A few meters from the shore of Lago Escondido, in a valley nestled between hills that rise above two thousand meters, the pickaxe drills into the rock without the provincial State of Río Negro being able to specify -or wanting to do so- who authorized such an intervention.
Joseph Lewis , the British financier who received a pardon from Donald Trump in January after being convicted of fraud in the United States, returned to his Patagonian estate to oversee what reliable sources describe as a bunker with three basement levels and two floors, complete with communications rooms, a spa, a hair salon, and a private apartment for his use. Four thousand square meters of concrete and steel, buried in glacial moraines , barely visible in satellite images and never inspected by any official.
Provincial legislator Magdalena Odarda has been asking the same questions for seven years, and the answers remain elusive. Now she wants to know if that fortification —fully suitable for military use, as she described in her request for information —is an air-raid shelter or simply the whim of a man who demonstrated that in Argentine Patagonia, laws are negotiated behind closed doors .
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense of the Nation keeps the online viewer of border areas of the National Geographic Institute deactivated, just when it was most needed to determine if Lewis ' excavations violate areas sensitive to sovereignty.
But the magnate is not alone in this silent fortification operation. The Emir of Qatar already has his residence carved into the rock at 1,700 meters above sea level on Cerro Baguales, and the Amaike Trust—belonging to the Abu Dhabi royal family—is deploying infrastructure both in the Andes Mountains and on the Atlantic coast. This latter group is the one that acquired from Tavistock , Lewis's holding company, the private airport on the Río Negro Atlantic coast, 700 kilometers as the crow flies from the Malvina Islands, where no state control monitors air traffic. The Gendarmerie doesn't enter, the Coast Guard doesn't enter, and when the Río Negro police themselves tried to enter, they were simply denied access without any repercussions.
Impunity, however, extends beyond the boundaries of the ranches. Seven US congressmen toured Tierra del Fuego and Neuquén without notifying or inviting the governors, aboard a US Air Force plane that no one officially summoned. Gustavo Melella protested tepidly, as usual; Rolando Figueroa preferred to be angry with the press, who caught him unanswered. Forty-eight hours after that visit, Ambassador Jamieson Greer —Commercial Secretary of the US Trade Mission in Argentina—signed a reciprocal trade agreement with Pablo Quirno . Nobody believes in coincidences.
What's happening in Lago Escondido, on the shores of Sierra Grande, and in the foothills of El Bolsón isn't just the story of a millionaire building his own custom bomb shelter while being pardoned for his financial crimes. It's a chronicle of abdication: the provinces' abdication of their jurisdiction, the national government's abdication of its responsibility to protect its borders, and the abdication of a leadership that normalizes the existence of parcels of land where foreign powers build without submitting plans, leaving police officers returning to their stations empty-handed.
Patagonia has become a haven of lawless zones, and Lewis's bunker is merely the most blatant expression of what the authorities, by action or omission, have chosen not to see.
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