“He could not have caused this disaster,” Hezi Singer told Israeli military radio. “He was a kilometre away from the fire when his friends woke him up.” His son Rotem, twenty-three, had just been detained in the far south of Chile, accused of carelessly starting a fire in one of the most photographed landscapes on earth. The father’s view was blunt: the Chilean authorities were looking for a scapegoat.
The accusation itself was tiny next to its consequences. According to the Associated Press, Singer’s travelling companions said he had burned toilet paper after going to the bathroom and had not put the flames out completely. Chilean authorities said that was exactly how the fire in Torres del Paine National Park had begun. The regional prosecutor, Juan Meléndez, said the man had admitted a role in negligently allowing the fire to start.
By the time Singer was detained at the end of December 2011, about 110 square kilometres of forest had burned and 400 tourists had been evacuated, while firefighters failed to stop the blaze. More than 560 firefighters were working on the fire, and the government declared a state of emergency in the region. Officials said the burned area came to nearly four percent of the whole park.
Torres del Paine lies in southern Chilean Patagonia, a group of granite peaks rising out of the steppe, with glaciers above and bright lakes below. The park was created in 1959 and named a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978. It is famous for its wind, and the windiest months, from November to January, are also the busiest for tourism. The head of Chile’s national emergency service, Vicente Núñez, described what his crews faced as “an extreme scenario, mainly due to topography, strong winds and highly combustible vegetation”.
That summer the whole south of the country was burning. Crews were fighting three large wildfires, in Magallanes, Biobío and Maule. One killed an elderly man who had refused to leave his home. More than 100 houses were destroyed, and the tourists who would normally be walking in the park stayed away, costing the local economy millions of dollars, while a national heat wave and drought made everything worse. President Sebastián Piñera called for tougher sentences for arson, and said it could take weeks to bring the park fire under control.
The family insisted the story made no sense. Rotem’s grandfather, Gilad Harel, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that the allegations were bizarre, and that Rotem was “a responsible person, who served in a combat unit in the army”. Singer protested his innocence, although the newspaper Haaretz reported that he admitted lighting a bonfire in a part of the park where fires are banned, and that onlookers shouted “filthy Jew” at him as he was led to the courtroom.
The case ended in February, and it ended in trees. A court in Puerto Natales ordered Singer to pay a $10,000 fine to the Chilean government and to do two years of community service for the Jewish National Fund, which agreed, with its Israeli branch, to help raise money to plant 50,000 new trees in Torres del Paine. Under the agreement, Singer was not blamed for the fire. He came from Nes Tziona in central Israel, and Ynet reported that he was continuing his backpacking trip.
His case did not change the pattern. A tourist’s fire burned about 150 square kilometres in 1985, and an accidental fire started by a Czech backpacker in 2005 destroyed 155 square kilometres. Yet studies inside the park suggest fires have been frequent there for at least the last 12,800 years.
The rule on the ground is still the simple one, and it is enforced faster now. In October 2026, the forestry corporation Conaf reported that two Spanish tourists had been expelled from the park after rangers caught them smoking on the Isla de los Hielos trail. Warned, the couple smoked anyway. The rangers called the police, who handed them to the prosecutor’s office in Puerto Natales, the same town where Singer’s case was settled. Conaf’s regional director, John Revello, said they were the first tourists expelled that season.