While Chubut burns in suspicious fires that ravage thousands of hectares, allegedly to clear land for real estate or mining businesses, Argentina not only faces an environmental emergency, but the consummation of a historical dispossession .

The recent dismantling of the Land Law by the government of Javier Milei , a now consummated fact, is not an isolated act: it is the final chapter of a saga of denationalization whose archetype is the Benetton empire.

The massive foreignization of the territory, far from being a theoretical possibility, is a reality that is expanding under the protection of a State that abdicates its primary duty: to safeguard national integrity.

The figure is a wake-up call to the national conscience: 13 million hectares, an area equivalent to the size of England, are already owned by foreign capital . This data, the result of research by the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET ), exposes a strategy of silent and selective occupation. This is not a scattered phenomenon, but rather a strategic colonization of key locations: river sources, border areas, and regions with mineral resources. Entire departments have over 50% foreign ownership, while the false "averages trap" serves as a legal alibi. This is not investment; it is a geopolitical advance disguised as property titles.

In this grim scenario, the Benetton case stands out as the manual of operations . Its 900,000 hectares in Patagonia, acquired in 1991 for 50 million dollars, are the model of a global holding company that transformed public land, granted as war payment to British lords in the 19th century, into a private fiefdom.

Their story is one of a master plan for sovereign dispossession: they camouflaged their British origins during the Malvinas War, rebranded themselves with local names, and today diversify their holdings across wool, meat, agriculture, forestry, and mining . Their argument of "poor land" requiring expansion to be viable is the same logic that today justifies liberalizing land purchases: presenting national wealth as a wasteland, valuable only to those with the foreign capital to "develop" it .

The connection to the current situation is obscene. The Milei government's intention to modify the Land Law is already a reality . Deregulation is underway, and in conjunction with fires of dubious origin like the one in Chubut, it paves the way for strategic resources to fall into foreign hands. The fires ravaging forests and grasslands seem like the prelude to a new catastrophe: the definitive handover of the subsoil, water, and territory. The United States, the main holder with 2.7 million hectares, along with Italy and Spain, are consolidating their possessions at a time when the Monroe Doctrine is resurfacing with force.

The loss of sovereignty is not only revealed in the maps of the Malvinas; it is signed in every sales contract, consumed in every intentional fire, and legalized with every reform that dilutes the protection of national heritage.

The State, far from being the guardian, has become the facilitator of a new Conquest of the Desert, this time carried out by investment funds and global corporations. When land ceases to belong to the Nation, independence becomes a fiction. Benetton's million hectares are not an anomaly; they are the symbol of a country that, amidst flames and decrees, is negotiating away its last piece of Patagonia. Sovereignty, today, is also measured in lost hectares .