“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, who was twenty-three, had just been taken into custody in the far south of Chile. The accusation was that he had carelessly started a fire in one of the most photographed landscapes in the world. The father’s conclusion was blunt: the Chilean authorities, he said, wanted a scapegoat.
The act he was accused of was tiny when set beside what came of it, almost absurdly so. The Associated Press reported that Singer’s travelling companions said he had burned toilet paper after going to the bathroom and had then failed to put the flames out completely. Chilean authorities said that this was exactly how the fire in Torres del Paine National Park had begun. The regional prosecutor, Juan Meléndez, said the young man had accepted that he played a part in negligently allowing the fire to start.
If the prosecutor’s account was correct, that scrap of paper led to one of the worst fires in the park’s history. By the time Singer was detained at the end of December 2011, roughly 110 square kilometres of forest had burned and 400 tourists had been evacuated, while firefighters failed to halt the flames. More than 560 firefighters were working on the fire, and the government declared a state of emergency in the region. Officials calculated that the burned area came to almost four percent of the whole park.
Torres del Paine lies in southern Chilean Patagonia. Granite peaks rise straight out of the open plain, with glaciers on one side and bright, mineral-coloured lakes below. The park was created in 1959 and named a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978. It is known above all for its wind, and the windiest months, from November to January, are also the months when most tourists come. Vicente Núñez, who headed Chile’s national emergency service, described what his crews were up against as “an extreme scenario, mainly due to topography, strong winds and highly combustible vegetation”.
That summer the entire south of the country was alight. Firefighters were battling three large wildfires at once, in the regions of Magallanes, Biobío and Maule. One of them killed a man: an elderly resident who had refused warnings to leave his home. More than 100 houses were destroyed. The thousands of tourists who would normally have been walking in Torres del Paine at that time of year had to stay away, and their absence cost the local economy millions of dollars. A heat wave and a drought across the country were making everything worse. “We have a situation of extreme vulnerability,” said President Sebastián Piñera, who called for heavier sentences for people who start fires deliberately. Piñera said it might take weeks to bring the fire in the park under control.
The country wanted someone held responsible, and Singer was the name available. The environment minister, María Ignacia Benítez, said the government would take legal action against whoever was to blame. The fire, she said, had clearly been caused by the carelessness of tourists. “It could have been accidental, and most chances are that it was accidental, even though we can’t be certain”.
The young man’s family, for their part, insisted that the story being reported made no sense. His 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 maintained that he was innocent, although the Israeli paper Haaretz reported that he had admitted lighting a bonfire in a part of the park where fires are forbidden. The same paper reported that, as he was led into the courtroom, people watching shouted “filthy Jew” at him.
He was arrested on 31 December and released on bail. His passport was taken from him and he was ordered to remain in the Patagonia region while the case was investigated. At that point he faced 60 days in prison and a fine of $300. By 5 January the park had partly reopened, according to the Spanish daily El Adelantado de Segovia, which reported on the serious fire that had started on 29 December.
The case closed in February, and what it ended with was trees. A court in Puerto Natales ordered Singer to pay a $10,000 fine to the Chilean government and to carry out two years of community service for the Jewish National Fund. The fund and its Israeli branch, Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael, agreed to help raise the money to plant 50,000 new trees in Torres del Paine. Under the terms of the agreement, Singer was not named as responsible for the fire. Some 48 separate wildfires had burned through the park in late December and early January, destroying at least 100 homes. Singer, who comes from Nes Tziona in central Israel, was continuing his post-army backpacking trip, according to Ynet.
What his case did not alter was the pattern itself. In 1985 a tourist started a fire that burned about 150 square kilometres of the park, to the east and south of Lake Pehoé. In February 2005 an accidental fire started by a Czech backpacker burned for around ten days and destroyed 155 square kilometres, including some two square kilometres of native forest; the Czech government later gave one million US dollars towards replanting. The fire of late December 2011, the one linked to an Israeli backpacker, burned roughly 176 square kilometres in all and destroyed 36 square kilometres of native forest, and it too brought substantial international aid and replanting work. In 2019 a new fire, started by a cigarette end, was put out quickly by nearby brigades of the National Forest Corporation.
There is a longer view of all this, and it makes the idea of the careless foreigner as the single villain harder to sustain. Recent studies of the park’s past environment suggest that fires have been frequent there for at least the last 12,800 years. Researchers working on the Chilean Patagonian steppe place wildfires alongside pressure from grazing animals, the oil and gas industry, invasive species and climate change on their list of threats to the ecosystem. Conserving the steppe, they argue, depends both on protection inside state parks and reserves and on changing the way the unprotected land around them is managed.
On the ground, though, the rule applied is the simple one, and it is now applied faster. In October 2026 the forestry corporation Conaf in Magallanes reported that two Spanish tourists had been expelled from Torres del Paine. Park rangers patrolling the Isla de los Hielos trail, in the Playa Grey sector, had caught them smoking where smoking is not permitted. The rangers explained the restriction to them; according to Conaf, the couple ignored the warning and smoked anyway, breaking the rule that forbids any source of heat outside designated areas. The rangers followed the official procedure and called the Carabineros, who detained the pair and handed them over to the local prosecutor’s office in Puerto Natales, the same town where Singer’s case had been settled. Conaf’s regional director, John Revello, said they were the first tourists expelled in the 2026-2027 season, and that the institution remains alert and watchful towards anything that puts the environment, or people’s safety, at risk.