During the last weeks, I’ve received many chain-style emails, unsigned, which stated that several evictions had been taking place in Tilcara in the last weeks. The email said that people who had been living for a long time in Tilcara and who were part of the original communities of the area, were being displaced from their land, for the purpose of building touristic enterprises in the site. The topic grabbed my attention, of course, and the first thing I did was write to some media of the argentinean province of Jujuy to verify the information. The answer I got was that they knew about the email, but there was no source that certified the truthfulness of the version, so there was no news.

But since the subject seemed interesting for this blog -you know, here we’re quite far from spreading out the vision of “everything in tourism is positive”- I kept sending some emails around, to find out more about this. The issue gained even more potential when I came across an article in the Salta Libre site (spanish). There, some of the eviction situations were told citing names and last names. And it states the following:

“Men and women, who have taken care of the land and its animals for centuries, have been dispossesed of everything they own by unsensitive death merchants. They are being kicked out without compassion for lacking the papers that today the law remembers to demand from them; of course it’s late now, their land, the one they’ve cultivated sowing corn, watching for their goats, their lambs, their chicken, already have new owners in papers, land owners avid of increasing their fortune, occasion pirates that glanced at the business oportunity, corrupt officers that sign buy and sale papers within a week; the land is being literally “cleaned” to build new houses, hotels, and everything that helps to the modernization of the worldly patrimony of humanity in tilcaran land, its legitimate owners are abandoned to their fate in disgraceful huts, and soon will become slaves of their own land.”

These days, I’ve sent several consults to diverse sources to check the veracity of the information, and to see what’s the relation between this situation and the important growth tourism is having in this area. If anyone has more information, leave your contribution in the comments area. If you prefer to contact me, privately, to hand me more information, you can do so at jorgegobbi@gmail.com. As long as I recollect new information, I will publish it here.