By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Jun 9 2005 (IPS)

The pulp mill that caused the deaths of a number of swans in southern Chile was voluntarily shut down Wednesday by its owners, in the midst of a political and legal scandal involving the Supreme Court and the government of Ricardo Lagos.

The decision by the company Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (Celco) to close the plant, which was welcomed by the authorities, came after a group of lawmakers announced that they would take action against the Supreme Court judges that allowed the pulp mill to reopen in late May.

Environmentalist Marcel Claude, meanwhile, accused Celco of a "media manoeuvre" aimed at "whitewashing its image" and "blackmailing" public opinion by closing the plant and leaving 300 workers without a job, who will take to the streets to protest their loss of employment.

"It is the government that should square its shoulders and decree the closure of the plant," said Claude, vice-president in Latin America of the international environmental organisation Oceana.

The conflict over the pollution of the Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary on the Cruces river has revealed weakness on the part of the government and the impunity enjoyed by polluters, as well as "severe levels of corruption," environmentalist Sara Larraín, head of the non-governmental Sustainable Chile Programme, said Tuesday.

Larraín was referring to the mid-May authorisation by the government’s environment commission of the reopening of the Celco plant, as well as a May 30 Supreme Court ruling that freed the company of blame for the contamination that has killed around 500 swans since October 2004.

On Apr. 18, the Austral University in Valdivia published a scientific study that found that the deaths of some 500 swans as well as the migration of thousands of others were due to the disappearance of ‘luchecillo’, the waterweed that formed their main source of food, which was killed off by toxic waste dumped into the river by the Celco plant.

The cellulose factory, which began to operate in February 2004, belongs to the Angelini group, the country’s second-largest business consortium, whose lawyers were successful in their attempt to get the Supreme Court to overturn, on May 30, an Apr. 19 Valdivia appeals court ruling that ordered the plant to shut down.

Two weeks earlier, in another controversial decision, the regional office of the government’s National Environment Commission (CONAMA) had authorised the reopening of the cellulose plant, on the condition that it promise to cut production levels and perfect the system used to process its toxic solid waste products.

The Angelini group’s pleasure over the CONAMA authorisation and the May 30 Supreme Court verdict did not last long, however.

On Jun. 3, the Europe-Latin America Centre (EULA) at the University of Concepción (515 km south of Santiago) denied that it had produced the report freeing Celco of blame for the pollution of the Cruces river, which the Supreme Court had based its ruling on.

The report was actually drawn up by the company itself, and merely cited EULA studies.

The Angelini group blamed the "error" on its team of lawyers, who resigned Tuesday, while the Supreme Court merely corrected the text of the ruling but stood by its rejection of the demand for the closure of the plant presented by the Valdivia-based Action for the Swans group.

José Araya, the head of Action for the Swans, told IPS that the Supreme Court had "deliberately" ruled in favour of Celco, by basing its verdict on "irrelevant information" while ignoring the main scientific study, the one carried out by the Austral University.

Deputy Guido Girardi of the Party for Democracy (PPD), which forms part of the centre-left governing coalition, pointed out to IPS that the Austral University study was commissioned by the regional CONAMA office, and was thus paid for by the Chilean state rather than by Celco, unlike the other report.

Girardi and his fellow PPD lawmakers Leopoldo Sánchez and Enrique Accorsi joined together with Senator Antonio Horvath of the right-wing opposition National Renovation Party (PRN) and environmentalists to bring legal action demanding an investigation of who was responsible for the false report that Celco handed over to the Supreme Court.

Manuel Baquedano, president of the Political Ecology Institute, who took part in the legal action, told IPS that the Supreme Court’s May 30 decision was "hasty, undoubtedly because of pressure from the company, and revealed the justices’ lack of technical capacity to decide on environmental questions on their own."

Other legislators and activists sent a letter to President Lagos Tuesday asking him to revoke the pulp mill’s permit to operate. They also called on Supreme Court chief justice Marcos Libedinsky to overrule the May 30 ruling.

Deputy Sánchez, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies’ natural resources commission, said lawmakers were considering taking action against the five magistrates who approved the ruling, for "perversion of the course of justice".

Lagos had stated on Monday that "the country’s credibility is at stake" in the Cruces river conflict, not only because of the pulp mill scandal, but involving the entire forestry industry, due to the increasingly strict environmental requirements adopted in international trade.

But Araya and Baquedano both told IPS that the permit to reopen the factory, granted by the regional CONAMA office, known as COREMA, was not a result of its own initiative, but was in response to a government policy that favours investment by private business.

"Without a doubt, COREMA had nothing to do with it. In my view, what happened was an arrangement between the government and the company," said Baquedano.

For his part, Araya said the pollution of the Cruces river "is one of the most dramatic pieces of evidence of the influence of the business sector and its cosiness with the government."

Senator Horvath told the press that the Angelini group’s ties with the ruling coalition, and especially the co-governing Christian Democracy Party (PDC), should be investigated.

The legislator called attention to the fact that Celco named Alberto Etchegaray, a member of the PDC, as chairman of its board of directors last January.

Etchegaray served as housing minister in the 1990-1994 administration of Patricio Aylwin.

And Baquedano pointed out that the executive director of CONAMA, Paulina Saball of the co-governing Socialist Party, was Etchegaray’s chief aide when he was housing minister, while the head of environmental questions in Celco, Pablo Daud, "was until recently director of environmental impact studies in CONAMA."

Among the members of the Supreme Court who handed down the controversial May 30 verdict that was favourable to Celco was lawyer René Abeliuk, a member of the Radical Social Democrat Party (PRSD – which also forms part of the ruling coalition), who was a minister in the Aylwin administration as well.

Former president Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), of the PDC, had openly pressed for permission to be granted for the installation of the Celco pulp mill in 1997, and even inaugurated the plant before the environmental impact study was completed, Baquedano noted.

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