This February, large parts of south-central Argentina were devastated by fire. Smoke traveled across vast areas of the Andes Mountains in Patagonia, blackening the skies of Lanín National Park and Nahuel Huapi National Park, two renowned hubs for outdoor enthusiasts.

In much of Argentina, fire season usually peaks this time of the year as the dry season arrives. But blazes have unleashed a lot more destruction this year, burning down 37,000 hectares of native forests —- an area double the size of Buenos Aires. Strong winds and unusually high temperatures fueled the region’s worst forest fires in the last three decades.

During the mass evacuation of hundreds of families from Mapuche and Creole communities, the Ministry of Defense of the Argentinian Government, Luis Petri, began to accuse the Mapuche community of plotting this fire disaster. He labelled the Mapuche people as terrorists who intentionally put the well-being and natural resources of all Argentinians in danger. The response of the provincial authorities of Chubut, Río Negro and Neuquén was quick and perverse: disseminate the accusation with no concrete evidence and stigmatize the Mapuche communities. Indeed, they deployed the same strategy they usually do when dealing with the long-standing social and political tensions with Mapuche communities: repress, lie, and criminalize.

“Mapuche” means “people of the earth”. They are an indigenous group who have been living in farming villages in South America since the pre-Columbian period. The arrival of the Spaniards, however, began a long history of ethnic cleansing of Mapuche communities. During the “Conquest of the Desert” led by President Julio Roca in 1879, many Mapuche members were killed or forced to flee their communities. The remaining were subjected to coercive assimilation into the so-called “Argentine” society by means such as mandatory enrollment in Catholic schools.

The current Milei administration's official narrative justifies this “Conquest of the Desert” as a necessary move to pacify and consolidate national power. Today, the “Argentine-ness” of the Mapuche group is still highly contested since their indigenous identity has been made largely invisible from the mainstream consciousness.

However, even after the Milei Administration withdrew the land agreement that supposedly granted the land control in a national park back to them and this devastating fire that has turned their homes into smoldering ruins, Patagonia is still part of the Mapuche’s ancestral land.

Such catastrophic fires have devastating consequences for the entire territory: trees are burnt down, family properties are lost, and tourists cancel their travels and with it, the money they would have brought into the area. But Mapuche families are put into disproportionately more vulnerable situations because they depend on this land for their entire livelihoods. They not only live here but also depend on animal and wool production as their main source of income.

While Mapuche communities suffer tremendous losses from the fires’ destruction, the provincial and national governments of Argentina, on the other hand, are waging the 21st-century version of the “Conquest of the Desert” against them by exploiting this ecological disaster as a political opportunity to continue the genocide of the Mapuche community. It makes zero sense to make the Mapuche people the internal enemy of Argentine society and demonize them as invaders of the land when they have been calling this place home for years.

The scapegoating of the Mapuche can also be seen as a move to shift public attention away from the weak government response to this fire incident. Since the fires began to spread in early February, firefighters had to work under fragile conditions; due to understaffing, firefighters from other areas had to be brought in from other provinces to the affected areas whenever a fire ignited. Their temporary contracts also did not help the staffing situation

This fragility of the country´s fire management system is a repercussion of the political decision to slash the climate change budget, which has reduced resources for addressing environmental issues on a national scale. Since taking office over one year ago, Milei has downgraded Argentina's Environment Ministry to a sub-secretariat, removed a fund for forest protection, and passed a law that would further boost the oil and gas sector. In the midst of shifting the guilt of not taking care of the environment onto the Mapuche, Milei is also considering withdrawing Argentina from the Paris Agreement.

In that sense, the fire in Patagonia may indeed be a man-made disaster — it is aggravated by a government with little faith in environmental sciences. Indeed, blaming the Mapuche community would not put out the fire in any way - more investment in fire prevention and rapid-response infrastructure is what they really need.