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ENVIRONMENT-CHILE: Fishing Villages Turn to Int’l Justice in Fight Against Waste Duct

Pamela Sepúlveda

SANTIAGO, May 5 2011 (IPS) - Fisherfolk and indigenous people in southern Chile have petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in their 15-year conflict with Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (CELCO), a paper pulp company which plans to dump toxic waste in the ocean, and with the Chilean state for alleged human rights violations.

The Valdivia pulp mill, one of several owned by CELCO, is located 500 metres from the south bank of the Cruces river in the Los Ríos region, upstream from the Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary and 40 kilometres from the Bay of Mehuín (or Maiquillahue), the home of communities that depend on fishing for a living.

The company wants to lay a 40-kilometre waste pipeline from the pulp mill to Mehuín, including a 2-kilometre undersea extension, that would discharge the plant’s effluents directly into the ocean at a depth of 18 metres.

Small-scale fishers and people belonging to the Lafkenche (“people of the coast”) branch of the indigenous Mapuche community, living on the Bay of Mehuín, 800 kilometres south of Santiago, have been fighting the pipeline project since 1996.

In 2004 the company began discharging its effluents into the local Cruces river, but after a massive die-off and migration of black-necked swans (Cygnus melancoryphus) in the Anwandter Nature Sanctuary, in 2006 it resumed its original plan to build the waste pipeline to the ocean.

The Valdivia pulp mill produces 550,000 tonnes of pulp a year for export. In March, however, production had to be suspended due to the low rate of flow in the Cruces river, which fell below five cubic metres a second – the lowest limit established by the authorities for pulp production, which consumes enormous quantities of water.

Chile provides six percent of the 48 million tonnes of paper pulp traded on the world market every year. Last year, it brought in export revenues of 1.79 billion dollars. The forestry sector as a whole contributes 3.1 percent of GDP.

CELCO was granted permission to build the waste pipeline Feb. 24, 2010 by the Regional Commission for the Environment (COREMA), and it is expected to be completed in two years’ time. The population that will be affected by the project includes 20 coastal communities of Lafkenche people and small-scale fishers in Mehuín, Cheuque, La Barra and Mississipí.

Another 20 or so native communities further south and associations of fisherfolk with nearly 1,000 members, in neighbouring bays and inland areas, could also suffer harmful effects.

Eliab Viguera, spokesman for the Committee for the Defence of the Sea, the organisation of local people determined to prevent CELCO’s waste from polluting the ocean, told IPS: “The rights of indigenous communities here will be violated because their sacred ceremonial sites will be desecrated.” For example, the planned route of the pipeline would cut right across a native cemetery.

The Committee for the Defence of the Sea lodged appeals in the courts against the environmental permit granted by COREMA, and demanded protection for the integrity and lives of fisherfolk and Lafkenche people, and for the right of the native peoples to live on the coast, which is guaranteed under Chilean law. But the Supreme Court denied the motion.

“The violence unleashed in Mehuín was atrocious; many people were victims of criminals in the pay of CELCO, who harassed all those defending the ocean, without caring whether they were elderly people or children,” Viguera said.

He said that in the last few years, they have had to put up with everything from death threats to attempts to bribe them with money to give up their struggle.

José Araya, the coordinator of the Citizen Observatory’s intercultural programme, said: “They paid them to sign a cooperation agreement; then they made a payment to support the studies the company needed for its environmental impact assessment; after that they paid out more money when the environmental permit was granted; and in all probability they will make a further payment when the waste pipeline is completed.”

But the attempt to break up the resistance movement by divisive tactics only succeeded in wooing a handful of Mehuín fisherfolk, the sources said.

When all efforts to obtain justice in the national courts failed, the Committee for the Defence of the Sea took its case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), requesting urgent precautionary measures and a restraining order against any work related to the construction of the pipeline.

“The Chilean state must answer for the violations that have been committed here,” Viguera said.

Araya pointed out that one of the legal petitions has to do with the rights of native communities, who were not consulted over this project in their territory, as stipulated in International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which came into effect in Chile Sept. 15, 2009.

Official approval for the waste duct was granted four months later, and although the state had one year to bring Chile’s domestic laws and regulations into line with the requirements of Convention 169, not much progress has been made in that direction.

Araya told IPS that the petition before the IACHR emphasises “territorial rights, because the people involved are Mapuche and Convention 169 has not been respected; and also the right to life, because the environmental effects are harmful for communities that depend on fishing and ocean-based recreational activities.”

IPS contacted the Human Rights Directorate at the Chilean Foreign Ministry, which will represent the state before the IACHR, but it declined to comment.

CELCO, which owns five pulp mills in Chile and another in Argentina, has a record for polluting. Operations have had to be suspended at the Valdivia plant on several occasions because of judicial injunctions, among other reasons for exceeding its permitted production limit.

Discharge of effluents into the Cruces river, the cause of the die-off of swans according to research studies, was confirmed by the testimony of expert witnesses in late March at a civil action instituted by the State Defence Council (the agency responsible for the legal defence of the Chilean state) against CELCO for environmental damage.

The results “are quite conclusive. The company is responsible for the pollution, it exceeded its production limits and it withheld information from the authorities,” Araya said.

Under the circumstances, the Apr. 2 broadcast of a programme reflecting favourably on CELCO by Televisión Nacional de Chile, the country’s only public channel, caused outrage. The National Television Council (CNTV), the Chilean Association of Documentary Filmmakers and the State Defence Council expressed their disapproval of the programme’s one-sided portrayal.

CELCO later disclosed that it had hired the programme’s producer, Sergio Nuño, to make a separate documentary to present in evidence at the trial at which the company is being prosecuted by the State Defence Council.

While the fisherfolk wait and hope for the IACHR to take up their case, they are speculating that CELCO will not be able to build its pipeline because its environmental permit does not allow it entry to the sea. For this, it would have to obtain permission from the nation’s maritime authorities.

In spite of reiterated requests by IPS, CELCO declined to make any comment.