More Than a Decade of Megadrought Brought a Summer of Megafires to Chile. As relentless drought dries out subsistence farmers’ wells, vast eucalyptus and pine plantations, remnants of the Pinochet dictatorship, are torching their communities.  In the austral summer of 2023, the 13th year of a megadrought in Central Chile, over 425,000 hectares (1,050,197 acres) of forest burned, most of it in desiccated monoculture tree plantations of highly flammable eucalyptus and Monterey pine. The megafires were the latest outward manifestation of Central Chile’s intensifying climate crisis. As of mid-February, the fires had killed at least 26 people, injured 2,000 more and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. Authorities believed a number of the more than 250 active fires burning in February were intentionally started and had arrested ten suspected arsonists. But climate, along with land and water management decisions, had set the stage for blazes to burn big. Stretching 2,670 miles from north to south, Chile is the longest nation on earth. The narrow country is a seemingly endless series of micro-climates. The south is cool and wet. The far north has the driest non-polar desert on earth. Central Chile and the U.S. state of California can seem almost like clones, so similar are their Mediterranean climates, mountainous topography and sun-drenched farms fed by wells and distant snowmelt.  Both are experiencing megadroughts, and there is a resonance to how the consequences of their lack of water manifest themselves. “Two-thirds of the drought is because of the climate crisis,” said Fabrice Lambert of the Centre for Climate & Resilience Science. The other third, he says, is because of human mismanagement of water. In addition to the warmer, drier climate, the policies of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 until 1990, still haunt Chile. “From the total national wealth in Chile in 2021,” Statistsa writes, “80.4 percent belonged to the top ten percent group. Almost half of Chile’s wealth, 49.6 percent, was held by the  top one percent. On the other hand, the bottom 50 percent had a negative wealth—their debts exceeded their assets by 0.6 percent. A plantation economic mindset still predominates here. In the region of Bío Bío, aside from a small national park and a few scattered patches of indigenous forests, all the hills are clothed in vast, densely-packed monoculture tree plantations of highly combustible, non-native eucalyptus and Monterey pine......a graphic pictorial essay- read on        https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09042023/chile-megadrought-megafires/