Indigenous Mapuche pay high price for Argentina's fracking dream.

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Community tell of devastating environmental impact on land where their animals grazed.

Albino Campo Maripe in front of a burning well in Neuquén province, Argentina. Photograph: Uki Goni/The Guardian
▼ The roar of the burning gas well could be heard almost a mile and a half away, from atop the high plateau where Albino Campo Maripe stood, looking down at the orange flames lapping the earth in the distance.
When he was a child, the 60-year-old Mapuche chief used to ride there bareback. Those days are gone for ever. The once-pristine landscape is now dotted with fracking wells and the white patches of land cleared for even more.
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The panoramic view is nonetheless overpowering. Two crystal-blue lakes, whose far shores blend with the horizon, cling to the edge of an arid and wind-buffeted Martian landscape of red sandstone, rugged promontories and wide beaches.
The ancient and spectacular rock  formationsof Neuquén province in Argentina’s Patagonia region are a paleontologist’s dream, rich with dinosaur fossils. But the image quickly fades to the sight and sound of the fracking well that exploded on 14 September and burned continuously for 24 days, spewing hot gas and other elements into the air from nearly two miles below ground.
The raging fire was finally put  out on Mondayby a team of experts who flew from Houston with 56 tons of special equipment. “This shouldn’t be happening,” Campo Maripe said, “but these are the consequences of fracking.”
Fracking accidents happen regularly in Vaca Muerta (Dead Cow in Spanish), one of the world’s largest shale oil and gas reservoirs. In 2018 alone, there were an estimated 934 incidentsat 95 wells.
There have been leaks from drilling sites, and claims from local people of water pollution and increased ill health affecting them and their livestock.
For Argentina’s leaders there is a bigger picture. They believe the shale reservoir can rescue the country from its ongoing economic crises.
“This province will transform us into a world power,” the president, Mauricio Macri, said on Tuesday to a crowd of 3,000 people in Neuquén, referring to the nearly 2,000 fracking wells that have been drilled there since the discovery of the deposits was announced in 2011.
Twenty companies own a total of 36 concessions in Vaca Muerta, covering a combined area of about 8,500 sq km (3,300 sq miles).
The Argentine oil company YPF leads the pack with 23 areas, of which 16 are operational, in partnership with the US firm Chevron.

A gas well by the lake in Vaca Muerta. Photograph: Courtesy of Observatorio Petrolero Sur
For the environmentalist Maristella Svampa, the promise that Vaca Muerta could turn Argentinainto a new Saudi Arabia is a myth, like that of El Dorado, the city of gold the Spanish conquistadors searched for in South America. “It’s the magical illusion of sudden wealth,” she said.
Neuquén’s indigenous Mapuche people claim Vaca Muerta has brought them not wealth, but discrimination, dispossession and health problems.
The Campo Maripe community, comprising about 140 people among 35 families, is one of more than 40 Mapuche communities in Neuquén.
“When we went to school the other students would yell: ‘Here come the Indians,’” says Mabel Campo Maripe, 52, who shares community chief duties with her brother Albino. “Those same people today refuse to accept we are Mapuches because that would give us a right to our land.”

Mabel Campo Maripe. Photograph: Uki Goni/The Guardian
They say the denial of their cultural identity is being used by  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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