Argentina mistakenly installs solar panels in Chilean territory
Faurie said the items could not be removed until the summer, but some Chilean lawmakers want them demolished immediately.
The Argentine ambassador in Santiago, Jorge Faurie, admitted that his country made a mistake by placing solar panels three meters deep in Chilean territory, in Tierra del Fuego, which sparked a diplomatic incident between both countries.
The elements were part of Milestone 1 of Control and Surveillance of Maritime Transit of Magallanes. They had been donated by the Mirgor company, founded in 1983 by Mauricio Macri, Nicolás Caputo and Roberto Gustavo Vázquez. Macri sold his stake in the company in 1994, long before becoming a politician and being elected mayor of Buenos Aires first and then president. Nicolás Caputo is the first cousin of the current Minister of Economy, Luis Toto Caputo.
Regarding the panels, Chile wants them to be removed “as soon as possible”, but Argentina insists that weather conditions do not yet allow it. To add to Argentina’s embarrassment, the Navy announced the installation of these panels on April 29 with a high-profile ceremony that could in no way go unnoticed.
“There is a fence that was understood to not be exactly the limit, there was an error,” said Faurie The nation. “Once this claim was known, we said that we were going to proceed with the withdrawal. “It is a factual error,” said the diplomat.
“The operators may not have consulted the satellite coordinates, which would have been the most useful, but they installed them using a wire fence as a reference,” he added. Faurie also told Radio BioBio that the installation was carried out by the company that donated the panels. The technicians were apparently “deceived by the fence of a ranch in the area.”
“It is not a major problem. They will be removed as soon as weather conditions allow it,” which would be in the summer, explained Macri’s former chancellor. Meanwhile, the possibility of the panels supplying energy to Chilean residents is also being studied, he said.
According to Chilean diplomatic sources, Vice Chancellor Gloria de la Fuente would have discussed the issue with her Argentine counterpart Leopoldo Sahores. Chilean Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren was quoted by media covering the Bürgenstock Conference on Ukraine in Switzerland that it was not a “serious matter.” He also said he hoped it would be resolved quickly. “We believe it is a mistake in good faith,” he also admitted. “We have a very extensive border with Argentina and this is not an absolutely exceptional fact, sometimes these types of errors occur,” he estimated. However, some hardline nationalist lawmakers urged President Gabriel Boric Font’s government to simply demolish the facility.
“A large part of the installation is obviously in Argentine territory and there is a relatively small portion that remains in Chilean territory that must be corrected and we will see the most effective way to correct it. We are going to evaluate the situation obviously according to the ground conditions and also the meteorological conditions,” said Palacio San Martín in Buenos Aires.
