Greenpeace Declares Independent “Glacier Republic” in Chile’s Andes

March 5th, 2014, was independence day for South America’s newest nation—or is it just a publicity stunt?  Well, it has a flag and embassies and seems to be quite serious.  It is called the Glacier Republic, and it consists of the 23,000 square kilometers or so of the Republic of Chile’s territory that is covered by glaciers. The republic was declared by the international environmental organization Greenpeace to call attention to the fact that Chile does not take care of its glaciers, which make up 82% of the continent’s total glacier-covered land.  More specifically, glaciers are ill-defined under Chilean law, which classifies them as neither public nor private—a loophole that this week’s declaration of independence exploits.

82% of South America’s glaciers are in Chile—or
at least they used to be.

The announcement of the new state (known in Spanish as la República Glaciar) was made March 5th in a full-page ad in the New York Times (reproduced below).  As the director of Greenpeace Chile, Matías Asún, explained, “Glacier Republic was founded because in Chile there is a legal loophole that does not recognize these huge ice masses as part of its sovereignty.  Neither the constitution nor the water code mentions glaciers as public goods that need to be protected actively.  Chile is one of the few countries without a law to protect glaciers, and that has allowed mining companies to become their main threat.”  Greenpeace explains that Chile can have the territories back when it agrees to take proper charge of them.

The Glacier Republic maintains its capital, according to Greenpeace, in a tent erected high in the Andes Mountains in an as yet undisclosed location, in the Patagonia region shared by Argentina and Chile where all of South America’s glaciers lie.  It seems quite possible that the as yet unnamed capital will exceed the current record held by La Paz, Bolivia (11,942 feet), for the national capital at the highest altitude above sea level.

Nicanor Parra, age 99, is one of Glacier Republic’s first citizens.

Readers can visit the Glacier Republic website and apply for a passport.  Among the first batch of citizens is the flamboyant Chilean “anti-poet” Nicanor Parra, one of Latin America’s most revered writers.  Since Parra is 99 years old, it is not clear if he will make the trek to visit his new fatherland.

Is there a special rule where professional poets are allowed
to cover their faces in anguish in their passport photos?

This is not Greenpeace’s first foray into micronationalism.  In 1997, Greenpeace activists declared the British-administered island outcropping of Rockall to be an independent country called Waveland and erected a flag there (see below).  Rockall, like Chile’s glaciers, is territorially ambiguous.  Though governed by the United Kingdom as part of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides council area (as erstwhile “counties” are now called), it is also subject to claims by the Republic of Ireland (as part of County Donegal), as part of the Republic of Iceland, and as part of the Kingdom of Denmark (as part of the autonomous and occasionally separatist Faroe Islands).  The uninhabited islet—it is too small to have any source of freshwater—is about equidistant between those four nations.  A Scottish separatist named Nick Hancock set out last year to break Greenpeace’s 42-day record with a 60-second squat on Rockall, during which time he was to unfurl a “Yes Scotland” banner promoting Scotland’s independence from the U.K.

There has still been no official response to the Glacier Republic declaration from the Chilean government.  The country is not known for its tolerance of separatism.  Chilean authorities use heavy-handed tactics to suppress the independence movement on Easter Island, and in the Chilean mainland Mapuche Indian activists in the land struggle are routinely rounded up and tried and prosecuted as “terrorists,” to an extent that has alarmed international-rights organizations.

Scottish nationalist Nick Hancock and the plastic “pod”
in which he plans to dwell for 60 days on Rockall

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Related article from this blog:
“Breaking News: Easter Island Wants to Split from Chile, Join French Polynesia” (Jan. 2013)

Breaking News: Easter Island Wants to Split from Chile, Join French Polynesia

Come now—France?  Things can’t be that bad, can they?

Reports emerged yesterday (January 10th) in French media that the president of the parliament of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Leviante Araki, is threatening to secede from the Republic of Chile, which administers the tiny island colony, and attach it to French Polynesia, a French possession to the far west of it in the southeastern Pacific.

Rapa Nui, which is only 63 square miles and has just over 5,000 inhabitants, is one of the most remote inhabited territories in the world.  Its nearest neighbor, more than 2,000 miles away, is the similarly minuscule and isolated Pitcairn Island, a British colony inhabited by a handful of descendants of the mutinous H.M.S. Bounty crew of 1789.  Chile, Easter Island’s parent country, is 3,500 miles to the east, with nothing but water in between.

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is at the easternmost extent of the Polynesian culture area.

Chile has owned Easter Island since 1888, but it had had a brief period of French rule as well, of a sort.  A mentally deranged French mariner named Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier ran the island as a personal fief in the 1860s and ’70s, intending to turn it into a vast sheep farm.  He married a native woman, whom he crowned Queen of the island, exported native workers—who were to all practical purposes slaves—to Tahiti and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Paris to declare Easter Island a protectorate.  Dutrou-Bornier, who had a taste for prepubescent native girls, was murdered in 1876, and the island remained a no-man’s-land of sorts until Chile took over.

Easter Island’s last brush with French colonialism didn’t end so well.

France didn’t express interest in annexing Easter Island in Dutrou-Bornier’s day, and it seems unlikely that it will be very enthusiastic this time around either.  French Polynesia is mostly a nuisance for Paris, which holds onto it only for strategic reasons: its vast sea territories, for example, are used for nuclear testing.  French Polynesia has its own independence movement; the territory’s president, Oscar Temaru, is pro-independence but has failed to move that agenda forward with his precarious coalition government.  There is also a movement on the Marquesas Islands to split away from French Polynesia and its population centers on Tahiti, to form a separate colony.

Oscar Temaru with the flags of France and French Polynesia

Nor is cession to France likely to prove popular on Easter Island itself.  The population has only a bare majority of native Polynesians, due to heavy settlement by Spanish-speaking Chileans.  Traditionalist natives are more interested in seceding from Chile as an independent nation, to be called Rapa Nui.  One resident, Valentino Riroroko Tuki, has even crowned himself King of Rapa Nui, claiming to be grandson of the last king, Simeón Riro Kainga, who was assassinated—by Chilean agents, some say—in 1898.  But nearly all of the island’s Chileans and an unknown number of indigenous residents are wary of independence, fearing the loss of Chile’s heavy economic support of the isolated, resource-poor territory.

Valentino Riroroko Tuki, Rapa Nui’s self-proclaimed king

The proposal is likely to go nowhere, but it points to growing discontent on Easter Island.  In 2010, Rapa Nui sovereigntists took over a tourist “eco-village,” a rebellion put down violently by the Chilean military.  Just this month, escalating violence between Santiago and another of Chile’s subject peoples, the Mapuche, may have further emboldened Easter Islanders to run the island on their own terms—or, failing that, on France’s.

The flag of Rapa Nui, showing a double-headed reimiro,a canoe-shaped traditional Polynesian necklace ornament.

Fun fact: if Easter Island were ceded to French Polynesia, it would be the first time that France expanded its territory since the end of the First World War, when it annexed the brief-lived Republic of Alsace-Lorraine after the German Empire’s collapse and also snatched up Syria and Lebanon when the Treaty of Versailles carved up the defeated Ottoman Empire.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]