“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 years old, had just been detained in the far south of Chile, accused of negligently setting off a fire in one of the most photographed landscapes on earth. The father’s verdict on the case was blunt: the Chilean authorities were looking for a scapegoat.
The accusation against him was almost comically small 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 then failed to put the flames out completely. Authorities in Chile accused him of accidentally starting the fire in Torres del Paine National Park in exactly that way. The regional prosecutor, Juan Meléndez, said the man had acknowledged a role in negligently allowing the fire to start.
What followed from that scrap of paper, if the prosecutor’s account was right, was one of the worst fires in the park’s history. 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 as firefighters failed to stop the blaze. More than 560 firefighters were working on the fire, and the government declared a state of emergency for the region. Officials said the burned area amounted to nearly four percent of the entire park.
Torres del Paine sits in southern Chilean Patagonia, a group of granite peaks rising out of the steppe, with glaciers on one side and bright, mineral-coloured lakes below. The park was established in 1959 and designated 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 peak tourist months. The head of Chile’s national emergency service, Vicente Núñez, described what his crews were facing as “an extreme scenario, mainly due to topography, strong winds and highly combustible vegetation”.
That summer the whole south of the country was burning. Firefighters were fighting three large wildfires, in the regions of Magallanes, Biobío and Maule. One of them claimed a life: an elderly man who refused warnings to leave his home. More than 100 homes were destroyed, and the thousands of tourists who would normally have been walking in Torres del Paine at that time of year had to stay away, which cost the local economy millions of dollars. A nationwide heat wave and drought were making everything worse. “We have a situation of extreme vulnerability,” said President Sebastián Piñera, who called for tougher sentences for arson. Piñera said it could take weeks to bring the park fire under control.
The country wanted someone to answer for it, and Singer was the available name. The environment minister, María Ignacia Benítez, said the government would sue any perpetrators. The fire, she said, was obviously caused by tourists’ negligence. “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, meanwhile, insisted the version 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 himself protested his innocence, though the Israeli paper Haaretz reported that he admitted lighting a bonfire in a part of the park where fires are prohibited. The same paper reported that as he was led to the courtroom, onlookers shouted “filthy Jew” at him.
He was arrested on 31 December and released on bail, with his passport confiscated and orders to stay in the Patagonia region while the case was investigated. At that stage he was facing 60 days in prison and a $300 fine. By 5 January the park had partially reopened, according to the Spanish daily El Adelantado de Segovia, which reported on the serious fire that had begun on 29 December.
The case ended in February, and it ended in trees. A court in Puerto Natales ordered Singer to pay a fine of $10,000 to the government of Chile and to perform two years of community service for the Jewish National Fund. The fund and its Israeli branch, Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael, agreed to help raise money to plant 50,000 new trees in Torres del Paine. Under the agreement, Singer was not implicated in 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 reported by Ynet to be continuing his post-army backpacking trip.
What his case did not change was the pattern. In 1985, a tourist started a fire that burned about 150 square kilometres of the park, 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 about two square kilometres of native forest; the Czech government later donated one million US dollars towards replanting. The late December 2011 fire, linked to an Israeli backpacker, burned approximately 176 square kilometres in total and destroyed 36 square kilometres of native forest, and it too prompted significant international aid and reforestation efforts. In 2019 a new fire started by a cigarette butt was put out quickly by nearby brigades of the National Forest Corporation.
There is a longer view available, and it complicates the idea of the careless foreigner as the single villain. Recent paleoenvironmental studies inside the park indicate that fires have been a frequent phenomenon there for at least the last 12,800 years. Researchers working on the Chilean Patagonian steppe list wildfires alongside grazing pressure, the hydrocarbon sector, invasive species and climate change among the threats to the ecosystem, and argue that conserving the steppe depends both on protection inside state parks and reserves and on changing how the unprotected land around them is managed.
Still, the rule enforced on the ground is the simple one, and it is enforced faster now. In October 2026, the forestry corporation Conaf in Magallanes reported that two Spanish tourists had been expelled from Torres del Paine after park rangers patrolling the Isla de los Hielos trail, in the Playa Grey sector, caught them smoking where it is not allowed. The rangers told them about the restriction; according to Conaf, the couple ignored the warning and went ahead anyway, breaking the rule that bans heat sources outside designated areas. The rangers followed the protocol and called 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 was 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.