Patagonia’s Fire Panic Hid a Fight Over Rural Land

On September 29 Argentina’s Supreme Court cleared foreign buyers to purchase rural land without the old caps, eight months after a Patagonia fire panic blamed Israeli tourists. The order restored article 154 of President Javier Milei’s 2023 emergency decree. It did not say the decree is constitutional.

Chubut’s own file had already pointed somewhere else. The blaze that started on January 5 in Puerto Patriada was treated as arson. The people in the frame were neighbors in a land fight, not backpackers.

A Foreign State and an Israeli Flag

César Milani, army chief from 2013 to 2015, posted as the cordillera burned. He blamed “a foreign state, pointed out by the locals themselves as responsible,” and put a photo of Milei waving an Israeli flag next to the text. He did not name Israel in words. Waldo Wolff, a Buenos Aires city legislator and a voice in Argentina’s Jewish community, called him “a coward” for the dodge.

Luis D’Elia, a former official on the opposite side of Milei, went further. “The ‘Israelis’ are going around burning Patagonia. Listen to this kid,” he wrote, sharing a resident’s video. Those earlier accusations against Israeli visitors ran with interviews from people pushed out of the Andean strip in Chubut, where more than 3,000 people were evacuated.

One woman on local television said the government was “selling Patagonia to all the Israelis.” She tied the smoke to Milei’s drive to loosen who can buy rural land. Milei called the charge antisemitic and said Jews and Israel were being used to hit his government.

The Prosecutor Named a Neighbor Dispute

The fire began on the afternoon of January 5, about 300 meters off the road into Puerto Patriada, on a rise with no house close by. More than 3,000 tourists were in the area. Débora Barrionuevo, a prosecutor in Lago Puelo, said the first tests found fuel in the soil. Electrical failure, an early idea, was dropped.

Governor Ignacio Torres called it one of the most aggressive fires in the province’s history, with flames about 30 meters high. By mid-January the Chubut file counted more than 12,000 hectares. By January 27 the governors of Chubut, La Pampa, Río Negro, Neuquén, and Santa Cruz put the regional total at almost 230,000 hectares, including 45,000 in Chubut. Twenty-four homes, a ranch, and two tourist complexes were listed as damaged in Chubut. One person was dead.

Son un invento. La investigación no va por ese lado, entendemos que no tiene nada que ver con la realidad.

Carlos Díaz Mayer, Lago Puelo chief prosecutor, to Chequeado

Díaz Mayer, speaking with the provincial prosecutor called both theories an invention line that Chequeado recorded, rejected Israeli tourists and Mapuche “terrorist” cells in the same breath. His working idea was a land fight inside a community near the ignition point.

Police chief Andrés García said cameras caught two trucks loaded like a move, minutes after the fire started. Most neighbors had not even grabbed ID. Two witnesses came in on their own, asked to stay unnamed, and tied the trucks to a family living meters from where the expert marked the start. Inside that community, García said, a woman who had arrived from Buenos Aires about two years earlier wanted to be recognized as a member, was refused, and a conflict followed. Officers seized five phones. As of the January 13 briefing there were no detainees and no one charged.

The national security ministry had already posted that early signs pointed at “terrorist groups self-described as Mapuche.” That claim was not the provincial file. Torres, asked about Israelis and land sales, called those stories “conspirational theories aimed at creating distractions.” He said that while he is governor, not a hectare of native forest will be sold in Chubut, burned or not, because article 105 of the provincial constitution forbids it.

Where Did the Viral Fire Video Come From?

The clip that did the most work online was filmed a long way from El Hoyo. Martín Morales recorded himself confronting two people over a fire beside a lake in Los Glaciares National Park, in Santa Cruz, about 1,400 kilometers from the Chubut front. One of them said, “I’m really sorry.” Morales later told a Calafate outlet he put the rest of the fire out and reported it to park staff. He called the pair Israeli. That ID was never confirmed by officials.

The stills were then pasted onto posters that read “Expel the incendiary enemy. Israeli soldiers out of Argentina.” A second prop was a grenade. Posts said an Israeli M26, the kind used by the IDF, had been pulled from a lake near the Chubut fires.

CLAIMS THAT FAILED THE FILE

• The campfire clip: It was shot in Santa Cruz, not in the Chubut comarca where the January 5 fire began.
• The grenade: Chubut said the metal recovered at Lago Epuyén was Argentine, made by Fabricaciones Militares, not an Israeli M26.
• The Mapuche cell: National security posts named self-described Mapuche groups; the local prosecutor said that was not the investigation.
• The fake deputy: A circulating “confession” from a libertarian lawmaker named Matías Baez named no one who holds a seat in the national or Buenos Aires legislature.

Chequeado, Argentina’s fact-checking platform, compared the lake photos with an M26 IM and said they were not the same device. The provincial government said six grenades were found in the Puerto Bonito area of Lago Epuyén, five of them during December sweeps, before this fire season. The last one taken out was described as an FMK8 training grenade from Fabricaciones Militares. Torres said the fragmentary rounds on the list were FMK2 models issued to the armed forces. None of that inventory was tied to the January 5 ignition.

[NUEVO] Es falso que la granada encontrada en la Patagonia en el marco de los incendios es una M26 producida en Israel: es de Fabricaciones Militares ❌

👉 Si se compara la imagen de la granada hallada con una M26 IM, se puede constatar que no es el mismo artefacto explosivo. pic.twitter.com/5NoDHY1yXj

— Chequeado (@Chequeado) January 12, 2026

The Andinia Myth, Recycled in 2026

The tourist story did not appear from nowhere. It is the latest coat of paint on Plan Andinia, the antisemitic myth of a second Jewish state in Patagonia that the Anti-Defamation League traces to the 1960s. The first sketch came from the Frente Nacional Socialista Argentino, a tiny party set up by the sons of Adolf Eichmann after Israeli agents seized him in Buenos Aires in 1960. A 1965 pamphlet, “El Plan Andinia o el Nuevo Estado Judío,” followed. In 1971 the economist Walter Beveraggi Allende pushed a leaflet through army officers’ hands.

The modern twist is specific. Young Israelis who backpack through the Andes after military service are recast as soldiers on recon, mapping lakes and passes for a future grab. That version spread on the right and on parts of the left, in Argentina and in Chile. The Organización Sionista Argentina called the 2026 fire version a conspiracy with no historical or political footing and flagged the return of Plan Andinia by name.

The rumor did not fade when Díaz Mayer spoke. By September it was still being bolted onto any Milei gesture toward Israel, including a clip of him calling Argentina a promised land. A forged-looking “Josué” settlement file, said to cover 100,000 hectares of burned ground, made a second lap in April. Fact-checkers who looked for a government trail did not find one. What survived was the land question, not a new fact from the forest.

13.3 Million Hectares Already in Foreign Hands

The panic had a statute under it. Ley 26.737, the 2011 rural land law, capped foreign holdings at 15 percent of rural land at national, provincial, and departmental level. No single foreign nationality could take more than 30 percent of that slice. No single foreign holder could take more than 1,000 hectares in the núcleo zone, with equivalent caps elsewhere, and extra limits sat on border-security belts and large water bodies.

Ten days after taking office in December 2023, Milei signed DNU 70/2023. Article 154 repealed that law. A federal chamber in La Plata later struck the article down after the Centro de Ex Combatientes Islas Malvinas La Plata, a Malvinas veterans’ group, sued. On August 5, 2026, the government pulled a fresh land chapter from a private-property bill so the Senate could pass the rest. The September 29 Court order then revived the 2023 repeal in practice, without deciding whether a president may erase a land law by decree.

RURAL LAND IN FOREIGN HANDS

The Justice Ministry gave Chequeado the certificate count, a total of 111 certificates for foreign rural purchases. The National Rural Land Registry is the source of the 13.3 million hectare stock. Most 2024 and 2025 papers went to Mendoza. Senator Patricia Bullrich, defending a later bill, pointed at Chandon’s long presence in that province and said no one treats those vineyards as a French annex. Chequeado has also recorded 31 departments already over the old departmental cap, which is a different number from the national 5 percent share.

Constitutional lawyer Andrés Gil Domínguez wrote that after the September order, any foreign person, company, or state can buy rural land anywhere they want, including border zones, with no limit. The Court itself did not write that sentence. It wrote that CECIM had no standing and that there was “a clear absence of a collective-incidence right over a collective good,” so there was no case.

Burned Forest Cannot Be Lot-Sold for 60 Years

Even with the foreign-ownership cap gone in practice, a second law still sits on the ash. Ley 26.815, the fire-management statute, was tightened in 2020 by Ley 27.604. For native or planted forest, protected areas, and wetlands, the text sets a sixty-year ban on changing burned forest after the flames are out. Owners may not switch the land’s use, subdivide it (except in an inheritance split), or push a real-estate project other than a lease or a sale of private land. Fiscal land cannot be sold or parceled for that kind of project. Farm use that differs from what the land was before the fire is barred too.

Grassland, prairie, shrub, and farm belts carry a shorter, 30-year lock. Both clocks run whether the fire was lit or accidental. That is the legal wall in front of the “burn it, then lot it” story. In August 2026 the government tried to strip those clocks out of the same property package that carried the land-cap fight. Allies would not vote for it. The chapter came out with the land chapter.

Torres’s article 105 point is narrower and local: Chubut’s constitution, on his reading, blocks the sale of native forest in the province, burned or not. Los Alerces National Park, part of the 2026 burn, is also a World Heritage site, which he called technically impossible to sell. The national 60-year rule and the provincial constitution are two separate locks. Neither is the 15 percent foreign cap the Court just revived a path around.

On September 29 the Court Unlocked Rural Land

The order was signed by Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz, and Ricardo Lorenzetti. It reversed the La Plata chamber, revived article 154, and said, in so many words, that the judges were not ruling on whether the decree is valid. They also said they were not stepping on Congress’s job under article 99 of the Constitution to review emergency decrees. In the countryside, the practical result is the one Gil Domínguez described. On the merits, another plaintiff with standing can still try.

HOW THE LAND LAW MOVED

1. December 2023: DNU 70/2023 article 154 repeals Ley 26.737, the rural land cap law.
2. January 30, 2024: A federal judge in La Plata suspends that article on a suit by Malvinas veterans at CECIM.
3. January 5, 2026: Fire starts at Puerto Patriada; fuel is later found in the soil.
4. January 12, 2026: Díaz Mayer and García tell the press the live file is a local land dispute, not Israelis or Mapuche cells.
5. August 5, 2026: The government withdraws a new land-cap chapter so a private-property bill can pass the Senate.
6. September 29, 2026: The Supreme Court restores article 154 on standing grounds and leaves constitutionality untouched.

The people who lit Puerto Patriada, if the provincial theory holds, were fighting over membership and ground in one community. The people who spent January naming Israeli tourists were fighting over a national land market Milei has tried to open since his first fortnight in office. Those are different fights. Only one of them has a Court date. The 60-year lock still applies to the burned forest. The Court has not said whether the decree that opened the rest of the countryside is legal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Plan Andinia?

It is a false claim that Jews plot to plant a second state in Patagonia. During the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship, interrogators treated it as if it had an operational core and tortured the journalist Jacobo Timerman for details of an Israeli invasion that did not exist. Analysts often pair it with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another forged plot document, because both dress a local land fear in a global Jewish cabal.

Was an Israeli grenade found at the Chubut fires?

No. Divers at Parque Municipal Puerto Bonito on Lago Epuyén recovered six grenades, five of them in December, before the January 5 fire. The last device pulled was logged as an FMK8 training grenade from Argentina’s Fabricaciones Militares and sent into judicial custody. Governor Torres said the fragmentary rounds on the same list were FMK2 models used only by the armed forces.

Where was the viral Patagonia campfire video filmed?

In Los Glaciares National Park in Santa Cruz, on a lake shore far from El Hoyo. Martín Morales, who shot the video, said he finished putting the fire out himself and filed a report with park authorities after the pair walked away. He identified them as Israeli in a later clip; no official confirmation of that nationality was issued.

Did Argentina’s Congress repeal the rural land law in 2026?

No. On August 5 the executive withdrew the land chapter from a broader private-property bill after it could not find the votes, including among allies. The Senate then passed the rest of that bill. The 15 percent cap stayed on the books until the September 29 standing ruling restored the 2023 decree in practice.

How long does Argentine law lock burned forest from new uses?

Sixty years for native or planted forest, protected areas, and wetlands, counted from extinction of the fire. Grassland, prairie, shrub, and ordinary farm belts are locked for 30 years. Both bans apply if the fire was arson and if it was an accident, which is why a change of use after a blaze is not a simple local permit question.