I t’s hard to find the right words to describe the extraordinariness that occurs each year in Patagonia, on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. Hyperbole could only begin to capture what happened there in 2021: events that have come to be known as the massacre of the penguins.
It must have been the same back then as it is now, nearly a hundred years since the first Magellanic penguin made landfall on this beach in the Patagonian province of Chubut, the endpoint of a 3,200-kilometre swim from Brazil. A penguin, the same as now: agile and athletic in the sea, fast underwater; but with a clumsy, swaying, short-stepped gait on land. He shakes off the last of the saltwater and smartens up his black and white feathers. The penguin walks inland, unsteadily, chest puffed out, until he finds a patch of soft, dry earth under the branches of a Quilimbay or Jume tree. Just as they do today, he uses his beak to dig a sloping burrow, 70 centimetres into the ground. He shooes away the dust with his wing and begins to wait, sheltering, until the arrival of a female a few days later. This is how it must have happened—penguins, after all, are creatures of habit.
2024: The slow trickle of penguins gathering in Punta Tombo, a 210-hectare (2 square kilometre) protected area on the Atlantic coast, cock their heads and throw a sideways glance in the direction of the tourists and the contingents of school children whose arrival marks the beginning of the season. It’s 11.30 in the morning on September 16. The sun is mild. The wind is exceptionally light. The penguins pay no heed to the politicians who have shown up to cut ribbons and give speeches. They ignore the mobile phones and cameras turned towards them. They take their time to cross over the kilometre-and-a-half long wooden walkway which intrudes into their habitat, built so that the visitors can gawk at them up close while keeping the 2-metre distance the warning signs require; these penguins, such an emotive symbol of relational fidelity and responsible co-parenting—the males and females raise their young together —thanks to the Oscar-winning 2006 French documentary, March of the Penguins.
Alfajores
A popular type of Argentinean biscuit made up of two cookies with a sweet filling in between. The
word itself, like many Spanish words, is thought to originate from Arabic.It must have been imperceptible at first, the gradual expansion of the area occupied by the penguins each September-to-April mating season, starting in 1929 and eventually growing to some 400 hectares (4 square kilometres). Back then, this land wasn’t yet a province, still less a nature reserve, home to the half million penguins that today make it the continent’s largest colony. The Magellanic penguins were not yet at the mercy of family feuds, personal ambitions or the courts. They weren’t yet subject to a tourism industry that sells them in the form of stuffed toys and depicts them on the side of taxis, on alfajores and on posters, t-shirts and other souvenirs, and which attracts over 85,000 visitors a year to wander among their nests and their young for a fee of $19 for foreigners or $6 for Argentinians.
It would take 92 years for all that to come together; and then for their habitat to be flattened by a multi-tonne machine and divided up with an electric fence.
The 2021 events that have come to be known as the ’Massacre of Punta Tombo’ in fact took place some 9 kilometres away in the lesser-known and less frequently visited Punta Clara. The incident led to a court case in which 37-year-old Ricardo La Regina, manager of an area of land which partly overlaps with the penguin colony, was accused of aggravated environmental damage and cruelty to animals. Specifically, La Regina was alleged to have used a mechanical digger to open a 930-metre-long pathway through the colony, crushing eggs and baby penguins as he went, killing 105 birds and destroying 175 nests.
Digger
The word in the original is “retroexcavadora”, a particular type of digger known in English as a backhoe.It started on the morning of August 10, 2021. And in this story, dates matter. Ricardo La Regina repeatedly stated that everything he did was over and done with in August; that is, before the arrival of the penguins. Against this, the prosecution—backed up by satellite imagery and expert reports—stated the bulldozer was in fact used multiple times after that first August morning, up until December 4; that is, at a time when eggs had been laid, penguins were brooding over them, and some chicks had already hatched. The eight months the penguins spend on the coast at Chubut are a key part of their reproductive cycle.
But all this occurred in the middle of an expanse of 10,000 hectares of desolate Patagonian bush, amidst the Quilimbay and Jume trees, buffeted by an constant wind coming off the sea. Until 22 November 2021, none of what happened was seen or heard. Up till then, there was no body of evidence. The crime scene had to be reconstructed.
Bush
The word used in the original is “estapa”, which could be translated as “steppe”, more frequently is
used to described the grasslands of Eurasia.
A t first glance, it’s a family saga.
Guanaco
A wild llama-like animal found in the Southern Cone of Latin America. The naturalist
Charles Darwin, who first theorised evolution, shot and ate a guanco for Christmas during his voyage around Latin America on the HMS Beagle, 1833.
In 1929 the Italian Luigi La Regina bought an area of land on this stretch of the Patagonian coast with the help of a friend. With his wife Ana Rodal he raised up a simple building divided into two equal parts: one for the family to live in, another for shearing the sheep that they began to rear. Luigi took out a bank loan, paid back his friend and then bought up another 20,000 hectares, now part of the La Perla estate.
The terrain here is rocky, uneven and arid, covered with patches of stunted grayish vegetation, thinned out by the wind. This rough scenery runs 15km along the edge of the Atlantic: beaches alternate with dramatic outcrops of red and black rock. In this wild land live sheep, guanacos, pumas, wildcats, choiques and foxes. At that time the coast was a refuge for birds such as the lesser-celebrated cormorant. There were fewer than fifty penguins. They seemed irrelevant.
Choique
A large flight-less bird. It looks a bit like an ostrich.By 1960, Luigi’s family had grown. Perla, Francisco and Luis Emilio had all been born and, in turn, had children of their own. They all lived on the same plot of land, and all of them worked raising sheep and selling their wool. They had all seen, too, how the penguins had multiplied on the narrow stretch where the land meets the sea. They received visits from relatives, friends, people their friends knew—and people they didn’t know—all wanting to see this peculiar little animal up close, as they came and went, regular as clockwork, having chosen this place to make their nests, lay their eggs—a maximum of two per cycle—and raise their young.
“If we don’t get organised this is going to be a disaster,” is how Alberto La Regina, Luigi’s grandson, describes their thinking at the time. Not without reason.
“Around here, my family and I have to stop all kinds of invasions. There was a provincial tourism director who took eggs from the penguins to send to Mar del Plata to make sweet bread—when he was found out, he threw them all into a water tank, an Australian tank. We knew, because we would give water to the sheep and they wouldn’t take it. I told my father that something had happened. When we emptied the tank it was full of eggs at the bottom. There was another person who said that penguin eggs could be sown in the ground like seeds, so they came with a big truck and took 50 or 60 of them to an island nearby, Isla de los Pájaros. There was someone else who wanted to dig a tunnel so that people could come out right in the middle of the colony. After that, in the middle of the dictatorship, the Provincial Inspector came and claimed they were going to build an airport here so that people could get here more easily. Imagine—planes landing among the penguins!”
“Those are just a few of the problems we’ve had to deal with,” Alberto says, a grey-haired man with light blue eyes who was born, raised and still lives in the area, letting out a frank laugh at each memory. He seems to enjoy what nature has brought to these shores.
Budín
A local bread pudding.And so, the La Regina family did get organised. In 1972, when Argentina was under the de facto government of Alejandro Lanusse, Luis Emilio decided to donate 210 hectares of the family plot to the province, an area including Punta Tombo and its surroundings, so that it could be turned into a nature reserve. His son Alberto now manages the Punta Tombo DeliStore, a café at the entrance to the reserve where visitors—as many as 8,000 in a single weekend—stop off to eat grilled steak sandwiches, drink a coffee and try homemade budín, or buy a shirt, a cap, a pencil or a toy, all penguin-themed. His wife, Norma González, prepares sweet snacks and works the souvenir counter. “My children and I are rooted in this land,” she says, all smiles like her husband.
Between September and April, Alberto, Norma and their children work from 8am to 6pm, to the rhythm of the penguins and the tourists they attract. During the enterprise’s humble beginnings in the 70s the whole family was involved in preparing food to be sold through a counter window. The men slaughtered the sheep, the women prepared the empanadas. Later, they expanded: putting out tables and chairs, introducing wildlife guards, improving the 38-kilometre road to the entrance (gravel-surfaced even today). Mass tourism began with tours along the Chubut coast to see whales, sea lions, killer whales, dolphins and pink dolphins. The car park was reorganised and relocated so that the penguins wouldn’t be run over by buses; a walkway was built crossing the colony that was two metres wide, in some parts elevated, and in others skimming the ground; a research centre was constructed as well as a restaurant with a sea view. In time, this brought division and family feuds; and ultimately the bulldozer, the path, the wire fence. But things were changing long before it came to that.
The DeliStore also hosts a museum dedicated to the La Reginas. It is widely recognised that if it weren’t for the family’s donation there would be no nature reserve, nor training centre for park rangers and scientists, nor international tourism in a location 1,300 kilometres from Buenos Aires and 110 from the nearest city of Trelew. The museum is a modest room with some photos, some old equipment used to treat wool—and an epic family tree, starting with Luigi, the Italian who arrived in Argentina in 1896 aged 13, bought his first sheep aged 16, and by 1929 was the local landowner. The tree then branches for his three children: Perla (whose name was given to the estate), Francisco and Luis Emilio. Other offshoots follow: Luis Emilio’s two sons, Omar and Alberto. Only Alberto is given a picture.
“El pibe”
Local slang, often used to refer to teenagers or young adults, meaning “the boy” or “the kid”. Ricardo la Regina was 34 in 2021.Omar—the father of Ricardo la Regina—is absent. He was expelled from the estate together with his wife and two children some 14 years ago and lives 9 kilometres away in Punta Clara. No one wants to talk about why. Omar is a diagnosed schizophrenic, declared mentally unsound. This meant that the management of the 10,000 hectares he inherited after Luis Emilio’s death in 2010 fell to Ricardo, the man with the bulldozer, the man who put up the fence. No one involved in bringing the case against him uses his name: for them, he’s “that guy”, “that arrogant guy”, “el pibe”, “that fool”, “the eco-killer”. All to avoid “tarnishing” the La Regina family name, they say.
When the events of 2021 first surfaced in the local press, the person behind the “horror at Punta Tombo” was described as “a local ranch entrepreneur”. Before it was given the title of the “massacre of Punta Tombo”—the name by which it is still known today—the national press spoke of a man who had mowed down “500 penguins with a bulldozer and flattened 140 nests”. Ricardo La Regina’s full name only appeared later, when the story was repackaged as “the secret family and commercial plot behind an environmental disaster”, the hidden face of the La Regina family tree: “The grandfather donated land for a nature reserve; his grandson killed penguins and is facing a trial that has caught the world’s attention”.
O n 27 January 1520, long before penguins settled in Punta Tombo and Punta Clara, they had been spotted by Portuguese explorer Fernando de Magallanes on his voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The chronicler travelling with him, Antonio Pigafetta, described them as “strange geese”. Francisco Balbo, another member of the crew, noted down geographical data that makes it possible to place the sighting near to what is now Chubut.
The name for the birds that stuck—more like a surname, perhaps—was that of the expedition’s leader. Magellanics—with their peculiar linear markings, white over the eye, beak and neck, and black around the edges of the torso—are one of eighteen species of penguin around the world. No one compares them to geese anymore, although many call them “pájaro bobo” or silly bird, perhaps due to their wobbly gait.
As slow-moving as they are on land, in water these birds can swim at speeds of 25 kilometres per hour and dive 76 meters below the surface. The success of their long annual journey from the warm waters of Brazil to Chubut can be attributed, in part, to the camouflage offered by their colouring: their off-white bellies allow them to blend with the light and avoid being spotted by predators from below, while their black backs hide them from above. The first penguins to arrive for the season—the males generally arrive before the females—turn up in September. In April, they return to Rio de Janeiro or Florianópolis and remain there for four months—swimming, eating and resting through four-second “micro siestas” that allow them to sleep a cumulative 11 hours a day.
Pejerreyes
A small silver-sided oceanic fish found along the coast of Latin America, which humans eat
grilled or fried.Once in Chubut, in spite of their clumsiness, the birds—50 to 60 centimetres tall—walk as much a kilometre inland to make their nests. It’s an exhausting journey in itself, and one they have to later retrace in their search for food: five or six days out to sea to stuff their craws with a kilo and a half of anchovies, hake, pejerreyes and squid. For the young male penguins making this journey for their first ever reproductive cycle, it’s even more arduous: they have to build their first den, and as the areas closest to the sea are often already taken by others, they may have to go further afield to find suitable terrain. According to Jennifer Davies, an Assistant Park Ranger at the reserve, nests belonging to novice penguins are often less sturdy and effective. “We know which ones don’t stand much of a chance. They’re the ones exposed to Kelp gulls, who will exploit the slightest inattention to take an egg and peck out its contents,” Davies says, having spent three seasons working at the site witnessing the cruelties of nature. The gulls aren’t the only ones lying in wait: foxes, ferrets, armadillos and wild cats also attack the birds and their young.
The nests are a centrepiece of the mating process. When the females arrive towards the end of September, exhausted from the journey, the males show off what they’ve made as their greatest asset. They do a little dance around the new arrivals, beating their wings. For those with no fixed partner, or widowed, the location and comfort of their burrows may be fundamental to their mating success. If the female is not put off by the male’s dance of seduction, copulation follows: she lies down, he gets on top. If the female does not reject him, they may form a partnership lasting their whole lives. Lifelong can mean between 22 and 30 years.
At the Punta Tombo reserve, some of the nests are right up against the visitor walkway. “Once they’re hatched, the chicks start moving around and can end up in the middle of where the tourists go. And that’s fine—this is their place, we’re the invaders here. When it happens, people have to be held back until the penguin moves off again. Sometimes it takes a while. Not everyone is so understanding,” explains Davies, who has to deal with those who disregard the reserve’s rules: be silent, don’t eat at the site, give way to penguins and keep two metres’ distance. “Every day there’s someone who touches them or gets too close. Before people go in, the Park Ranger gives a talk reminding them what they shouldn’t do, but people still take in their little cereal bar or biscuits, and then sit on the benches to eat them and litter the place with wrappers. There’s no rubbish collection service here—so there’s a lot
of cleaning up to do at the end of the day”.
One thing which has made penguins so adorable to humans is their monogamy. Another is the way parents share responsibility for their young during the 40–42-day incubation period. First, they alternate in looking after the egg. Once the chicks are born—grey-feathered, weighing 90 grams—they take turns to get food for the chicks until they are three months old and can fend for themselves. Come February, with their brilliant black and white feathers and its oily waterproofing, the young make their first, short excursions into the sea. The real test comes in April: getting to the waters off Brazil.
Nature is unromantic. Although penguins head back to the same nests year after year, sometimes they find others who have taken up occupation, the young or those who have got lost. The fights which follow are ferocious, bloody; they attack each other with their beaks, strike with their wings, they bray. Penguins are territorial. Males can take out an eye in a fight over a female. In any case, the reproductive success of the more than 200,000 couples at the reserve is by no means guaranteed.
“There are better years, and years that are a total failure, where not a single penguin is born. It depends on a lot of factors, like the torrential rains that wipe everything away and the availability of food. The average number of penguins that survive per nest is half a chick. And there’s high mortality at sea too—up to 80%. It’s the most delicate stage, when they have to look for food by
themselves.”
The speaker here is Pablo García Borboroglu, a biologist from Mar del Plata, researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet) and winner of the 2023 Indianapolis Prize, the most prestigious prize for animal conservation in the world. Pablo is the founder and president of the NGO Global Penguin Society, which researches and protects penguins, the Magellanic species in particular. He became a specialist in September 1991, when Argentina’s largest oil spill affected 17,000 in Chubut. “We don’t know how many died in the sea. The criminal justice system never brought a case or issued a fine against anyone for what happened. But, years later, the route for tankers was moved several miles offshore”, he says.
Oil is one reason the species is endangered. The other is the fishing industry, which hoovers up the available food in the sea, and snags penguins in its nets. Humans always seem to be the culprit. Sometimes it takes just one.
T he wheels of state have turned slowly in adapting to the changing relationship between humans and nature. On 23 July 1976, four years after the land was donated to be turned into a nature reserve, and with Argentina under another military dictatorship—the cruellest in its history—a “monitoring unit” was established at the site. It took another 19 years, till 1995, for a path to be opened, the first 200 metres of the raised walkway built and people prohibited from going down to the shore to take photographs with the birds. It wasn’t until 2007 that the site was incorporated into the Chubut System of Nature Reserves and a protocol for its management was established. In 2015 UNESCO took the even more significant step of establishing the Patagonia Azul Biosphere Reserve, stretching from the road which marks the region’s land border, National Highway 3, all the way out to 24 nautical miles at sea. The penguins at Punta Tombo and Punta Clara, and the entire Reginas estate fall within the Biosphere Reserve. This fact is vital: Punta Clara lies outside of the Punta Tombo Nature Reserve, but inside the Biosphere.
On 10 August 2021, the then 34-year-old rancher Ricardo La Regina clambered onto the New Holland digger he had bought “to make improvements to the land”. Sitting atop the mechanical beast, determined to mark out the boundary between his land and his uncle’s, he traced the lines on the estate map to cut a 930-metre path down the sea. He then made a second, smaller, track nearby. Over the following days he installed a six-wire electric fence, the type used to keep cattle from escaping. He claims he wanted to prevent his cows from getting into Punta Tombo and trampling on the nests.
Minister for Tourism and Protected Areas
Ministers in Argentina’s provinces are public servants appointed by the governor, who is elected.It was only 103 days later, on the morning of 22 November 2021, that his uncle Alberto La Regina first saw the path and the fence. He says his initial thought was that this was a legal matter: his nephew had usurped his land. But then he saw the disaster: the crushed nests, the flattened earth, the cleared land. Right away, he telephoned García Borboroglu and the local Minister for Tourism and Protected Areas at the time, Néstor “Quique” García. No-one picked up. Coming off his shift at the colony that afternoon—alongside his wife Dr Laura Reyes, also a biologist and penguin specialist—García Borboroglu noticed six missed calls on his mobile: three from Alberto La Regina, and the rest from the tourism minister. He didn’t think it could be anything serious. It would be another four days before he visited the site.
There’s not much in this part of the world besides the wind blowing unceasingly: no drinking water, no phone signal, no shops and no medical centres. To reach such places one must travel 110, 180 kilometres, sometimes more. It is rugged, inhospitable terrain. Here, most of the time, nature is
in charge.
Shock
The English word “shock” was used by Borboroglu in the original.At 2pm on 26 November 2021, García Borboroglu finally came to Alberto’s land, to the wire fence. He says what he saw amounted to cruelty. “We get calls all the time for penguin-related matters, but we never imagined anything on this scale. It was a shock; I couldn’t stop asking myself: what for? why? He said it happened in August. But the tracks were fresh, the earth was loose, the vegetation uprooted. We know how it is here: one windy afternoon and everything is smoothed out again,” he says. It goes back to the timeline and to one crucial fact in particular: in August, the nests are empty and there are no penguins; in November, he estimates there are two eggs per nest and one brooding adult penguin. “There are two kinds of penguin colony here: the type in Punta Tumbo, where there’s vegetation and the nests are under shrubs; and another where they’re able to dig into the ground without it collapsing. In places like Punta Clara, which is all land, you have many nests close together. The path was dug right there, through the middle of these densely packed nests. That guy tore 40 centimetres into the ground. He decapitated the nests.”
The tourism minister asked Borboroglu to conduct a first reckoning of the damage, which they set about doing with the tape measure they always have to hand. “When we do a census of the colony we take an area 100 meters squared to count the the density of nests, and then we extrapolate. That is what we did here with the nests that were left on the areas next to the path: we used them to make an estimation. Thinking about it now, I think we were too conservative with our calculation. What that guy did will take 35 years to undo,” says the man who became the case’s key witness, responsible for putting a number on the tragedy: 105 penguins dead, 175 nests destroyed. “Environmental crimes are not legislated for in Argentina’s Penal Code”, he says, “but make no mistake: while someone might own the land, they don’t own the fauna and flora that live there”. (When he says “the fauna that live there” he is referring to the penguins, and also the guanacos, choiques and wild cats—but not to the cows; the cows are considered an invasive species.)
Néstor García, the provincial tourism minister, found out what had happened on Monday 22 November. But not by phone. As he couldn’t be reached that way, Alberto La Regina went down to his office that afternoon in person, with a lawyer. He told the minister about the fence, the track and the clearing of an area of land where the whole family had once met. García spoke to a number of public officials in the eight days before he filed criminal charges against Ricardo la Regina. “In the end I had a meeting with the governor. I told him: ’We have an obligation to file charges. If we don’t, I’ll leave’. I didn’t argue or try to analyse whether he had dug the track in August or November. People who are experts on the matter can do that. There are some who think it’s all made up and you can’t possibly know if one baby penguin killed, three or 175. For me that’s not the issue. I always make the rather grotesque comparison of what it would be like to go to a town somewhere or other and just bulldoze people’s houses. They’d have nowhere to live. This is the same. The key is the environmental impact; whether they killed one or 175 penguins in the process just makes it worse,” he says.
García is an expert in protected areas. He has spent his whole career in public administration, moving through the ranks, and ending up as minister. It’s a trajectory he’s proud of. In December 2021, a month after the news first emerged, he stepped down. “My job was my life, but I retired because it was my time and because I wanted to live differently, I wanted to start enjoying life.” He also talks about the damage caused by Covid-19 which meant many local providers went bust. “It was very hard.” These days, García struggles with mobility. A knee cartilage problem makes it difficult for him to walk. “It’s my weight,” he explains, sitting on a chair at the table with a yerba mate his wife has prepared. His house is unassuming and small. The dining table is wedged between a massage chair and a desk. There’s a television playing too, tempting him with recipes he can’t eat. “My wife finds me healthy food every lunch time, that’s how I get by.”
García’s retirement has removed him from his public role, but he’s still in touch with everyone involved in the case: Alberto, García Borboroglu, Omar who he did military service with, as well as his son Ricardo. “That pibe has taken the wrong path; his connections to the province could have brought him other things. Alberto and his wife and children, for example; they’ve basically stopped raising cattle entirely. They have the café in Punta Tombo and the DeliStore, and they live very well from it. But that pibe, it’s him against the world. His grandfather’s vision of donating land—he never had any understanding of that,” says García, angry now, pearls of sweat gathering on his forehead.
It’s midday on 17 September 2024. Ricardo La Regina is driving the Toyota 4×4 he uses to navigate his father’s land. The ground is uneven, forcing him to go slowly, the vehicle heaving up and down over the bumps.
Opening and closing the gate behind him he’s now on the track he says he made in August 2021, before the penguins arrived, though satellite imagery from National Geographic shows he went over this route more than once up to December that year. Ricardo is serious as he drives, focussed. Along the first section of the path there’s vegetation; in the distance, the guanacos and his livestock. One hundred and seventy metres from the shore, the landscape changes. He gets out and continues on foot. The earth along the path and surrounding it is white, clayey—and pockmarked like a minefield. Inside each den is a penguin. Nearer the cliffs, hundreds. Unlike in Punta Tombo, where the birds roam unperturbed, accustomed to the presence of humans, Punta Clara is wild and the penguins bray nervously, rushing this way and that in an avalanche of motion.
Ricardo’s defence lawyer, Federico Ruffa, is with him. It’s the first time they’ve retraced this route together. They are calculating how much clearing was done in 2021, minimising the damage, talking it over. “I did it in August, when there were no penguins here,” Ricardo repeats. The date is vital.
He is tall with green eyes, a slouched posture and a hoarse whisper of a voice, difficult to make out. As if to excuse himself, he says that when he was a boy and the whole family lived on the same plot of land, he helped to count the penguins himself. Up until a few years ago García Borboroglu came here to visit them. He understands the penguins don’t know where the protected area ends, he says, and nor do his cows, which is why he wanted to put up the fence. He says he sent dozens of requests to the government asking them to do it and protect the reserve, but he never got a reply; that he also has a tourism project and would like there to be trails; that he already built a site overlooking the sea where he could put a restaurant. He was angry, he says, back in 2021, when it all kicked off. “Above all for my mother, who would cry when she watched the news. At first it was just the local press, but after them came the national media saying 500 penguins were crushed, and then the international media. When a friend of mine who lives over in Spain wrote to me asking what’d happened, I couldn’t believe it. Then things moved on to the next story, open-pit mining, and it began to quieten down”.
Ecocide
The word ‘ecocide’ was first coined in 1970s in the context of the American use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. A campaign has since built up around the term to introduce it into international law as a standalone crime. The term has been incorporated into various national legal frameworks around environmental damage.Ruffa has a modern haircut, his hair almost touching his ears. He wears sunglasses, a black t-shirt and jeans. For most of our time he remains quiet, but when he interrupts, he is scathing: “There are no dead penguins in this case. They carried out three searches and the only thing they found were two baby penguins dead along the side of the path, and no-one even knows why they died. I still don’t understand the distress—is it emotional, because their little nests were broken? The prosecution is inconsistent. First, they said there were 270 dead penguins. But when none turned up, they said they must have been ground up by the bulldozer and then dissolved into thin air. They’ve got nothing—they just made up their minds from the start. The prosecution has noble aims, and penguins get a good press, but behind that it’s a circus. We said it from day one: they say they want a trial, but they’ve just got caught up in a lynching. Then Greenpeace comes along to fly the flag, to force through legislative changes to protect the environment and call it ‘ecocide’, a historic demand made by some environmental organisations But in the end they’re not solving anything. If it really mattered to them, they wouldn’t have allowed someone guilty of ‘ecocide’ to stay in Punta Clara. The penguins have been left in the hands of the penguin-murderer rather than being guarded by those who say they care”.
When he wants to be humorous, Ruffa says he feels like Doctor Octavius Brine, the villainous octopus in the film Penguins of Madagascar, who is bitter about the penguins because he can’t find a spot at the zoo, displaced by these new and adorable stars. But that’s only when Ruffa wants to laugh. Most of the time he’s serious and sceptical, including in front of his client. “They put on a show. When that’s over, the machine will find another show. That’s what our lawyers live off; journalists too, Argentina, everyone. They talk about a massacre, they say they’re going to try someone for ecocide—a charge that doesn’t even exist,” he says en route back to Trelew. The round trip to Punta Clara takes seven hours. There’s no personal complicity between the two men. It’s a business relationship.
On the outskirts of Trelew, the city closest to Punta Tombo, imposing wind turbines turn the stiff breeze into energy. In the city, it’s all wind—a relentless hiss, even on good days. Here, in this city of 100,000, the accused and his lawyer live alongside many of the witnesses, as well as former and current employees of the Punta Tombo Nature Reserve.
But few other locals recall what happened in 2021. “I don’t know anything,” the hotel manager apologises. “I don’t remember. In late 2021 we were all mobilised against the law to allow open-pit mining,” says a young man involved in the ultimately successful protests in which public
buildings were set alight, seven protesters arrested and thirty injured by the police putting down six days of unrest. “I heard something on the radio about penguins, but as there were passengers in the backseat, I didn’t really get what they said,” says a taxi driver who, like all his colleagues, will take clients to the nature reserve for $110. “What massacre? The Trelew one?” asks another.
Trelew Massacre
Decades later, three ex-army officers were later convicted for the killings.The city has two museums. The colossal Egidio Feruglio, closed for the past year and a half, holds the biggest dinosaur skeleton in the world, known as the Patagotitan mayorum. The other is much smaller, located in the former airport, marking the spot where 19 rebel fighters who had escaped from the local jail surrendered on the 15th of August 1972. A week later, on 22 August, 16 of them were shot dead on the orders of dictator Alejandro Lanusse, an act taken as the beginning of systematic state terror in Argentina. The shootings themselves took place elsewhere, on the Almirante Zar military base. But it is the airport—the same one visited in 1929 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, during his time as a pilot for Aeroposta Argentina S.A—that has remained the site of commemoration for the Trelew Massacre.
Many of the city’s buildings and customs owe their characteristics to the Welsh settlers who arrived here in 1865. The name Tre-lew derives from the Welsh word for town (tref) and a shortened version of the name of town’s founder, Lewis Jones. These days its main tourist draw is its proximity to Punta Tombo and the penguins. On Lewis Jones Avenue there is a bench where visitors can take pictures between a Chubutín (a cartoon character representing an early resident) and a penguin called Luis, the paint rubbed off his beak. At the city bus station there’s a nearly two-metre-tall model penguin. Bang in the middle of the gloomy passage where the bus companies sell tickets, it holds a banner reading “Trelew”, surrounded by a fence and a “Do Not Touch” sign. Taxis are painted with images of the bird. In the shopping centre, as across the whole region, one can buy chocolate penguins, yerba mate in penguin-themed packets, key rings, toys, penguin alfajores. There are penguins on the signposts for the town’s highlights, rusty and indistinct.
On Tuesday 30 November 2021, the case reached the chief prosecutor of Rawson, María Florencia Gómez. It was 7pm and she needed to work fast. She had never presided over an environmental case.
“Now I’m an example across the country,” she says proudly, invited to give talks in Washington and all over Argentina. Gómez has a booming voice, speaks quickly, and doesn’t bother to hide a certain vanity. “It’s the first case to reach a public trial for something we haven’t yet legislated for in this country: ecocide. I had to use the existing Penal Code, so I went for aggravated damage and cruelty to animals. It’s a light charge for such a serious act: the harm that guy did is going to affect the colony for 35 years, because he didn’t just crush the eggs and the young. He left one in two of the adults partnerless; they won’t reproduce again. But I had to go with this lighter charge, as if it was the same as beating a dog.”
Insistent as she says she is, Gómez sent 128 emails to National Geographic to ask for satellite images of the area before getting a response. But it was worth it: the images they sent her show that the biggest impact on the path dug in Punta Clara happened on the morning of 26 November 2021, and not in August, as Ricardo La Regina had claimed. Again, it’s a question of dates. November is not August; by November the penguins have arrived, the male and female have met and procreated. November is the month the eggs hatch.
To gather evidence and reconstruct what happened, Gómez ordered three searches, bought drones to film the area and summoned geographers, cartographers and specialists in marine biology. The provincial authorities, alongside Greenpeace, Patagonia Natural Foundation and the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers, became plaintiffs. Other than García Borboroglu’s estimates, the first search found two dead penguin chicks covered in dirt in a nest left by the side of the new track. The investigators ascertained that the fence not only prevented penguins from reaching their nests as a result of its height but gave them electric shocks. According to the 59-page indictment, later inspections indicated it was “highly likely, given the dimensions and weight of the machinery, that when the topsoil was dug up and compacted, and the material dragged for many metres, this destroyed and crushed the baby penguins and eggs, reducing them to dust”. That’s why there’s no corpus delicti. Reconstructing the crime scene took three years.
O n Monday 16 September 2024, the prosecutor arrived at the Punta Tombo reserve at 11.30 in the morning. Speeches for the official opening of the season had already begun. Despite wearing a flamboyant animal print scarf and the same hairstyle—a high bun—that she has in all her media interviews, she trusted she could pass unnoticed by the politicians and cameras, unseen amongst the public throng wandering the paths of the nature reserve.
Over the course of the month, the “Punta Tombo Massacre” made headlines once more. The prosecutor herself became a spokesperson for the cause, while expressly requesting witnesses not to speak to the press. Gómez said she felt she was one step away from making history. She wanted no surprises. “I have everything I’ve achieved documented. I worked alone, carried out the investigation alone, completely alone, to get to where we are today: 92 witnesses, and something unprecedented—National Geographic, who never get involved in things like this, allowing me to access satellite images and present them as evidence. This is a case with planetary repercussions; this trial could be the kick Argentina needs to draw up legislation to deal with these kinds of acts,” she says enthusiastically, shielded by huge sunglasses.
Around 3pm, once the politicians have cut the ribbon and left, Gómez sits in the DeliStore to speak with Alberto, Norma, García Borboroglu, his wife Laura and representatives of the Natural Patagonia Foundation. A boisterous gathering: they talk, laugh, share anecdotes about the case and their latest information about it.
All the while, the buses and the tour groups continue to arrive at the reserve. Further away, the penguins keep coming back, as they do every September, every season. Agile in the water, unsteady on land, oblivious to everything and at its mercy: the path, the visitors in their thousands, the cameras, the feuds, the laws, the personal ambitions.
No, it’s not the same as it was one hundred years ago when all this—the bush, the obstinate wind, all the calm blue sea—was theirs and theirs alone.
On 7 November 2024 a court in Rawson found Ricardo La Regina criminally responsible for aggravated damage and cruelty to the penguins and their habitat. On 20 November he was sentenced to a three-year prison sentence and required to cooperate with the authorities as they undertake remediation measures on the affected land. The sentence was confirmed by a court in Trelew on 21 May 2025, as Translator was going to press. La Regina’s offer to donate further land to the nature reserve in lieu of the conviction was rejected. The bulldozer has been confiscated.
