Abelino Paicil spends his days standing at the edge of fields, watching young men dig up landmines. Often the 59-year-old’s mind wanders to when he was a young man in those fields, planting those same mines.

“They are pulling up what we sowed,” said Paicil, the nurse for the Chilean Army demining company on Tierra del Fuego, the country's harsh southernmost region. “You like to see it. You like to see how things can change.”

Things have changed in spades. In 1980, when Paicil was planting mines in the plains along the Magellan Strait, Chile was living under the dictatorial regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and was in the midst of border disputes with all three of its neighbors—Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina.