ALERCE, Chile - The majestic tree that gives this town its name is one of Chile's principal national symbols. Streets, schools, suburban housing developments, hotels, gas stations, taxi fleets and even a record company and a brand of cellphone - all invoke and honor the towering and sturdy "sequoia of South America," as the alerce is sometimes called.
In 1976, Chile declared the alerce tree a "national monument."
Luis Cárcamo, right, followed by his son Javier haul off trunks of the prized alerce. Cutting of live trees is illegal.
In Alerce, the tree that provided its name has all but vanished.
But here in Alerce, as in many other parts of southern Chile, there are scarcely any alerce trees to be found these days. Predatory cutting and burning in defiance of laws meant to protect the species have reduced its range and numbers by half and created a lucrative black market in which alerce timber can fetch as much as $5,000 per cubic yard, if successfully spirited abroad.
"The corruption is tremendous, involving very important people," said Adriana Hoffman, a former Environmental Protection Agency director. "There is always plenty of talk about saving the alerce, but nothing gets done and as a result, we are losing part of our patrimony. What is going on is truly scandalous."
Despite its resemblance to the North American redwood, the alerce (pronounced ah-LER-say) is actually a relative of the cypress, with a tough, water-resistant reddish-brown wood that makes it much sought-after for use in building construction and furniture making.
Slow-growing, largely because it favors soils poor in nutrients that other trees shun, it nonetheless grows to a height of 165 feet or more and a width of 15 feet, and some trees in protected areas are more than 3,600 years old.
Since 1975, the export of alerce timber from Chile for commercial purposes has been banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. To further protect the species, Chile in 1976 also approved laws that declared the alerce a "national monument" and prohibited the cutting down of any live trees.
But those regulations contained a loophole that loggers were quick to exploit. Since it is legal to harvest dead trees killed off by fire, lightning or disease, traffickers have been clandestinely helping the process along, environmental advocates say, in hopes of reaping big windfalls.
Most often, loggers simply strip trees of their bark or set forest fires to scorch them and make them eligible for the death certificates that are required before they can be cut down and trucked to sawmills. But the traffickers have also been known to "strangle" alerces with metal rings placed tightly around the trunk.
On a recent cold and drizzly Saturday morning, José Darío Cárcamo, 68, and his son and grandson were scavenging for the remnants of trunks in what had once been a grove of alerce trees here. Their plan was to recover as many stumps as they could with their axe and power saw and then sell the wood, either to neighbors for fuel or to local artisans who prize the alerce as the raw material for carved souvenirs or musical instruments. "When I was a young man, it seemed that there were still alerce forests everywhere," said Mr. Cárcamo, a former woodsman. "Now my grandson has only this, and God only knows what will be left for his grandson."
Government officials maintain that environmental groups here and abroad are exaggerating the threat. They argue that alerce stocks remain plentiful and that the official policy is working better than the alternatives suggested by critics.
"The alerce is not going to be wiped out this year or next, or in the next thousand years," Carlos Weber, director of the National Forestry Corporation, the government agency that oversees all aspects of Chile's forest management, said in an interview in Santiago. "We're not talking about 50 or 100 trees left, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, far above what the market demands each year."
In an effort to safeguard the alerce, Chile has set up a network of national parks and other protected areas. But the government has crippled the environmental crimes division of the national police, and environmental advocates say they are worried at other signs of a lack of resources and political will to guarantee that the law is obeyed.
"It's an absurd responsibility and raises the question of whether the government is serious about enforcing environmental laws in southern Chile," said Aaron Sanger, the representative in Chile of Forest Ethics, an American environmental group. "The government has one ranger for every 900,000 acres in that region, so it is kind of hard for that ranger to do a good job of detecting illegal logging in these remote places."
Environmental groups charge that the illegal traffic in alerce wood is controlled by a mafia that has connections to powerful politicians. Last year, a judge near here received death threats after she began an investigation into charges that a federal senator had improperly pressured Mr. Weber to issue logging certificates to favored constituents.
More recently, the mayor of Fresia, west of here, Nelson Schwerter, was arrested and accused of being a middleman in an alerce-smuggling scheme. He has accused judicial authorities of a political vendetta, but five woodcutters have identified the mayor as the person to whom they sold illegally logged alerce.
Much of the alerce shipped abroad has been tracked to places like Britain and Japan. "The alerce is mixed with other woods that are not on the protected list, and the customs people are none the wiser," said Dr. Hoffman, now the director of Defenders of the Chilean Forest, a leading environmental group. "There is little control and even less knowledge."
Yet in spite of the high price that alerce commands on the black market, commercial loggers have shown little interest in replanting the tree, for obvious economic reasons. Pine and eucalyptus grow fast enough that they are ready for cutting in as little as 20 years, while the alerce requires 1,000 years or more.
