MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile President M. Bachelet travel to Easter Islands.

President Michelle Bachelet travels to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) today, Thursday, to inaugurate “Month of the Sea” celebrations on Chile's Pacific Ocean territory. Traveling with the President are Defense Minister Vivianne Blanlot and Interior Minister Andrés Zaldívar.

Earlier this week, Bachelet and Zaldívar hosted a group of Rapa Nui folk dancers at the La Moneda palace. After their presidential performance, the folk dancers, accompanied by Sen. Nelson Avila, presented a petition to Bachelet and Zaldívar signed by 1,200 islanders who oppose the proposed construction of a US$13 gambling casino on the island.

"The Islanders fear that a gambling casino is a threat to their traditional way of life," said Sen. Avila, adding, "Interior Minister Zaldívar told me that he was not in favor of an idea like this."

Chile has been debating the idea of a Rapa Nui casino for the past year, and rights to such a concession have already been acquired by Chile's Martínez family, owners of gambling casinos in the resort cities of Viña del Mar and Pucón. The issue has divided the island's 3,800 residents, and the final outcome of the debate is far from decided.

Adding drama to the situation is a new law approved by Congress earlier this week that awards greater autonomy to Chile's two island territories ? Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island) and Juan Fernandez (aka Robinson Crusoe Island). Heretofore, the two islands have been administered as a part of the province of Valparaíso. The new legal arrangement suggests that the island's 3,800 inhabitants will have an important voice in the final decision.

Javier Martínez, the director of Enjoy, the company proposing the project, argues that people opposed to the project do not really know what it is all about and have not thought about the benefits a casino will provide for the community. The US$13 million project includes a game room, theater, museum, events center, movie theater and an arts market.

"Tourists may want to visit archeological sites and then seek other entertainment," Martínez said. "I've been on the island twice and in the afternoon and at night there are not many places where you can go eat, have a drink and just have a good time, and this is all part of tourism."

Another supporter is Pedro Edmunds, the longtime Mayor of Hanga Roa, the island's largest town. "I welcome any project that would develop Rapa Nui society, and this is one that would create 150 jobs that I don't have today," he says. "Plus, a chunk of the profits and sales would stay here on the island and give me more money to build roads and maybe afford to buy a dialysis unit for the hospital."

But Mario Tuki, a fisherman and schoolteacher who sits on the island's council of elders, strongly opposes the casino, saying that it would bring "the instantaneous destruction of the island as we know it."

He insists that a casino would ruin Easter Island's unique balance of tourism and preservation. "Our livelihood is based on a kind of cultural tourism found nowhere else in the world. If people want to gamble, let them go somewhere else, like Las Vegas or Monaco."

Another opponent is Alfonso Rapu, a representative from the island's Development Commission. "It would be the beginning of the destruction of the identity for the Rapa Nui population," he says. "We don't want to change our values, what we have on the island, our moais, our archeological history, our culture, our way of life."

Beneficiaries of the proposed casino might include dozens of cruise liners, charter flights, and those who fly LAN Chile's near-daily flights to the island. Tourism to the island has shot up dramatically in recent decades: 700 tourists visited from 1970 to 1979, while 48,000 arrived in 2005 alone.

Rapa Nui, of course, is best known for its Moai statues, which average four meters high and depict human heads-on-torsos from rough hardened volcanic ash. About 1,000 of these volcanic stones remain on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), a small triangular island located about 3,760 kilometers off the Chilean coast in the South Pacific Ocean. It has been part of Chile since its annexation in 1888.

The origin of the monolithic stone sculptures remains a mystery. Some believe the inhabitants who carved them were of Peruvian origin due to the similarities between carvings. Some even suggest the island is the remnant of a lost continent.

Scientists and anthropologists believe the inhabitants of Rapa Nui were driven to cannibalism two centuries ago after the island's ecology collapsed in the wake of competitive moai-building efforts by the island's nine warlords. Moving the huge stone monuments required the deforestation of the island's trees (used as rollers), which in turn led to an economic and social collapse, and ultimately cannibalism.

The felling of the volcanic island's forests ended the society's ability to move the monolithic moai, crimped supplies of fire wood, devastated the bird population and terminated a sea-faring and fishing tradition that relied on wooden canoes fashioned from the large, once-abundant palm trees. The island's extreme isolation left inhabitants with no alternative forested living spaces ? and a society in chaos. By Steve Anderson The Santiago Times - News about Chile