Asbestos magnate to environmental guru: the morphing of Stephan Schmidheiny.

Part of what Schmidheiny has done is to reinvest in Latin American forest properties. According to recent Swiss accounts, Stephan Schmidheiny began buying Chilean forest land in 1982, and he now owns over 120,000 hectares in Southern Chile, near Concepcion, land which the Mapuche Indians claim has been theirs since time immemorial. The Mapuche charge that some of the land Schmidheiny bought was stolen from them during the Pinochet dictatorship, using that regime's standard techniques of intimidation, torture, and murder. Schmidheiny's Chilean holdings, owned by his Terra Nova affiliate, owned in turn by Nueva, his Swiss-based holding company, make him Chile's third largest owner of forest properties. (Nueva also controls a dozen companies in Latin America, which employ 10,000 in the production of pipes, building materials, and in the planting and harvest of vast numbers of trees.). The activities of Terra Nova are so controversial that Huilcamans, president of the Mapuches' Consejo de Todas las Tierras, went to Switzerland in 1999 with two of his aides in an attempt to reason with Schmidheiny personally and to get him to recognize the injustice of some of his subsidiary's activities. According to one account, Schmidheiny refused to speak with the Mapuche envoys, referring them instead to Hans-Ulrich Spiess, a Swiss representative of Terra Nova, who found the accusations "absurd." Spiess went on to claim that Terra Nova held a "legal title" based on Chilean legal procedures, and that "If we look back long enough, we will always find someone to whom the land belonged to at some time in the past." Schmidheiny never criticized Chile's Pinochet regime in public, but was quoted in a speech as saying, "A Third World country which opts for a liberal free-market economy must have a strong state."(2)