Dakar 2016? With Luck, DOA

In the early 1980s, when I was researching my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herding in the Chilean Andes, Horacio Larraín was my local mentor. Then a professor of geography at Santiago’s Universidad Católica, he helped get approval for the project (funded by the Inter-American Foundation). We still see each other occasionally, though he has since retired to the northern city of Iquique and the interior desert village of Matilla.

A longtime aficionado of the Atacama Desert, Horacio is (like me) concerned with the human and environmental destruction wrought by the annual Dakar Rally, which relocated from Africa to South America in 2009. Since then, Dakar has killed both participants and spectators, and damaged or threatened countless archaeological sites and ecosystems in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Last year, a Spanish competitor smuggled 1.4 tons of cocaine back toEurope; this year, there’s been only one death, but two participants – a Dutchman and an Italian – were arrested into Antofagasta for off-route wanderings that damaged an archaeological site.

I’ve only ever seen Dakar at its starting point in BuenosAires (as pictured above in 2010), but I know the Atacama and deplore what this senseless event has done to it. I rarely if ever do guest posts but, in this case, I have translated Horacio’s open letter as published on the website Piensa Chile (Think Chile), where you can see the Spanish-language original.

I have edited Horacio’s essay for brevity and taken some liberties for clarity in English (I am not a professional translator, though I’m confident I have conveyed the meaning), and all the hyperlinks are mine. The photographs below display some of the landscapes and features that Dakar puts at risk.

Open Letter: A Critical Opinion on Dakar and the Preservation of Cultural Resources

In recent years, we have fought a difficult battle against this Rally which is presumably a sporting competition, but which really destroys landscapes and cultural heritage. To summarize, this Rally is a competition and pleasure for the rich (the entry fee is US$240,000) to try out the latest model vehicles before they hit the international market.

This pseudo-sport competition contains the following essential faults that make it totally incompatible with serious and responsible protection of the natural and cultural patrimony of our Tarapacá region:

1) There’s a maliciously false idea that “there’s nothing in the desert” and that, for that reason, you can go anywhere and drive through any part of it. Archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, paleoecologists and paleobotanists know perfectly well that the subsoil is genuine mine of findings of the past, but all of them hidden from view today. For that reason, a superficial glimpse (which they seem to request) can detect little or nothing.

2) Many times, specimens of extinct fauna from the Tertiary and Quaternary, with extraordinary scientific value (species new to science) have been found on the desert flats.

3) The Pampa del Tamarugal is marked by numerous ancient trails, full of history, as manifested by the cultural artifacts tossed or left along them. Thus we can learn about the nitrate industry and the borax industry, of their abandoned settlements and their ancient ways and circuits of exchange. The ancient routes constitute living history for anyone who knows how to read them. For us archaeologists, they are bearers of culture, genuine archaeological sites.

4) One of the oldest and most venerable routes, the Quahpaqñanor “Inka Trail,” crosses the Pampa, from Quillagua to the north along the Salarde Llamara. Some months ago, we verified that the Dakar heavy support vehicles of 2012 and 2013 followed this same Inka route for more than 30 km, a criminal act that we reported, as the Camino del Inka Study Group (Universidad Nacional Arturo Prat) to the National Monuments Council in 2014. We received no reply.

This inaction and apathy by regional and national authorities worries us. It especially alarms and disturbs us that, to hear their declarations, our repeated scientific proof seems to carry no weight with them, and they are demonstrating an unfortunate absence of cultural consciousness.

Even a schoolchild is capable of understanding our fears and shock, on seeing how they expose the vulnerable desert landscape and destroy its surface, on which there was life thousands or millions of years ago that’s hidden to our eyes today. We could cite numerous cases of noteworthy findings in the open flats, where there’s nothing visible today except for some stones.

The Pampa is not a desert lacking life and bygone human activity: it is an open book for anyone who wants and has learned to read it. And that, necessarily, is the job of the scientist who talks about the danger that these off-road competitions involve, that they respect nothing, they trample and destroy, competitors and spectators alike, leaving thousands of new marks, marks that unfortunately will last for centuries.

For us, Dakar is a true hurricane, highly destructive, whose only objective is to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the powerful automotive industry and appease that hunger for bread and circuses to a bored and deprived humanity that lacks any greater cultural stimulus.

My Own Perspective

The Atacama desert, and corresponding parts of neighboring countries, should not be ecological sacrifice areas to fossil-fuel “sports.” With luck, Dakar 2015 will the last of its kind, or one of the last, but that will require the governments in question to remove subsidies and forego the international publicity they think benefits them - not to mention the damage Dakar does to their countries.

For earlier commentaries of mine on Dakar, please go to this link. 

Declining Dakar: Ecuador Opts Out of Fossil Fuel "Sports"

Several times, in this blog, I have expressed my doubts about the Dakar Rally, an off-road automotive competition that moved to South America in 2008 after terrorist threats in Africa made it impossible to continue on its continent of origin. Since then, the event – whose starting point in my Palermo neighborhood I photographed in 2010 – has aroused objections from archaeologists, conservationist and others, but it’s nevertheless managed to expand from Argentina and Chile to Peru and, this coming year, Bolivia.

Dakar won’t be welcome in Ecuador, though, as its government has rejected an offer by France’s Amaury Sport Organization (ASO) in concluding that Dakar 2014 would cause more damage than it was worth. After the 2013 event, environmental conservation groups in Argentina, Chile and Peru argued that their governments frequently permitted the ASO to ignore their environmental requirements – the Chilean NGO AcciónEcológica maintains that Dakar has destroyed more than 200 archaeological sites but, obviously, the Rally's money and influence have allowed it to continue.

Meanwhile, though, Dakar not only damages the desert environment and archaeological sites, but in the process it also kills and injures people – both participants and spectators. For the long-term health of the deserts and highlands of northern Argentina and Chile, and Bolivia and Peru, and the sustainability of the region’s tourist economy, Dakar’s departure would be a welcome development.

Moon Handbooks Chile, in Saratoga

In just a few weeks – Monday, June 17, at 7 p.m., to be precise – I will offer a digital slide presentation on travel in Chile at Santa Clara Country’s Saratoga Library (13650 Saratoga Avenue, Saratoga CA 95070, tel. 408-867-6126, ext. 3817). Coverage will also include the Chilean Pacific Islands of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Juan Fernández (Robinson Crusoe), as well as southernmost Argentina (Tierra del Fuego and the vicinity of El Calafate) that appear in the book. I will also be available to answer questions about Argentina and Buenos Aires. The presentation is free of charge, but books will be available for purchase.

Sacrificing the Atacama? A Chilean View of Dakar

When I first saw the Atacama desert, in the late 1970s, its vast aridity overwhelmed me, and inspired me to return to Chile to undertake my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herding in the Andean highlands of Parque Nacional Lauca, east of the city of Arica. To do so, I had a fellowship from the Inter-American Foundation, but I also needed an in-country sponsor to be able to carry out the research. One of my faculty advisors at Berkeley put me in touch with Horacio Larraín Barros, then a geography professor at Santiago’s Universidad Católica, who eased my way through official obstacles at a time when Chile was an international pariah.

In the ensuing years, I have kept sporadically in touch with Horacio, and have visited him in Antofagasta and in his retirement home at the village of Matilla, in the Andean foothills east of Iquique. While retired, he is not inactive, and he still has an intense devotion to the Atacama which, in its extreme aridity, is one of the world’s finest archaeological reserves – nowhere else on Earth are sites and artifacts so well-preserved.

Recently, though, he’s become concerned about environmental threats to the Atacama, particularly through the Dakar Rally, which he often mentions in his Eco-Antropología blog. I’ve voiced my own misgivings about Dakar, which has operated in Argentina, Chile and Peru since 2009, when terrorist threats made them abandon Africa. Long before that, I recall seeing dirt-bike tracks vandalizing the massive geoglyph known as the “Giant of the Atacama” (pictured above) and other archaeological sites, and Horacio thinks Dakar has brought this to a critical stage. For that reason, I asked him permission to translate and publish a recent open letter he wrote to colleagues, which appears below.

As an aside, I will toss in the fact that Horacio is a distant, probably very distant, relative of Pablo Larraín, director of the Oscar-nominated film No that I discussed in earlier posts.

Horació Larraín Barros on the Dangers of Dakar

Colleagues and friends, it’s time to get involved. This Dakar Rally is going to continue growing, in the number of vehicles, drivers and, what’s worse, the number of curiosity seekers either as spectators or copycats with their own 4WD vehicles who leave an infinity of marks everywhere on the land. We cannot simply act like ostriches, hiding our heads or saying, “I already spoke about that.” We need to create a broad alliance of civic response to express the feelings of the entire scientific and educational community of the country. We have so far acted timidly and separately. I think it’s time to undertake collective action: obtain thousands of signatures of scientists, journalists, lawyers, photographers, visual artists, teachers, and others. I’m not sure how to organized this network, but it’s imperative to do so. The Internet is the medium of course, but how to make them listen to our voices? Does anybody have an answer?

I believe the time has come for everyone who appreciates or deals directly with environmental conservation (geographers, biologists, agronomists, architects, anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists, foresters) need to raise their voices in consensus against this event as it is developing in today’s Chile.

Pilar Cereceda has sent me documents proving how the Centro del Desierto de Atacama (CDA, Atacama Desert Center) has credibly raised its voice since 2009 and 2010. The painful thing is that such documents, sent to the responsible authorities, have been ignored. And this attitude illustrates how there are semi-official powers (economic and political) behind all of this, and that our voices as scientists, teachers and opinion-makers are not being heard.  My position is that we need to take more decisive action in common.

If anyone has any clearer ideas of how to articulate, through the network, a serious and well-grounded response, we would appreciate it. What’s clear to me is that none of the objections of the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales (National Monuments Council), the CDA and other institutions have been taken seriously. Apparently, the responsible authorities have not even replied. And with respect to any assessment of the real damages caused and means of mitigating them, we have not heard a word, so far as I know.

What country are we in? Will we permit others the luxury of destroying our valuable ecosystems and cultural heritage with impunity?

Dakar Does It Again

Throughout the world, large parts of thinly populated deserts are often sacrifice areas for mining, grazing, and other environmentally destructive activities that have damaged their natural and cultural heritage. Northern Chile’s Atacama desert is no exception but, for the last two years, there’s been a new menace: relocated from Africa, the world-famous Dakar Rally has torn through fragile archaeological sites in both 2009 and 2010, and will get the chance to do so again in 2011.

Starting in Buenos Aires, Dakar thunders across the Pampas and through the Atacama before returning to Argentina. Dakar 2010 claimed fewer lives (one) than in 2009 (three), but it did far more damage to sensitive archaeological sites - according to Chile’s Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales (National Monuments Council), the country’s Instituto Nacional de Deporte (National Sports Institute, which sponsored the Dakar invasion) is liable for US$570,000 in fines for damages to 56 archaeological sites in the Atacama region of Antofagasta, near the riverside oasis of Quillagua. The disrupted sites included lithic workshops, where pre-Columbian indigenes carved arrow and spear points, as well as Inka roads and trails. In the previous year, the IND paid only US$75,500 in fines.

Nevertheless, the cultural and environmental demolition derby will go ahead in 2011 because, like mining and grazing, it’s profitable. According to the Argentine government - not, admittedly, the most reliable source for statistics - Dakar 2010 drew four million spectators and generated US$160 million in revenue. Even if those figures are a fraction of that, half a million dollars is merely chump change for an institution like Dakar - even though the Atacama’s archaeological heritage is priceless and irreplaceable.

Dakar 2010 Takes Its Toll

In 2009, for the first time, the Dakar Rally was held outside Africa because of safety and security concerns - particularly the threat of terrorism in the country of Mauritania. Instead, organizers moved the event to Argentina and Chile, where this was not an issue. On New Year's Day, the 2010 South American event began in Buenos Aires, after the participating vehicles were on display near Palermo’s Sociedad Rural (as pictured here) for several days.

Safety and security, of course, are relative terms when it comes to fossil fuel “sports” such as off-road automobile and motorcycle racing. It’s certainly not secure for the plants and animals destroyed or killed by speeding vehicles as they tear up the desert and the Andean altiplano (the Chilean town of San Pedro de Atacama specifically requested Dakar to keep away from its natural and archaeological resources). And it’s not secure for humans either - last year, the rally claimed three lives and, this year, Dakar 2010 needed only one day to take its first life, a spectator in Córdoba province. Five other spectators were injured.

In what other “sport” is grisly death a predictable outcome of the competition? Even leaving aside the question of whether we should encourage extravagant recreational consumption of fossil fuels, which are a limited and declining resource, Argentina and Chile should rethink their support of Dakar. Or at least, perhaps, we should acknowledge that this is a blood sport.