Harvesting Repression

The military government of Chile, troubled by calls for the possible cessation of loans from private U.S. banks, is devising new ways to earn critical foreign exchange. The junta has targeted its forestry reserves as a key source of quick cash, and multinationals from the U.S. and Japan, aggressively searching the world for new sources of scarce newsprint, seem more than willing to cooperate.

Since September, Georgia Pacific Corporation has exported $20 million in timber from a recently purchased plantation in southern Chile to its pulp mills outside Portland, Oregon, according to the Eugene Committee for a Free Chile. The multinational's subsidiary, Forestal Georgia Pacific-Crecex, acquired the 4830-acre tract early last year, for a price of $1.9 million. Longshoremen have staged symbolic work stoppages to protest the shipments.

The Georgia-Pacific venture is not the first evidence of Chile's aggressive courting of multinationals to win their cooperation in exploiting the country's timber reserves.

Early last year, the dictatorship was prepared to shake hands with two Japanese corporations.

Marubeni and Sanyo Kokusaka Pulp - and develop a logging operation on Chiloe, an island off of Chile's southwestern coast. The plan called for the companies to cut down 320,000 acres - approximately 26 percent - of Chiloe's rain forest for woodchip production.

Like the deal with Georgia-Pacific this project met stiff opposition. After protests from Chile's Catholic Church and the Japanese Council of Churches on environmental grounds, the two firms hastily withdrew their offer.

Although the junta shelved the Chiloe project after the Japanese debacle, the government is searching for multinationals to participate in a similar program.

And as the regime earns cash from the sale of timber by-products overseas, it is provided with the wherewithal to insulate itself further from outside pressures demanding a return to democratic rule.

- Marisa Birns