Making Connections or Breaking Cultural Traditions?
Air Date: Week of March 19, 2004
Producer Alan Weissman leads us on a trip to an island off the coast of Chile that boasts a proud and distinct culture. The Chilean government wants to build a bridge there to boost the economy of the island and the nation. But islanders think that’s a big mistake.
Transcript
CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.
At the northern end of the archipelago that stretches a thousand miles down Chile toward Cape Horn is an island the size of Puerto Rico, called Chiloé. Chiloé has developed its own mythology and culture, thanks to its isolation. Its folklore, quaint towns, succulent seafood and the picturesque ferry crossing have made it a tourism treasure.
But some fear the island's isolated mystique may soon be lost. For its 2010 bicentennial, Chile wants to build the longest bridge in Latin America, to join Chiloé with the rest of the nation. The government promises faster access to hospitals and easier access for tourists. Yet many islanders claim this bridge isn't really for them, but for a fish – and a foreign fish at that. As part of “Worlds of Difference,” a series by Homelands Productions, Alan Weisman reports.
[MUSIC: SONG BY ROLANDO ALARCÓN]
WEISMAN: A ghost is singing.
[MUSIC]
WEISMAN: His words tell how he drowned when a storm snatched the boat that was taking him to his wedding.
[BIRDS CHIRPING, MUSIC]
WEISMAN: The place where his bride waited in vain is a big green island that hangs like a teardrop off the south coast of Chile, called Chiloé.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
WEISMAN: On Chiloé, hearing ghosts or seeing spirits is accepted, even expected. There’s La Pincoya, a long-haired nymph in a seaweed skirt whose dance lures the fish. Or El Trauco, the gnarly forest troll who’s to blame when single girls on Chiloé find themselves pregnant. And our unlucky groom is now surely aboard a schooner named El Caleuche.
[CÁRDENAS SPEAKING SPANISH]
VOICEOVER: The Caleuche is a phantom ship. Its crews are drowned sailors, lost at sea. Whenever the fog enshrouds the shore or moves up the rivers, that means El Caleuche is here.
[CÁRDENAS TALKING, SOUND OF WATER, PADDLING]
WEISMAN: For centuries, the phantom ship Caleuche had no shortage of drowned seamen. Chiloé’s original natives, the Mapuche Indians, had only bark canoes to reach their cousins on the mainland, a mile-and-a-half across a windy channel. The sailboats used by settlers sent to this farthest outpost of the Spanish Empire weren’t much safer.
[CÁRDENAS SPEAKING SPANISH]
VOICEOVER: We’re in the Santa Maria de Loreto de Achao church, the oldest wooden church in Chile.
[SOUND OF CREAKING BOARDS]
WEISMAN: Chiloé historian Renato Cárdenas is descended from a Spanish sea captain who ran aground here in 1613. Stroking his silky gray goatee, Renato explains that this island was so remote that missionaries couldn’t even get nails to build churches
[CÁRDENAS SPEAKING SPANISH]
VOICEOVER: This church is made with wooden pegs, no nails.
WEISMAN: Isolated together, Chiloé’s Spaniards and Mapuches intermingled blood lines and beliefs, and called themselves Chilotes.
[FERRY ARRIVING AT DOCK, HORN BLAST]
WEISMAN: In 1958, regular ferry service finally began.
MAN ON FERRY SPEAKING SPANISH: Renato Cárdenas!
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WEISMAN: Soon, tourists arrived to try to glimpse El Trauco, and to see stilt houses, and wooden churches built from pegs and interlocking shingles, so charming that they’ve been recognized by UNESCO. [ACCORDIAN PLAYING] [OYAZUN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: The churches are now official world heritage sites. Chiloé also has more than 30 folk festivals every summer. WEISMAN: Felix Oyazún heads a local development council. He says tourists come for Chilote folklore and music, and a cuisine of 200 native potatoes and huge mussels and oysters. But the enchantment, he says, starts with the crossing. [OYAZUN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: Arriving by ferry is like going through a magic door to an island, like none that exists anywhere else in Chile or South America. [SINGING IN SPANISH, ACCORDIAN PLAYING] WEISMAN: Which is why he was stunned to hear about Chile’s plan to turn his island into a peninsula. For its bicentennial in 2010, the government wants to build Latin America’s longest suspension bridge, at a cost of a third of a billion dollars. That would turn a 20-minute ferry passage into a three-minute car trip. [OYAZUN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: It will be a real shock for the tourists. Chiloé needs an airport, a hospital, roads. It would be a contradiction to have a gorgeous luxury of a bridge to such a deficient place. The government has to come to its senses. [SINGING IN SPANISH, ACCORDIAN PLAYING, FERRY ENGINES] WEISMAN: Nine ferry boats, with four diesels apiece, run constantly between the mainland and the island. [VILLALOBOS SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: The ferries serve their function, but they just aren’t enough. WEISMAN: Businessman Sergio Villalobos leads support for the bridge from the town of Ancud. He thinks the sheer volume of traffic a bridge carries would more than make up for the loss of some romantic tourists. [VILLALOBOS SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: When the Golden Gate was built, they went from 10,000 trips a month to 140,000 vehicles every day. WEISMAN: And all those customers, he adds, will fortify culture, not harm it. [VILLALOBOS SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: We’ll train more people to form folklore groups for the tourist flow, like hula professionals in Hawaii, or Mariachis in Mexico. That used to be just for fun, now there are Mariachi schools. We need to do that here. Bridges bring progress, and new industry. WEISMAN: Ancud could use new industry. This town of 30,000 used to be Chiloé’s fishing capital, but cod and sea bass are now so depleted that it’s down to one processing plant. Yet, when you mention the jobs the bridge might bring to local fishermen, you don’t get the expected reply. [MAN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: It would be worse for us, because traditions would be lost. The magic of the island would be lost. Our mythology would be lost. [PEOPLE TALKING IN SPANISH] WEISMAN: Bridges form connections, unite communities. Yet all over this island, emotions run high against one that would link Chiloé to the modern world. One reason, say these fishermen, is the belief that it’s not really for Chiloé at all. [MAN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: It’s just to benefit the salmon industry... WEISMAN: In Chile, fishing is fishing, but salmon is an industry. Today, half the salmon U.S. consumers eat comes from here. But 25 years back, there were no salmon in this country. [CÁRDENAS SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: We are in Curaco de Vélez, an historic place. This is where salmon farming began, not just in Chiloé, but in all Chile. [BIRDS SINGING, WIND BLOWING THROUGH TREES] WEISMAN: A lot of us are grateful for farmed salmon. In an age of collapsing sea harvests, groceries and sushi bars everywhere abound with thick orange salmon filets. Maybe you’ve heard that Chile is the world’s second biggest salmon exporter, after Norway. But in these globalized times, that’s a little confusing because half the Chilean companies are owned by Norwegians themselves or their European neighbors. In the 1970s, tests showed that isolated Chiloé had some of the clearest water left on the planet. Soon, European salmon growers were floating giant cages of Atlantic salmon transplanted from Norway in lakes and inlets all around this Pacific island. [SLOSHING WATER, MEN TALKING IN SPANISH] WEISMAN: Renato Cardenas talks to a fisheries technician at a new installation on a bay near Castro, the city where he teaches. [MAN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: We have 280,000 fish, around 40,000 per cage. In two months, it will double. [WATER SLOSHING, SEAGULLS] WEISMAN: All those fish, yet only two men are working here. Automated feeders deliver pellets made of ground-up sardines, anchovies and jack mackerel. To keep the salmon coming, Chile has become the world’s second biggest producer of fishmeal. [MAN SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: A motor pushes food to the cages, so fewer workers are needed and the salmon grow more uniformly. We monitor by camera to make sure they eat everything, so less food is lost.
WEISMAN: Yet many pellets pass right through the cages. Combined with salmon feces on lake bottoms and sea floors, they create enormous algae blooms in Chiloé’s once crystalline waters. The same thing happened in Norway - one reason why the Norwegians came here. Chiloé fishermen claim this pollution, and aggressive escaped salmon, are ruining natural fishing grounds. [WATER SLOSHING] INFANTE: The total sales for the year 2002 were $973 million worth of exports. WEISMAN: Rodrigo Infante, general manager of the National Salmon Growers’ Trade Association, says Chile is on its way to becoming the world’s number one salmon producer. INFANTE: We feel the bridge itself will be a positive thing for the island and its people. WEISMAN: The bridge, he explains, is actually key to a grand plan that goes far beyond Chiloé. INFANTE: Well, Chile has 55,000 kilometers of coastline and 95 percent of that to the south – plenty, plenty, plenty of areas to be developed. WEISMAN: That southern coastline is a pristine puzzle of islands, fjords, and volcanoes. No road can traverse it. But a bridge to Chiloé would extend the Pan American highway 100 miles farther, creating a gateway to those untapped regions. Chile’s grand vision is fish farms clear down to Tierra del Fuego, to triple salmon production.
[MEN TALKING IN SPANISH, CLINKING OF MUSSEL SHELLS, DOG BARKING] WEISMAN: On the eastern shore of Chiloé, Renato Cárdenas and his cousin Pancho gather mussels. [CÁRDENAS SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: I was born here on the shore. I grew up like algae, like a mollusk. This beach was my playground. WEISMAN: Behind them rises their hamlet’s wooden church steeple, and hills where teams of oxen plow. In front lie many green islands. And beyond, on the mainland, the snowy peaks of the Chilean Andes, golden in the afternoon light. [SOUND OF CLEANING MUSSELS] WEISMAN: Just offshore bobs a huge raft of the omnipresent aluminum cages, near a line of abandoned Styrofoam floats. [CÁRDENAS SPEAKING SPANISH] VOICEOVER: That’s a salmon farm, and that’s the remains of one. They contaminated the bottom so badly, they had to move it. [DOG YELPING] WEISMAN: Where they moved it was right atop rich shellfish beds where Renato’s relatives collect. So they’ve had to work a little harder to fill their 30-kilo sacks with two local mussel varieties: small, sweet choros and big, meaty cholgas. CÁRDENAS: Adelante. Pase. Hola!
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Palitos—houses built on stilts—on the island of Chiloé. (Photo: Alan Weisman) 
Algae pollution and salmon platforms (Photo: Alan Weisman) 
Renato Cárdenas gathers pangue leaves. (Photo: Alan Weisman) 
