The Changing Geopolitics of Mapping

In the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student researching my M.A. thesis on llama-alpaca herders in Chile’s Parque Nacional Lauca, I was infatuated with maps. In fact, my love of maps was one of the reasons that I entered the Ph.D. program in Geography at Berkeley.

I had been to Lauca before I started grad school but, when I returned on a research grant from the Inter-American Foundation, I found it a little frustrating because of the limited availability of maps in what the Chileans regarded as a strategically significant border area along the Bolivian frontier. In the 19th century, Chile had acquired the area during the War of the Pacific, and it limited access to maps – for the most part, excellent topographic maps were available at a scale of 1:100,000, but areas closest to the border were literally whited out.

The village of Parinacota, in Parque Nacional Lauca

Those maps displayed a grid of the areas in question, but with no landmarks or physical features whatsoever – if you were close to the border, as I was in the Aymara village of Parinacota (pictured above), you could see its namesake 6,438-meter (20,827-ft) volcanic peak (pictured below, at right), but it didn’t appear on the map (the village itself sits at roughly 4,392 meters, roughly 14,409 feet, so the peak is a pretty imposing presence). Those areas were whited out, though, because the agency responsible for mapping was the Instituto Geográfico Militar, which reserved the best maps to themselves for ostensible security reasons.

The snow-capped Payachatas volcanos, Pomerabe and Parinacota, in Parque Nacional Lauca

The reason the IGM whited out those areas was that Bolivia claims the area in question, though in fact it was Peruvian territory at the time of the Chilean takeover. Moreover, Chile’s diversion of the Río Lauca for hydroelectricity is a lingering issue (the river’s source is in Chile, but it drains into Bolivia).

Argentina's Instituto Geográfico Nacional, in Buenos Aires

The military role in cartography is a remnant of a 19th-century attitude toward geopolitics; it's perhaps worth noting that, in General Augusto Pinochet’s textbook on the topic, he apparently confused Washington State and Washington DC. Traditionally, the Argentine military has taken a similar approach but I was surprised, on a recent web search, to learn that Argentina’s own Instituto Geográfico Militar (pictured above, from Creative Commons) no longer exists as such – in 2009, it became the Instituto Geográfico Nacional which, symbolically at least, would suggest a distancing between geographical information and its military applications. That said, the shift may be more rhetorical than real – small print, on the site, makes it clear that the IGN still depends on the Ministerio de Defensa, the Defense Ministry.

Ross Road, Stanley, Falkland Islands

Interestingly, in 1986-7, when I spent 13 months in the Falkland Islands – which Argentina claims as the Malvinas, and invaded and occupied for ten weeks in 1982 – I had my best access ever to official maps. On a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, I purchased a full set of 1:50,000 topographic maps by the British Ordnance Survey from the local government Secretariat in the capital of Stanley (pictured above).

My rocket launcher tube, salvaged from the British military

In the era of Google Maps, of course, ordinary citizens have access to more and better cartographic information than the official agencies of that time did. Still, given the sensitivity of a conflict that had ended only a few years earlier, it continues to amuse me to look at the salvaged rocket launcher tube I used to ship the maps back to England on the RAF charter flight at the end of my time there.

Win This Book: a Calafate Contest!

Today’s entry includes a contest to give away two copies of the latest edition of my Argentina guidebook, and a link to an interview on Buenos Aires.

The Strangest Street in El Calafate: a Contest

On a hilltop east of downtown El Calafate, in a neighborhood where a handful of hotels have opened and private homes are slowly filling in half-hectare plots among the low scrub and bunch grasses, Avenida Gunther Plüschow is a paved six-lane road that extends nearly two km but gets very little traffic. At this exposed site, the wind blows ferociously and can become tiresome, but its few residents put up with it for the views, and for the relatively low land prices.

In fact, my cousin María Elisa Rodríguez and her husband Sebastián Brina live at the north end of this road, just a short distance from the Design Suites Hotel (pictured above), which overlooks the glacial trough of Lago Argentino. The question, though, is why this avenue, with the width of a freeway, is so overbuilt built when nearly all the other nearby roads are gravel - with one exception. That exception is the perpendicular Avenida Jorge Newbery which, though neither so wide nor so long as the other, is still big enough for a drag race (fortunately, that doesn’t happen here, or so my cousin tells me).

In any event, I will award copies of the new edition of Moon Handbooks Argentina to the first two readers who can explain why these two roads are so overbuilt. This may require a little research, but it shouldn’t be all that difficult to decipher with references to the links above; please send your entries to my email southerncone@mac.com; do NOT send them to the comments box of my Southern Cone Travel blog.

If you’ve won before, feel free to enter again, unless you’ve already won the book in question. Those in need of more cartographic clues might consult the Google map of El Calafate, and blow it up to the desired level of detail.

Buenos Aires Q&A

In conjunction with the release of the new fourth edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires, I recently completed a ten-question interview on “Exploring Buenos Aires” that has gone live on Moon’s web page. If you have any further questions on the Argentine capital and its surroundings, feel free to ask them at the email address above.

How much does that book cost?

Last Thursday, April 24, was the first day of the 34th Feria del Libro, Buenos Aires's wildly popular annual book fair, where hundreds of publishers promote thousands of new books and hundreds of thousands of Porteños browse the offerings over two weeks. Occupying more than 45,000 square meters of display space in the Palermo fairgrounds, it's one of the city's signature events, with personal appearances by authors from throughout the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. The biggest English-speaking names this year are novelist/journalist Tom Wolfe and social critic Naomi Klein, who has also made a documentary film about grassroots responses to Argentina's economic and political meltdown of 2002. The fair will continue until May 12 (the photo above is from last year's event).

In marginally related news, the governor of Salta province has demanded that the publisher responsible for a school atlas that shows the Falkland Islands (Malvinas to Argentines) under British control reprint the 30,000 books rather than cover the offending map with an adhesive overlay. If, as was reported earlier, the total cost of the books was US$2.3 million, this means that the provincial school system paid about US$77 per copy. The provincial education minister lost her job over the atlas scandal but, if those statistics are correct, she deserved it even more if she, or someone else in her department, really laid out that kind of money for such a small run of a fifth-grade text.

Mapping Gaffes

In 1997, the Argentine province of Chubut published a tourist brochure that, because of a cartographic error, showed the town of Los Antiguos, in neighboring Santa Cruz province, as part of Chile (Los Antiguos is only a few kilometers from the border). Responding to protests from the Santa Cruz legislature, Chubut recalled tens of thousands of maps at a cost of roughly US$100,000.

Something similar happened last week when the northern province of Salta distributed a fifth-grade atlas that shows the British-governed Falkland Islands, which Argentina claims as the Malvinas, under their English language nomenclature. According to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, the publisher in question - whose editorial director is a former university rector in Salta - defended the book, saying the entire map of the South American continent (see the pertinent section in the illustration above) appears in English. They could, he suggested, add an addendum to show students that this is "how the Anglo-Saxon world sees us."

Apparently, however, the book was never approved by the former Instituto Geográfico Nacional, the government agency that zealously defends Argentina's borders from dangers such as guidebooks that might make similar "mistakes" - no matter the language in which they appear. Not unique to Argentina, this is a legacy of the era when the military were responsible for mapping the borders of the newly independent South American countries, and many disputes have lingered into the recent past. In 1978, for instance, Argentina and Chile nearly went to war over three small islands in the Beagle Channel of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

Placing explanatory stickers on the offending map would be the simplest solution. If that's not acceptable, the cash-starved province may have to dump US$2.3 million worth of atlases into the recycling bin.