Abstract

The volcanic eruption of 2008 on the town of Chaitén, in the middle of Palena Province, was the beginning of a series of decisions and behaviors, some of which result paradoxical. They were not the result of error or improvisation, but were so as a result of the special historical, geographic, economic and political conditions in which the disaster strock and left the protagonists, both authorities and victims, with very limited decision margins. Plus the enormous costs of violent uprooting of a town and the destruction of their social nets and rituals of everyday life, we must add a high cost in one of the most critical variables of territorial development at Western Patagonia, which is precisely its secular difficulty to ingrain population and consolidate a balanced network of cities and towns. A case study with mixed quali-quantitative methodology that combined interviews with locals and authorities in the town, press archive and different articles, documents and statistics related to the subject, was used to make a description and advance towards a global understanding of the processes.