It’s hard to think of a structure that better defines Chile than the Gran Torre Santiago, «Torre 2» within the Costanera Center complex. At 300 m in height it is the largest skyscraper in Latin America, and is paired with Mall Costanera Center, the largest shopping mall in Latin America. Designed by architect César Pelli—who designed New York’s World Financial Center and Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers—its construction in a country frequently rocked by some of the world’s strongest earthquakes is seen as a major feat of engineering. Furthermore, its location at the heart of Santiago’s new commercial center is viewed as an apotheosis of sorts of the economic success of Chile (viewed relative to Latin America).
On the other hand, the tower’s glittering facade obscures a much more ambiguous side of a building persistently dogged by controversy. One of the first things I learned in Chile was the common nickname of the Gran Torre Santiago: ”Mordor,” for its resemblance to the Dark Tower of Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as the lowkey association with evil it carries. Sometimes, not so lowkey: an editorial published a few months before the beginning of the unrest characterized the Gran Torre Santiago as “our Mordor, that gigantic, malign mountain that commands and dominates…a place that is always dark and terrible.”
Wow.
Understanding the mixed views Santiaguines have of their tallest, shiniest monument goes a long way towards explaining the increasingly frequent demonstrations near the complex, as well as shedding some light on the causes behind the current protests.
Previously in this series on the 2019 Chilean protests: Corruption | Cost of living | the Dictatorship | Pensions | Government misconduct | Constitutional reform | The water crisis
Costanera Center is the “baby” of one of Chile’s richest businessmen
Construction of the Gran Torre Santiago began in 2008 and was finished in 2014. The whole complex is owned by Cencosud, one of Latin America’s largest retail companies. Based in Chile, Cencosud operates a variety of retail enterprises, including supermarkets (Jumbo and Santa Isabel), department stores (París and Johnson), and hardware stores (Easy). Cencosud also maintains a credit card in association with Scotiabank, which offers various benefits by a “points” system for purchases made at their stores. Cencosud competes against Falabella and Walmart Chile in the supermarket/retail business, all of which operate along very similar organizational lines. Almost all supermarkets in Chile are owned by these three companies.
Interestingly, all are owned by families with foreign roots. Falabella is largely owned by a naturalized Italian family, Walmart is obviously American (although with a surprising Chilean connection), and Cencosud is chaired and majority-owned by its German-born founder, Horst Paulmann. Paulmann is one of Chile’s richest men, with an estimated net worth of USD$1.9 billion at the time of writing. He emigrated from Germany post-World War II to Argentina, from which he later emigrated to Chile. With his father and brother Jürgen (who later went on to create the budget carrier Sky Airlines) he established a series of supermarkets in the southern region of Araucanía from which Cencosud can trace its lineage.
Paulmann is not without controversy of his own. His father Karl was an ardent Nazi, who carried the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer and served as the head SS judge of Kassel. Karl was later sought after by postwar German authorities as an accomplice to multiple homicide as part of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, although by the time of the trials he had passed away. Paulmann has further been dogged by repeated allegations of links to Paul Schäfer, a literal Nazi pedophile who ran a heavily-armed Bavarian-themed cult-like compound in central Chile (Colonia Dignidad) that served as an ad hoc torture center/chemical weapons laboratory during the Pinochet dictatorship.
Paulmann has also been criticized for alleged breaches of contract, workplace abuses, delays in the payment of suppliers, and the creation of an overall environment of exploitation and “labor precarity” that some observers name as a crucial contributor to Paulmann’s wealth and business success.
It’s mostly empty
Well, the Gran Torre Santiago, at least.
While the Mall Costanera Center has been wildly successful in economic terms since its opening in 2012, the Gran Torre Santiago has failed to achieve anything close to full occupancy. By November 2016 only three companies had signed contracts to fill vacancies in the 15,000 square meters of the available space; one of the companies was the real estate developer responsible for selling the property. Including the space occupied by the observation deck and the home decoration store Casaideas, this amounted to slightly less than 15% occupancy of the 77,000 square meters potentially fillable. By 2018 seven companies had rented the 15,000 square meters of permitted floor space at the tower.
The dozens of empty floors of Santiago’s most prestigious commercial edifice—best seen at night—are due in large part to the ongoing failure of Cencosud and the Municipality of Providencia to come to an agreement over concerns about traffic in the already-congested five-way intersection at the base of Costanera Center. Until these have been resolved, the Municipality has refused to fully approve occupancy of the building. The official green light to continue filling the tower was only approved in March of this year, contingent upon a tit-for-tat scheme in which completion of traffic mitigation “stages” would permit progressive opening of more floor space for rental in the tower. In August an additional 25,000 square meters were opened, corresponding to the first sub-phase of the traffic mitigation works.
There are a couple of ways to read this. On the one hand, the protracted delay in gaining the necessary permits can be interpreted as an egregious case of government inefficiency and stonewalling. To an outsider, the scale of the delay is pretty astonishing, but for those of us who live in Chile the sometimes intractable bureaucracy encountered when dealing with the government is nothing new.
On the other hand, Cencosud has worked since before ground was even broken on the project to evade municipal regulation. Work was started in 2006 under an invalid permit issued in 2001, and continued for a year without validation. The revised plan detailed in the permit of 2007 possessed less than half the anticipated parking spaces needed for full occupancy of the complex. At the time of groundbreaking, the project operated on a five-year-old environmental impact assessment that had failed to consult the local neighborhood association and was furthermore accompanied by an incomplete traffic impact assessment. The seeds were thus planted for the present bureaucratic obstacles facing the project.
While delays about traffic concerns mat seem nit-picky, what it represents is a rare case of a government body in Chile putting its foot down in the face of over ten years of impunity on the part of Cencosud. That is to say, apart from Horst Paulmann, there few people shedding tears for Cencosud.
Mall Costanera Center has become a “suicide destination”
If you or someone you love are feeling suicidal, thinking of self-harm, or simply need help, please reach out to someone. If you feel like you are in imminent danger, please call your local emergency number (133 in Chile, 112 in the EU, 999 in the United Kingdom, 911 in the United States). See here for an international list of additional resources.
In any case, the vast majority of Chileans will never be directly affected by the office drama within the Gran Torre Santiago. ‘Costanera Center’ is, instead, the mall. One of the sadder and more bizarre footnotes to what is otherwise a story of commercial success has been the mall’s conversion into a popular suicide site. At least 14 people have killed themselves in Costanera Center since the mall opened in 2012. The rate seems to be accelerating: ten have occurred over the past 3 years, five have occurred in 2019, and three within the last four months (8 February, 9 April, 3 August, 27 August, 1 October). Many, many more attempts have occurred, stopped only by intervention from passers-by and mall security.
Costanera Center never closes after suicides, leading to the indescribably surreal spectacle of thousands of people completing their shopping while a corpse lies in the middle of the mall. The increasing frequency of suicides has begun to take an enormous mental toll on those who work in the mall, many of whom have now witnessed multiple events. Some employees have begun to avoid open areas of the mall and suffer from fairly obvious symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as eating disruptions, nightmares, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. Given that the mall does not close—as well as employees’ financial precarity due to low wages—many employees do not receive adequate time off or treatment for their symptoms.
Why they chose Costanera Center is anyone’s guess, but opportunity probably has a great deal to do with it—the mall is one of few places in Santiago where a six-story drop is accessible to the public. Often, the victims leave notes explaining their actions, which are not made public for obvious reasons. It should also be noted that these suicides are but a small fraction of total suicides in Chile, the rate of which is increasing faster than almost anywhere else in the world.
But due to the intensely public nature of the spectacle, and the high profile of Costanera Center, these are the suicides that generate national headlines. Perhaps unsurprisingly due to the building’s history and symbolism, many have associated the suicides with capitalism, dehumanization, consumerism, and the “n-word” (neoliberalism). Suicide is an obviously complex issue with many influencing factors: genetic, social, historical, and cultural. Economic factors also play a role, and in this sense Costanera Center’s symbolism as the embodiment of the success of Chile’s economic model may not paint as one-sided a picture as one might think.
Two Chiles, one tower
I confess that when I first arrived in Chile in 2015 I spent a lot of time in Mall Costanera Center. I was living and taking Spanish classes nearby, the tower was and is an impeccable landmark, but more than anything it felt like home (the United States). I hadn’t spent hardly any time in malls since I graduated high school, but suddenly I found myself a mall walker, passing time in the (air conditioned) confines of the impeccable mall with zero intention of buying anything—just immersing myself in the generic experience of a North American style megamall.
It still seems to me like a portal to another world. The Mall offers a tremendous tourist discount, which leads to a high percentage of foreigners inside (it has also lead to truly insane lines to cross the nearest border crossing in the summer). The whole mall experience, for that matter, is straight up copied from the North American pattern, the six floors forming concentric circles around a central open-air space, topped with a food court. There’s an H&M. There’s a Forever 21 (for now). There are three different Starbucks. There’s a Chili’s (don’t you dare make the “joke” about the Chili’s in Chile). There are stores called Privilege and Desigual (“Unequal”). There’s a fucking Hard Rock Cafe.
It’s the world of the OECD, to which Chile pertains, barely. Costanera Center itself is located at the nexus of the financial district of “Sanhattan” and the slightly older commercial strip along Avenida Nueva Providencia (formerly known as Avenida 11 de Septiembre, when it was developed during the dictatorship). The World Bank is nearby, and not two blocks away is the Embassy of the United States.
It’s in this area where protestors have gathered with increasing frequency over the past weeks. The significant police presence meeting demonstrators did not go unnoticed, with some of the usual suspects noting the contrast between the heavily-guarded Costanera Center and the absence of law enforcement from scenes of looting and arson in lower income neighborhoods; the Director-General of the Carabineros openly admitted the absence of law enforcement intervention in looting in these areas was part of an “intelligent” law enforcement strategy. Many would argue that the tremendous amount of commerce generated by the Mall (when it is open, as it closed for the worst of the protests, but not for suicides) justifies the presence. And in a sense, they are not wrong—deploying Carabineros there also constitutes an “intelligent” use of limited manpower to safeguard one of the biggest revenue earners (in commercial terms) in Santiago.
Strangely, I think this is one thing almost everyone in Chile can agree upon: the enormous focus on Costanera Center is due to the great wealth that has accumulated there. The difference is how people feel about it. On the one hand, Costanera Center monumentalizes the best aspects of Chile’s economy, a symbol of the power of capital to produce great works and to raise Chile to the ranks of the developed world. On the other hand, it’s a macabre vanity project by one of Chile’s most aggressive capitalists, a literally and figuratively vacant middle finger to those left behind by Chile’s economic development.
Can these two narratives ever be reconciled?