisemitic, this is not the first time Israeli tourists in Patagonia have faced such accusations. Indeed, a string of news stories dating back to at least 2011 documents similar allegations of Israeli tourists setting fires in the protected forests of Patagonia triggering protests across Argentina and Chile. The most recent fires resulted in the arrest of an Israeli tourist suspected of arson in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile. The Grayzone investigated this latest round of fires exposing the imperialist agenda, backed by Argentina president Javier Milei’s government, lurking behind these fires. Regardless of the veracity of these specific accusations, what remains critical is the established pattern: these are acts of arson within a long record of similar incidents. The suspected motive behind these fires is to circumvent Forest Laws that prohibit the sale, deforestation, and land-use change of native forests with high conservation value. Fires can downgrade forests' conservation status, rendering land available for purchase and development in areas once legally protected for their ecological value and natural beauty–yet strategically significant for imperialist accumulation.
These arson attacks and the events leading up to these fires exemplify voracious imperialist land theft and ecological destruction, forces that spare not even the world's most scenic and protected landscapes, from Latin America, Caribbean to Africa. As the crises of imperialism and capitalism deepen, areas once dispossessed and now ostensibly protected under the auspices of Western environmental institutions –especially on African and Indigenous lands– may become the next targets of large-scale, profit-driven ecological destruction. Beyond their scenic attributes, these protected areas are strategically significant regions that are transboundary and rich in unexploited natural resources. Zimbabwean scholar and land reform activist Sam Moyo articulated this best when he observed that Northern-driven ecological agendas which dispossess Africans and Indigenous peoples to establish protected areas –subsequently privatized and militarized– ultimately "seek to reserve more African land and biodiversity for external forces." The Patagonian fires exemplify this pattern which erupted from entrenched conflicts over land between Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, a settler colonial state, and imperial capitalism.
Indigenous resistance, colonial plantations, land and water grabs
Patagonia’s protected forests occupy the unceded territories of the Mapuche, Tehuelche, and other Indigenous peoples across the Andes Mountains of Argentina and Chile. This region remains at the center of intensifying Indigenous struggles for sovereign control of their ancestral lands. Indigenous resistance groups, such as the Mapuche Ancestral Resistance, continue their defiance against centuries of dispossession – first by settler colonization, then through 20th-century imperial capitalism embodied by rapacious landowners and multinationals. Furthermore, western environmentalism over the past decades has set aside vast swaths of land as protected areas, deepening Indigenous alienation while opening these territories to lucrative tourism and real-estate markets.
Indigenous communities around the world constitute the environmental movement's most confrontational force and also its most criminalized targets. Global Witness reports that from 2021 to 2024, up to 2,253 Indigenous environmental defenders were murdered for defending their land, communities or the environment. In the Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina there has been a series of murders of members of the Mapuche community by paramilitary forces for defending their ancestral lands against destructive pine plantations. When official investigators determined this latest round of fires was caused by arson, the Milei government, known for its virulent anti-Indigenous rhetoric and policies, immediately pointed to Mapuche groups as possible perpetrators. Judicial authorities in Chubut rejected the claim outright, finding no evidence linking Indigenous communities to the fires' origin. Government officials have often accused Mapuche Ancestral Resistance of arson to shield a capitalist class responsible for the ecological destruction. If Patagonia’s protected forests are burning today, it is because of settler colonial property relations that pillages Indigenous lands worsened by the capitalist driven ecological crises.
While global warming has driven increasingly frequent and severe wildfires across Patagonia over the past two decades, exotic pine mega-plantations – established since the 1970s to replace native forests – have dramatically accelerated fire spread and intensity. The Argentinian government continues to subsidize industrial plantations ostensibly to fight climate change, with 1.3 million hectares reportedly planted as of 2021. Pine trees, symbol of settler colonial plantation capitalism, were also a major factor in the massive fires in occupied Palestine last year that engulfed more 2500 hectares of lands in the West Bank.
Since taking office in December 2023, Argentina's president Milei has pursued aggressive economic liberalization. He has also moved to weaken key laws intended to protect Argentina's lands, water bodies, and forests – laws that limit the purchase of rural lands by foreign private entities and provide safeguards against intentional forest burning for land-use change. If Milei's proposals, currently under debate, succeed, they will unleash accelerated land grabs by foreign capital targeting Indigenous territories, even internationally recognized protected areas ostensibly safeguarded by Argentina's strongest conservation laws.
According to The Land Matrix, Argentina is one of Latin America's main target countries for large-scale land acquisitions– a form of state-sanctioned land grab. While most land grabs are reportedly concentrated in the Chaco region of the Northern Provinces –which according to the report may reflect underestimation in other parts of the country– the largest single land grab on record (468,000 hectares) is located in Malargüe, Mendoza province, within the larger Argentine Patagonia region and home to several protected areas. Furthermore, local residents in Patagonia have denounced a wave of attempted water grabs in the region, linking the recent forest arsons to these appropriations. While there have not yet been specific reports on water grabs in Patagonia, the Argentine Land Observatory has documented new dynamics of land and water grabs in Argentina within a context marked by the convergence of multiple global crises (financial, energy, environmental, and food) and increased international demand for raw materials and freshwater. Many land investments in Argentina are motivated by the desire of multinational corporations and private entities to acquire and control water and mining resources. The Andes forests represents close to 50% percent of foreign owned land in Argentina. These areas are mainly concentrated near the Andes mountain range and in border zones.
Land and resource theft is a pillar of neocolonialism and imperial expansion. But what distinguishes the situation unfolding in the Andean-Patagonia region is that it is occurring on legally protected lands –ostensibly safeguarded for their conservation values. To be sure, there is a valid argument that the establishment of protected lands itself constitutes a form of land grab. Protected areas systematically dispossess local communities and serve lucrative tourism markets controlled by foreign capital. Yet for many people, the idea of extractive and ecologically destructive profit driven activities on such a large scale taking place on these supposedly protected lands remains inconceivable. Nevertheless, African activists have long warned that environmental conservation is merely a veneer – protected areas serve precisely to annex more Indigenous lands for future exploitation on a massive scale, and there is a historical precedent to this pattern.
Are Africa’s protected lands the next target of imperial pillage?
National parks and forest reserves are colonial inventions. They were designed to satisfy the Western colonial gaze's romanticized notion of "pristine nature" while "protecting" biodiversity from Indigenous stewardship – never, of course, from colonial pillaging. However, when colonial states faced fiscal crises, they readily declassified these spaces for capitalist exploitation. For example, Ibo demonstrates that the broad declassification of forest reserves between 1946-1947 to accelerate timber production in Côte d'Ivoire coincided with the general economic crisis in the metropole and its colonies shortly after World War II. It is also worth noting that the most dramatic growth of protected areas occurred at the height of neoliberal imperialist expansion in the 1980s and 1990s which imposed the liberalization of African economies and the removal of red tape over natural resources. It was during this period that key national parks and conservancies especially in Eastern and Southern Africa expanded or were established. These protected areas were concessioned off to foreign capital in the tourism sector. However, the declassification of protected areas in Africa through the manipulation of laws to provide private concessions to extractive multinationals is indeed common and well documented. The Patagonian fires reveal how this global pattern of "protection" followed by declassification and exploitation operates across the Global South, from Africa to Latin America.
As the crisis of capitalism deepens in imperialist countries, the rush for land and resource theft in the world's peripheries accelerates. Environmental conservation NGOs such as African Parks and Peace Parks Foundation, both run by Western billionaires, now control together a staggering 85 million hectares of protected lands – that are militarized– in transboundary regions rich in natural resources across Southern, Central, and West Africa. Africa's scenic landscapes may not escape the wide-scale destructive exploitation witnessed in the Andes-Patagonia region, as resource exploration often occurs on these protected lands. Kenyan conservation researcher and writer Mordecai Ogada meticulously details the resource prospecting activities, including oil and mining exploration, on those sites and the close ties between conservation agencies and the extractive sector in Kenya. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the leadership of the five biggest conservation NGOs—namely The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, African Wildlife Foundation, and African Parks—all come from a pedigree of hedge fund managers, finance capital, and oil and gas executives.
In short, protected areas are just another tool of imperialist expansion, to reserve land for future appropriation as we have seen in Patagonia this month, and in Africa. The Red Deal manifesto offers a clear alternative: "Rather than taking an explicitly conservationist approach, the Red Deal instead proposes a comprehensive, full-scale assault on capitalism, using Indigenous knowledge and tried-and-true methods of mass mobilization as its ammunition."
Aby L. Sène is an assistant professor in parks and conservation area management at Clemson University.
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