ENVIRONMENT-CHILE: Gov’t Sues Pulp Mill that Killed Swans

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Apr 29 2005 (IPS) - For the first time in Chilean history, the government is suing a private corporation for environmental damage – specifically, for the deaths of a large number of swans in a nearby nature sanctuary.

On Thursday, the Chilean Council for the Defence of the State filed suit in the Appeals Court of Valdivia – 790 km south of Santiago – against Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (Celco), which belongs to the Angelini Group, Chile’s second-largest business conglomerate.

The Council made the decision to sue after Celco launched a media and legal campaign aimed at distorting the results of a study released Apr. 18 by the Austral University of Valdivia, which established that a Celco pulp mill was responsible for the environmental disaster in the Carlos Anwandter nature sanctuary.

The plant, which began to operate in February 2004, dumps its industrial waste into the Cruces River around 15 km before it runs into the nature sanctuary.

The Angelini Group is attempting to play down its responsibility by diverting blame to environmental officials who authorised the opening of the plant during the administration of former president Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), say legal and environmental specialists consulted by IPS.

The Valdivia Appeals Court itself had ordered the closure of the mill on Apr. 19 – the day after the release of the university study – in response to an appeal filed in late 2004 by environmental groups.

The Carlos Anwandter nature sanctuary, named after German scientist and philanthropist Karl Anwandter, was placed on the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance in 1981.

(The Ramsar Convention, which was signed in the Iranian city of that name in 1971, is an international treaty aimed at preserving and ensuring the sustainable use of wetlands, as sources of water and biodiversity.)

Until October 2004, the nature sanctuary was home to around 6,000 black-necked swans (Cygnus malencoryphus), the largest population of these birds in Latin America.

Today, however, there are only an estimated 300 swans left in the reserve, after several hundred died and the others subsequently migrated to other rivers and lakes in southern Chile.

Some of the swans died of poisoning from toxic chemical compounds, while others starved to death because of the disappearance of their main food source, a water weed known as "luchecillo" (Egeria densa), which was killed off by the toxic waste dumped by the pulp mill into the Cruces River, according to the Austral University report.

Another report is expected to be released in early May, although this one is being prepared by a delegation of experts from the Ramsar Convention who visited the sanctuary in March.

In the meantime, the Regional Environment Commission (COREMA), which authorised the building of the plant in 1997, received a new assessment report Tuesday that points to eight irregularities at the Celco plant and calls for a follow-up inspection in 10 days.

José Araya, president of the Valdivia-based citizens group Action for the Swans, and attorney Fernando Dougnac of the non-governmental environmental watchdog Fiscalía del Medio Ambiente, told IPS that the only way to ensure the recovery of the nature sanctuary and the protection of nearby communities is by permanently shutting down the pulp mill.

"The amount of pollution created by this plant is so extreme that it is not only doing significant harm to the birds in the sanctuary and elsewhere on the Cruces river, but is also hurting other economic activities, like tourism, cattle farming and agriculture, as well as endangering the health of the local population," stressed Araya.

Dougnac recalled that the authorities were warned back in 1996 of the environmental impact that the pulp mill would have, but COREMA granted little importance to these concerns, placing priority instead on the income and employment that would be generated by the 1.2 billion dollars Celco invested in the project.

A Supreme Court hearing ruled in a three-to-two vote that COREMA’s authorisation for the pulp mill was illegal, but it did not revoke the permit, choosing instead to follow the "mistaken doctrine" of leaving environmental problems in the hands of the government, added Dougnac.

"It must not be forgotten that Frei issued instructions to CONAMA (the National Environment Commission) stating that no investment projects should be rejected for environmental reasons, and that the role of this agency was to improve these initiatives," he stressed.

Dougnac criticises government authorities for having yielded to the economic power of the Angelini Group. "Without a doubt, there was absolutely guilty negligence on the part of the government authorities, who knew perfectly well what the effects of the plant would be, not only on the wetlands, but on the health of the human population as well," he said.

Araya also recognised the role played by "negligence and pressure," and the shared responsibility of the authorities and the Angelini Group.

Nevertheless, he emphasised, the lion’s share of the blame falls on Celco, which has been producing a higher volume of pulp than authorised, has hidden information from inspection and control agencies, and "lied to the public by claiming that it was living up to all environmental standards."

The Action for the Swans activist also denounced the release on Tuesday of a report by scientists at the Catholic University of Santiago, which refutes the conclusions of the Austral University report, as a blatant manoeuvre on the part of the Angelini Group.

"This study is going to end up backfiring against them, because the entire scientific community knows that the team that prepared the report for the Catholic University has close ties to Celco. They are all professionals who have long been funded by the Angelini Group, and one of them is a member of the Celco board of directors," Araya said.

Paola Cabello, an economist with the Instituto Libertad (Freedom Institute), told IPS that the closing of the plant "could be an overly hasty measure," and that it is more important "to search for solutions that can protect sustainable development," while improving CONAMA’s abilities as an effective control mechanism.

The Celco plant employs 300 workers and indirectly generates roughly 4,000 jobs, according to company sources.

Economic analysts estimate that a three-month closure would result in 40 million dollars in losses for the company, and this figure would rise to 150 million dollars if the plant were shut down for a year. Permanent closure would imply one billion dollars in damages to the Angelini Group.