View of a plant owned by Aguas Antofagasta, a company created 20 years ago that now has three desalination plants to supply drinking water to 184,000 families in that desert city in northern Chile. Credit: Courtesy of Acades

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 22 2025 (IPS)

Desalination projects are booming in Chile, with 51 plants planned to process seawater and a combined investment of US$ 24.455 billion. However, these initiatives hardly benefit small-scale farmers, who are threatened by the prolonged drought, and cause environmental concerns.

A survey by the Capital Goods Corporation and the Chilean Desalination and Reuse Association (Acades) revealed that these projects, already in the engineering and construction phases, will add 39,043 liters of water per second in production capacity."Using seawater, desalinated or saline, and reusing wastewater relieves pressure on rivers and aquifers, ensuring water for people, ecosystems, and productive activities" –Rafael Palacios.

Fifteen of these projects belong to the mining sector, eight to the industrial sector, eight to the water utility sector, and 20 are linked to green hydrogen, a clean fuel but very water-intensive, which the country aims to be a major producer of.

Of the future plants, 17 are located in the desert region of Antofagasta, in the far north of this elongated South American country, which lies between the Andes mountain range and the Pacific Ocean.

There are 11 projects in the southern region of Magallanes, followed in number by the regions of Atacama, Coquimbo, and Valparaíso, in the north and center of Chile, which concentrate most of the investment.

Rafael Palacios, executive director of Acades, told IPS that this country “faces a scenario in which water availability in northern and central Chile could decrease by up to 50% by 2060, so we cannot continue to depend solely on continental sources.”

“Using seawater, desalinated or saline, and reusing wastewater relieves pressure on rivers and aquifers, ensuring water for people, ecosystems, and productive activities,” he emphasized.

Currently, 23 desalination plants are already operating in Chile with a capacity of 9,500 liters per second. They primarily serve mining needs, but also industrial and human consumption.

One of the large greenhouses for the hydroponic cultivation of vegetables irrigated with desalinated water, on the farm of one of the 90 members of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Altos de la Portada, in the northern Chilean region of Antofagasta. Credit: Courtesy of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Altos de la Portada.

Small-scale farmers benefit

Dolores Jiménez has been president for the last eight years of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Altos de la Portada, in Antofagasta. The association has 90 active members who collectively own 100 hectares where they have created a Hydroponic City.

“We have no water problems thanks to an agreement with Aguas Antofagasta. We have an oasis which we would otherwise not have without that agreement,” Jiménez told IPS by telephone from Antofagasta, the capital of the region of the same name.

Aguas Antofagasta is a private company that desalinates water in the north of this country of 19.7 million inhabitants. The company draws water from the Pacific Ocean using an outfall that extends 600 meters offshore to a depth of 25 meters.

In desalination, outfalls are the underwater pipes that draw seawater and return and disperse the brine in a controlled manner, far from the coast and at an adequate depth.

Founded 20 years ago, the company currently desalinates water in three plants in the municipalities of Antofagasta, Tocopilla, and Tal Tal, supplying 184,000 families in that region.

Dolores Jiménez, president of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Altos de la Portada, shows the strength of the crops thanks to the use of desalinated water that reaches small farmers due to an agreement with Aguas Antofagasta. Credit: Courtesy of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Altos de la Portada

In its project to supply the general population, it included the association of small-scale farmers who grow carrots, broccoli, Italian zucchini, cucumbers, medicinal herbs, and edible flowers.

“They support us with water from the pipeline that goes to Mejillones (a coastal city in the region). They financed the connection for us to fill six 30,000 liter tanks, installed on a plot at the highest point. From there, we distribute it using a water tanker truck,” informed Jiménez.

“Now, thanks to a project by the (state) National Irrigation Commission, we were able to secure 280 million pesos (US$294,000) for an inter-farm connection that will deliver water through pipes to 70 plots,” she added.

This will mean significant savings for the farmers.

Jesús Basáez in his farm in Pullally, on the central coast of Chile. There he grows quinoa, which he irrigates with highly saline water that the grain tolerates without problems. Previously, that saline water forced him to stop producing strawberries. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

In Pullally, in the municipality of Papudo, in the central Valparaíso region, 155 kilometers northwest of Santiago, Jesús Basáez used to grow strawberries alongside a dozen other small farmers. But the crop failed due to the salinity of the groundwater, apparently caused by the drought affecting the La Ligua and Petorca rivers and proximity to the sea.

He then switched to quinoa, which tolerates salinity well. Today he is known as the King of Quinoa, a grain valued for its nutritional properties and versatility, which was an ancestral food of Andean highland peoples and has now spread among small Chilean farmers.

Basáez has three hectares planted with white, red, and black varieties of quinoa, which he irrigates with water obtained from a well, as he told IPS during a visit to his farm.

The public University of Playa Ancha, based in the city of Valparaíso, installed a mobile desalination plant on his farm that uses reverse osmosis to remove components from the saltwater that are harmful for irrigation. Pressure is applied to the saltwater so that it passes through a semipermeable membrane that filters the water, separating the salts.

After successful tests, Basáez is now about to resume his strawberry cultivation.

“It was three years of research, and it was concluded that it is viable to produce non-brackish water to grow strawberries again. The problem is that the cost remains very high and prevents replicating this experience for other farmers,” he said. The mobile plant cost the equivalent of US$ 84,000.

The mobile desalination plant installed on Jesús Basáez’s farm to research the high salinity of the water at the site. For three years, teachers and students from the University of Playa Ancha, in the central Chilean region of Valparaíso, researched how to reduce the water salinity on this agricultural property. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Debating the effects of desalination

Since 2010, Chile has been facing a long drought with water deficits of around 30%. There was extreme drought in 2019 and 2021, and the country benefited from a normal period in 2024, although the resource deficit persists, in a country where water management is also privatized.

A report from the Climate and Resilience Center of the public University of Chile, known as CR2, indicated that current rates of groundwater use are higher than the recharge capacity of the aquifers, causing a decline in reserves.

In the 23 already operational desalination plants, seawater is extracted using outfalls that are not very long, installed along the coastline of a shore that has numerous concessions and uses dedicated to aquaculture, artisanal fishermen, and indigenous communities.

The main problem is the discharge of brine following the industrial desalination process.

“I will never be against obtaining water for human consumption. Although this highly concentrated brine that goes to the seabed has an impact where a large part of our benthic resources (organisms from the bottom of water bodies) are located. On a local scale, except in the discharge area, this impact has never been evaluated,” Laura Farías, a researcher at the public University of Concepción and at CR2, told IPS.

“There is literature that points out that there is undoubtedly an impact. There are different stages of biological cycles, from larvae to settled organisms. There is even an impact on pelagic organisms that have the ability to move. And also an impact at the ecosystem level,” the academic specified by telephone from Concepción, a city in central Chile.

She added that this impact is proportional to the volume of desalinated water.

Jesús Basáez, in the municipality of Papudo, poses showing a mature quinoa plant in one hand and in the other a container designed to sell each kilogram of the grain he produces in its white, red, and black varieties. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

According to Farías, the water crisis has led to desalination being part of the solution, despite its impact on marine ecosystems, coastal vegetation, and wildlife.

“It is a maladaptation, because in the end it will have impacts that will affect the coastal inhabitants who depend on those resources,” she emphasized.

There are currently initiatives to legislate on the use of the coastal zone, but according to Farías, they seek to “normalize, regularize, and standardize those impacts, after these plants already exist and there are others seeking approval.”

Palacios, the director of Acades, has a different opinion.

The concerns about the environmental impact of desalination on coastal ecosystems are legitimate, but current evidence and technology demonstrate that this impact can be managed effectively, he says.

“In Chile, recent studies show no evidence that the operation of desalination plants has so far caused significant environmental impacts, thanks to constant monitoring and advanced diffusion systems,” he detailed.

He added that “in most cases, the natural salinity concentration is restored within two or three seconds and at less than 20 meters from the outfalls.”

Palacios explained that research by the Environmental Hub of the University of Playa Ancha “confirms increases in salinity of less than 5% within 100 meters.” And in areas like Caldera, a coastal city in the northern Atacama region, they are “less than 3% within 50 meters, limiting the areas of influence to small zones.”

“We are already implementing the first Clean Production Agreement in desalination and water reuse, promoted together with the (state) Agency for Sustainability and Climate Change, advancing towards voluntary standards for sustainable management, transparency, and strengthening the link with communities,” he emphasized.

By Orlando Milesi
SAN ANTONIO, Chile, Oct 17 2025 (IPS)

Maritime transport is key for Chile, which has 34 free trade agreements with countries and blocs of nations, one of the broadest trade networks in the world with access to over 86% of the global gross domestic product (GDP).

In 2024, this South American country surpassed US$100 billion in exports for the first time, mostly of copper, forest products, fresh fruits, fish, and organic foods. In turn, it imported US$78.025 billion, mostly diesel oil, clothing, accessories, and footwear.

Faced with growing trade, experts predict enormous port demand by 2036 in this long and narrow South American country squeezed between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean.

To avoid a collapse in 10 years, the San Antonio Outer Port project will triple the capacity of Chile’s main route for the exit and entry of products.

San Antonio currently handles 29% of the tonnage of maritime foreign trade, 34% of exports, and 71% of Chile’s imports by value.

The high agricultural and mining production from Chile’s central area, which contributes 59% of the country’s GDP and is home to 63% of its 19.7 million inhabitants, passes through this port.

The outer port will allow for the movement of six million containers thanks to two new port terminals, 1,730 meters long and 450 meters wide, with eight new berthing fronts for state-of-the-art container ships.

The total estimated investment for the project is US$4.45 billion, which will be financed by the government and by international companies applying for concessions.

The first months of 2026 will be key for awarding the dredging works, the construction of the breakwater, the protective infrastructure for the new port, and for learning the authorities’ decision on the environmental impact of the San Antonio Outer Port works.

Measures will be taken to mitigate that impact, including the protection of two wetlands located on port land and support for the work of fishermen in nearby coves. To decarbonize, the port project will also use energy produced from renewable sources.

San Antonio, 110 kilometers west of Santiago and south of the historic port of Valparaiso, which it has surpassed in relevance, is aiming for a revival by promoting the largest port infrastructure project in Chile’s history.

It currently provides 10,200 direct jobs to port workers with an average monthly income of US$1,110.

San Antonio aims to consolidate its ninth place among the largest ports in Latin America and expand its role in the movement of cargo to and from Asia and the Americas.

Its managers also seek to show that infrastructure development can be harmonized with the protection and improvement of environmental conditions through a project that is a model of sustainability.

The current port of San Antonio, on the central coast of Chile, on a day of full activity with its cranes deployed and loading two container ships with products for export. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SAN ANTONIO, Chile, Sep 30 2025 (IPS)

The port of San Antonio, Chile’s main port, is promoting a historic and sustainable expansion with its own investment and that of international consortiums, aiming to improve its current ninth place among the largest and busiest ports in Latin America.

The port, located in the Valparaíso region, 110 kilometers north of Santiago and in the municipality of the same name, San Antonio, is state-owned and currently operates with five concessions granted to private operators, receiving container ships carrying millions of products.

In 2024, it handled 23 million tons of import and export goods worth US$42.766 billion. It received 1,024 ships and 1.8 million TEUs, the unit of cargo in maritime transport equivalent to the capacity of a standard 20-foot container.“The most important thing is for the project to be inaugurated when demand requires it. We trust that, regardless of the government that comes in from next March, this project will follow the desired schedule. We are working as quickly as possible”–Juan Carlos Muñoz

For several years now, San Antonio’s cargo movement has tripled that of the historic port of Valparaiso, located 100 kilometers to the north, and serves an area stretching from the regions of Coquimbo, north of Valparaiso, to Maule, south of the Santiago metropolitan region.

This is a strip of land where 63% of Chile’s 19.7 million people live and where 59% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of this long South American country, which narrows between the Andes mountain range and the Pacific Ocean, is produced.

Chile has free trade agreements with 34 countries or trading blocs, representing 88% of global GDP. In 2024, its exports reached a record US$100.163 billion, and imports amounted to US$84.155 billion.

The San Antonio Outer Port project, which represents a major expansion of the current port, is key to strengthening international openness and solidifying connections with the main routes to and from Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

Copper, fruits, wine, salmon, fruit pulp, and other products are shipped out through San Antonio, while grains, vehicles, machinery, technological equipment, and chemicals are brought in.

“When you project Chile’s cargo movement, especially in the central macro-zone, you realize that by the years 2035-2036, the installed capacity in San Antonio and Valparaiso will be exceeded. Therefore, we must work on a port expansion because otherwise, we will have significant congestion of trucks and ships,” explained the Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Juan Carlos Muñoz, to IPS.

Such congestion, he added, “is an inefficiency we cannot afford because it would significantly affect the country’s competitiveness.”

The Outer Port is a strategic and emblematic project for Chile’s development, according to Muñoz.

The major expansion includes two new semi-automated terminals, 1,730 meters long and 450 meters wide, with eight berthing fronts.

By 2036, when the expansion is fully operational, eight state-of-the-art 400-meter-long container ships will be able to dock simultaneously, and move six million containers annually. This capacity will double the current one.

San Antonio was chosen as the most suitable location for this unprecedented port expansion.

Currently, the project is progressing through environmental approval and a bidding process for the breakwater, along with updates to the infrastructure for protecting its docks from winds and waves—a fundamental aspect for the installation of concessionaires for the next 30 years.

Regarding the potential impact of the November presidential elections, Muñoz reminded IPS that “in this project, we are taking the baton from those who came before. And we plan to hand it over improved and advanced to those who come next, regardless of political color.”

“The most important thing is for the project to be inaugurated when demand requires it. We trust that, regardless of the government that comes, this project will follow the desired schedule. We are working as quickly as possible,” he explained.

Map showing the projected location of the Outer Port of the port of San Antonio, the main port in Chile, on the central coast of the Pacific Ocean. The expansion will almost triple its current capacity and will be fully operational in 2036. Credit: Courtesy of the San Antonio port

Key Definitions

The Exterior Port includes the construction of an L-shaped breakwater nearly four kilometers long. Two kilometers will extend out to sea, and the other two will follow the coastline.

The total investment will be US$4.45 billion, of which $1.95 billion will be contributed by the state-owned San Antonio Port Company and US$2.5 billion by the private sector.

The transfer capacity will be expanded to six million TEUs per year.

In March, the project obtained a US$150 million credit from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, CAF, to finance enabling works such as the construction of the breakwater and to implement environmental compensation measures.

On Wednesday, September 24, Eduardo Abedrapo, president of the San Antonio port, confirmed during a visit to the port facilities by international journalists, including IPS, that two other consortia were prequalified, raising the number of bids for the initial works to five.

The tender process will close the receipt of bids in January 2026 and will award the contracts two months later.

The first contracts are for building the breakwater, carrying out the dredging, and related works.

The preliminary works are new access roads and a railway station to transport project construction material. Next comes the construction of the seawall and the deep dredging (18.5 meters) of the harbor basin.

The breakwater will be 1,230 meters facing the sea and 2,700 meters extending inland and requires 16 million cubic meters of rock.

The companies prequalified so far are Van Oord (Netherlands), Jan de Nul (Belgium), China Harbour Engineering Company CHEC (China), Acciona-Deme (Spain-Belgium), and Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co. Ltd. (South Korea).

The container ship Valentina, 366 meters long, docked at pier 1 of the Chilean port of San Antonio in the middle of loading operations. Less than 10 minutes pass from when the truck arrives alongside the ship until it leaves the port having delivered the container. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Environmental Sustainability

The project aims to ensure port operational quality through execution that is sustainable with the social and environmental surroundings.

“Chile has a very sophisticated and complex environmental assessment system. Obviously, these works have a set of impacts in their construction and operation phases,” Abedrapo told IPS.

He emphasized that “the port will be 100% electric. From the point of view of particulate matter pollution, it will be the opposite, as it will strongly contribute to decarbonization.”

However, he admitted that a port emits noise and has other impacts on the marine ecosystem or life in the surrounding areas.

He explained that as a result of meetings with the San Antonio municipality and social and environmental organizations, it was decided to protect two water bodies located in the new port facility by declaring them urban wetlands. They had emerged naturally 50 years after the original port was established in 1912.

“This is a demonstration of the company’s commitment to safeguarding biodiversity in the area and coastal land. It means that major infrastructure developments can be perfectly compatible and harmonized with the safeguarding and improvement of environmental conditions,” he asserted.

The removal of 16 million rocks to build the breakwater, for example, includes their reuse. Part of the environmental efficiency involves using the removed material to fill in other platforms.

Trucks move among dozens of already unloaded containers that are waiting for customs procedures before being sent to their destination. In 2024, 23 million tons of products passed through the Chilean port of San Antonio. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Progress of the Major Expansion

The environmental qualification resolution for the Outer Port is still being processed, awaiting technical reports from the involved public services and the conclusion of a citizen consultation.

Abedrapo believes that in October 2025 the environmental assessment service will issue a report that must be responded to by those responsible for the San Antonio port.

“The environmental assessment service could, towards the first half of next year, make a decision regarding the environmental qualification resolution for the project,” he estimated.

Abedrapo maintains that the Outer Port will ensure the sustainability and modernization of Chile’s public port infrastructure with high levels of efficiency and modern equipment.

He highlights direct benefits for Chilean foreign trade, lower-cost imported goods, and a competitive logistics chain.

Meanwhile, in the operation of the current port, the improvement of the breakwater, built last century, has been completed with the placement of 5,100 cubic meters of concrete and 3,400 cubic meters of prefabricated blocks. The parapet wall was raised from 10.6 to 11 meters.

Ten million dollars were invested to increase the safety of port operations relating the effects of climate change.

The work, which began last May, also included the installation of 2,300 cubic meters of large-tonnage rockfill.

The Chancay Port in Peru

Minister Muñoz dismissed any concerns about potential competition with the port of Chancay in Peru, funded by China in Chile’s northern neighbor and located near Lima.

“Rather than generating competition between different ports and countries, there is instead complementarity. It is good for us that Peru has ports of this level because there are ships that visit several ports to make a route along a certain coastline attractive,” he claimed.

He insisted that the demand projections in Chile require investing in a large-scale port that anticipates them.

He added that Chile can also attract cargo from other South American nations through the proposed bioceanic corridors.

“The existence of other ports of similar scale in other countries on the Pacific coast means that shipping lines visiting this part of the world can have more than one port of call. Ports like those being developed by our brother country Peru are an attractive complement to the project we are carrying out here, in San Antonio,” he concluded.

Google's first data center in Chile lies in the industrial sector of the municipality of Quilicura, on the northern outskirts of Santiago. It has no symbols or logos to identify it, but covers an extensive area. Water vapor is visibly emitted as part of the process to cool the servers. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Sep 4 2025 (IPS)

Chile wants to be a hub in Latin America in data storage and transmission by developing data centers, leveraging its wealth of renewable energy, and its optimal digital interconnection.

In contrast, the massive water required for cooling servers and resistance from social and local organizations who were not consulted are the main obstacles in this strategy.

The authorities are promoting a tech hub, as the concentrator or logistical connection point for centralizing numerous nodes of a computer network is called, where companies, investments, and talent converge.“Chile's technological development is at a turning point that will define our position as a relevant player in the region. In the future, this could mean having the capacity to host infrastructure for training large artificial intelligence models”–Andrés Díaz.

A key step in this direction is the National Data Center Plan (PData), launched by the government of leftist president Gabriel Boric in December 2024.

PData complemented the Cybersecurity Framework Law, enacted in April 2024, which established minimum requirements for the prevention, containment, resolution, and response to cybersecurity incidents, applicable to state agencies and private companies.

PData aims to position this elongated South American country as a Latin American hub for data centers.

It was launched 10 months after an environmental court in Santiago, the capital of this country of 18.4 million people, halted a multi-million dollar Google project in the municipality of Cerrillos, on the outskirts of Santiago, preventing it from using water to cool its servers.

The stoppage was a victory for residents organized in the Socio-Environmental Community Movement for Water and Territory (Mosacat), an environmental coalition that emerged in Cerrillos.

Google had announced it would modify the cooling system to use less than the planned 169 liters of water per second. But, following the court decision, it suspended the project and a US$40 million investment in what would have been its second data center in the country, after the one operating since 2015 in Quilicura, also on the outskirts of Santiago.

Tania Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Mosacat, praised the strength of the residents to “convince a multinational that its project was not possible with such scarce water resources. Companies are the ones that must become aware of the excessive use of our resources,” she stated in an interview with a union media outlet.

New reality

To promote data centers, the Boric government brought all interested parties together and managed to finalize PData, with the goal of providing certainty to all sectors and enabling their massive installation in the country.

Chile has abundant low-cost renewable energy, 62,000 kilometers of optical fiber, a network of 69,000 kilometers of submarine cables, as well as 3.8 million devices connected to the 5G network.

Alejandro Barros, a professor of engineering and researcher at the Public Systems Center  of Industrial Engineering at the public University of Chile, told IPS that the main lesson after the crisis with Google was the need to equip Chile with a public policy for the establishment and management of data centers.

According to Barros, PData “advances very significantly by establishing the governance model for these projects because multiple state institutions will be involved. How synergy and coordination is achieved across all sectors linked to these projects is relevant.”

“My concern is that the plan was presented at the end of an administration,” he said, recalling that Boric’s term concludes in March 2026.

“The question is what will the next administration do. Data centers will have to be built, but how do we agree so that Chile meets standards, has good dialogue with communities, and we don’t start from scratch again?” he asks.

Google’s fenced and patrolled data center in Quilicura, on the outskirts of Santiago, where huge water tanks are visible. The tech company was unable to establish another data center in the Chilean capital due to a court ruling against the massive use of water. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Microsoft installs its regional cloud

In 2017, there were six data center projects in Chile. Today, 38 are in operation.

It seems more likely that companies of various sizes will export data and processed information from Chile to meet external demand.

According to Fitzgerald Cantero, Director of Studies and Projects at the  Latin American Energy Organization  (Olade), the growth in the use of artificial intelligence will exceed an annual rate of 31% by 2029.

In the Latin American region, 78% of data centers are currently concentrated in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

During the Data Centers and Energy forum, organized by the Institute of the Americas  and held in Santiago on August 21, Cantero said that investment in artificial intelligence in 2025 will be 7 billion dollars and will jump to 10 billion in 2029.

Juan Carlos Olmedo, Chile’s electrical coordinator, stated at the forum that the electrical energy required by data centers in this country will quadruple by 2032, rising from the current 325 megawatts (MW) to 1,360.

On June 18, Microsoft opened its first Data Center Region in Santiago to support economic growth, technological innovation, and social development, indicated the transnational tech company.

According to Microsoft, this state-of-the-art infrastructure will provide digital services to businesses and public organizations, improving their speed, privacy, security, and data storage in compliance with local regulations and high availability

The new network of data centers, called the Microsoft Cloud Region, is also located in Santiago, consisting of three independent physical locations, each with one or more data centers, and will provide services to several South American countries.

According to the U.S.-based software developer, the opening of this regional Data Center will generate US$35.3 billion in net income over the next four years, both for Microsoft and for partners and customers using its cloud.

“Of that total, approximately US$3.3 billion will be invested directly in Chile, contributing to this country’s development and creating about 81,041 jobs between 2025 and 2029,” detailed the tech company.

At the time, Boric expressed his joy for this new project, calling it a show of confidence for Chile to continue integrating and transforming into a major tech hub in Latin America.

Chile is now connected to a global network that spans the planet, he said, which reinforces the country as “an excellent destination for investment, placing us at the regional forefront of innovation and technology.”

“Data centers and the digital economy are transforming society, and this is not just for some sectors—it is for everyone,” emphasized the president.

Representatives from companies, Latin American energy institutions, Chilean electrical sector authorities, and academics gathered in Santiago for a forum on Data Centers and Energy, which debated the challenges and conditions for Chile to become a regional hub. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The pros and cons of data centers

Andrés Díaz, director of the School of Industrial Engineering at the private Diego Portales University, believes that Chile has managed to position itself as a tech hub by attracting investments in digital infrastructure.

Regarding the projections for this strategic industry, he maintains that the important thing is to send clear signals of stability and security.

“The country has favorable conditions, from natural resources to technical capabilities; however, confidence to ensure the attraction of investment remains key,” he told IPS.

According to this academic, “Chile’s technological development is at a turning point that will define our position as a relevant player in the region. In the future, this could mean having the capacity to host infrastructure for training large artificial intelligence models.”

Data centers enable the operation of applications such as instant messaging or viewing content on platforms. And they are essential for sending, storing, and interconnecting information for companies, public administration, hospitals, and banking entities.

If a data center stops functioning, it would affect everything from traffic lights to email and ATMs. Teleworking, video calls, food delivery, and home cinema are also activities derived from their operation.

So-called data centers have thus become critical infrastructure, like other basic services.

“Both in Europe and the United States, the demand for massive data processing is exponential, especially because of what is happening with artificial intelligence,” professor Barros told IPS.

“This is what we see in the technological infrastructure plans driven by the United States and China, with all their positive and negative variables,” he added.

He warned of risks and challenges as a result, especially for the environment, including the type of energy that will be used: renewable or fossil-based.

“In Europe, they are starting to reuse nuclear energy again, and in the United States, they are beginning to use fossil-based energy. Chile has the advantage of its very significant renewable energy production,” he explained.

In 2024, renewable energies contributed nearly 68% of Chile’s electricity generation, with 35% coming from variable sources such as solar and wind.

But the main challenge is water due to the large volumes consumed to cool the servers, given that air cooling is less efficient.

“That means having clarity about how much water will be consumed, what impact it will have on the area where the data centers will be installed, and knowing if it is an area with water problems or drought for long periods,” emphasized Barros.

He also highlighted the importance of providing greater transparency and access to information when discussing the issue of water with local communities, specifying how much will be required and what impact it will have on basins or human consumption.

Droughts have affected various regions of Chile over a 40-year period, from 1979 to 2019. Furthermore, northern Chile is one of the driest regions in the world, and the central region, which is home to 70% of the national population, has had a permanent water deficit since 2010.

Leaders of the involved localities insist that data centers be required to undergo the Environmental Impact Assessment System, which includes a government evaluation and a citizen consultation.

Currently, to install a data center, only an Environmental Impact Declaration must be made, where the company itself reports on potential risks.

The mega-ship BYD Shenzhen arrived on May 28 at the port of Itajaí in southern Brazil, carrying 7,292 electric vehicles from the Chinese company BYD. It set a record for this type of transport, with unloading taking four days. Credit: Porto de Itajaí

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 7 2025 (IPS)

Residents near the port of Itajaí in southern Brazil celebrated the arrival of 7,292 electric and hybrid vehicles from China aboard the ship BYD Shenzhen on May 28 as a “historic event,” with unloading taking four days. 

It was a record in maritime vehicle transport, but similar operations had already occurred in Brazil and other Latin American countries. A year earlier, the port of Suape in northeastern Brazil received 5,459 units also from BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer."China has been pivotal... Beyond providing more affordable vehicles, its technological leadership and mass production capacity have shaped global trends." —Cristóbal Sarmiento.

China’s automotive industry, led by BYD, is the decisive factor driving electric mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Over the past four years, the number of light electric vehicles in the region has nearly doubled annually, with a 187% jump in 2024, reaching 444,071 by the end of December, according to the Latin American Energy Organization (Olade), whose data excludes non-plug-in hybrids.

This is relatively small, representing only 0.7% of the world’s electric vehicle fleet and 0.3% of the region’s total light vehicles, as noted in Olade’s technical report in May. But it signals great expansion potential, now being fueled by Chinese vehicles.

Lower prices and improving quality make Chinese units competitive amid growing demand for transport electrification in the region, according to Fitzgerald Cantero, Director of Studies, Projects, and Information at Olade.

With their exports to the U.S. and the European Union (EU) practically blocked by 100% and 45.3% tariffs, respectively, Chinese electric vehicles see Latin America as “an attractive market” that remains open, along with Asia, he reasoned.

Industrial Hub of Camaçari in Bahia, northeastern Brazil, where BYD built its plant for producing electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, batteries, and auto parts. Spanning 460 hectares, it allows for expansions to double production to 300,000 vehicles per year. Part of the facilities were purchased from U.S. automaker Ford, which left the country. Credit: BYD

Renewable Energy and Lithium as Attractions 

An additional Latin American attraction is its abundance of renewable energy, Cantero told IPS by phone from Quito, Olade’s headquarters. Using sustainable electricity is essential to meet the goal of decarbonizing transport and reducing planet-warming emissions.

Moreover, some countries in the region are rich in minerals needed for vehicle electrification, such as lithium for batteries, copper for electrical components, and rare earths containing 17 chemical elements used in magnets for electric car motors, wind turbines, and other strategic technologies.

Thus, the region has become a priority for China, the automotive superpower where 12.87 million electric passenger vehicles were sold in 2024, plus 2.2 million exported—figures close to half of all new cars sold domestically and abroad, according to data compiled by Olade.

China’s leadership is more than absolute, as the next powers—the EU and the U.S.—produced only 2.4 million and 1.1 million electric vehicles, respectively, in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency.

Olade estimates that China accounted for over 75% of global electric vehicle sales. This share is likely to grow, as the European market has stagnated and the U.S. has rolled back its environmental policies.

“The (U.S.) electric vehicle industry has been discouraged by new legislation, which will have a dramatic impact on consumer preferences,” said Margaret Myers, director of the Asia and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue.

Meanwhile, China is boosting exports of its production surplus, particularly to Global South markets with fewer import restrictions, she noted.

For China, “electric vehicle production is part of a broader effort to improve its economy and secure dominance in key industries, including EVs and their batteries, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, bioscience, and other priorities,” Myers concluded to IPS from Washington.

Electric trucks made in China at the second edition of the International Chinese Auto Expo, held from July 24 to 27 at an events center in Santiago, Chile. These cargo vehicles began operating in large mining facilities and urban areas in Chile and are now becoming more widespread nationwide. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Large Markets Concentrate Sales 

For now, Latin America remains a net importer. Brazil and Mexico are the largest markets, accounting for 73.6% of electrified vehicle sales (including fully electric, plug-in hybrid, and non-plug-in hybrid models) in the region, according to data from the Latin American Association of Automotive Distributors (Aladda), headquartered in Buenos Aires.

Their share of the population is much smaller. Brazil, with 212 million people, and Mexico, with 130 million, make up just 51.2% of Latin America and the Caribbean’s 668 million inhabitants.

Argentina, in fourth place with 47 million people, does not rank among the top eight in motor transport electrification. Colombia, the third most populous with 53 million, is also third in Aladda’s ranking.

Colombia and Chile lead in electric buses, with 1,590 and 2,600 operating in their cities as of December 2024, respectively, according to Olade. Brazil, despite its much larger population, has only 900—far fewer than Chile, a country of just 18.5 million people.

A Chinese electric vehicle charges its battery at a dealership in south-central Mexico City. Sales of Chinese-made electric vehicles have grown in this Latin American country due to their lower prices compared to Western brands and financing options. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Three Waves

“The evolution of electromobility in Chile had its first wave between 2017 and 2020, focused on public transportation—specifically electric bus systems,” recalled Cristóbal Sarmiento Laurel, Director of Energy and Sustainable Development at the private Diego Portales University.

The goal was to introduce the new technology in a “more feasible way, since buses operate on controlled routes and schedules, making charging planning easier,” he explained. BYD was the key player in this phase.

The second wave, starting in 2021, saw a “steady rise in sales of light hybrid and fully electric vehicles, with growing market presence from Chinese manufacturers like BYD, Maxus, JA, DFSK, and Changan, which quickly gained ground in the domestic market,” he added.

“China has been pivotal in this journey. Beyond providing more affordable vehicles, its technological leadership and mass production capacity have shaped global trends. For Chile, this relationship isn’t just a commercial opportunity but also a concrete way to accelerate the energy transition,” Sarmiento emphasized.

“Transport accounts for 33.3% of Chile’s energy consumption, according to the National Energy Balance, and relies almost entirely on fossil fuels”, therefore, electrification helps mitigate climate change, Sarmiento told IPS in Santiago.

“Not using fossil fuels is a solution,” but electrified cars “promote individual mobility rather than transforming transportation systems or boosting public transit,” noted Antonio del Río, a researcher at the Renewable Energy Institute of Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

More electric buses—whether Chinese or from other origins—are the way forward, he argued. “The cost per kilometer for an electric vehicle is 60% lower than a conventional car,” he said to IPS in Mexico City.

By the end of 2024, Mexico had only 780 electric buses, according to Olade data—half as many as Colombia, or a quarter per capita.

Assembly line of electric and hybrid vehicles at BYD’s Camaçari plant in northeastern Brazil, which will initially produce 150,000 vehicles annually with potential to double output. The electric vehicle market has grown rapidly in Brazil and Latin America over the past four years. With mass domestic production, Brazil could become an export hub for these advanced-technology vehicles. Credit: BYD

Mexico mirrored the region’s surge in electrified vehicle sales, which reached 412,493 units in 2024, up 174.9% from 2022, according to Aladda. Brazil led growth among major countries with a 256.2% increase, while Mexico saw 142.2%.

Despite the sharp rise, electrified vehicles still represent a small share of total sales: 8.1% regionally on average, 6.8% in Brazil, and 6.1% in Chile in 2024. Colombia stands out at 25.8%.

The most dramatic two-year growth—665.3% regionally—was in plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), followed by pure electric vehicles (EVs) at 403%. Non-plug-in hybrids (HEVs) lost momentum in Brazil but grew in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, especially in 2024.

Another notable trend is the diversity of Chinese brands—23 in both Mexico and Chile. Chile has 52 brands total, including Chinese and others, according to Rodrigo Salcedo, president of Chile’s  Electric Vehicle Trade Association (Avec).

The influx of new brands has heightened competition, bringing more options, models, and prices that are gradually approaching those of conventional cars. However, “there’s a gap,” lamented Salcedo, pointing to the lack of information, workshops, and trained technicians for maintenance—except for buses, which benefit from Chinese technicians in Chile.

BYD cars for sale and test drives at an Itavema dealership, a BYD sales network, in Botafogo, a traditional middle-class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Third Wave 

Meanwhile, a third wave of electric mobility is emerging in the region, following the initial phases of electric buses and the mass availability of light vehicles at falling prices. This new phase involves the establishment of assembly plants, including Chinese ones.

In Brazil, two Chinese automakers have begun local production of electrified vehicles. BYD (short for Build Your Dreams) started production in July at its assembly plant in Camaçari, Bahia, rolling out three models—one fully electric and two plug-in hybrids. And GWM (Great Wall Motors) is set to begin production this semester in Iracemápolis, São Paulo.

Symbolically, both manufacturers took over former plants of traditional automakers—Ford (U.S.) and Mercedes-Benz (Germany), respectively.

While Chinese-branded cars have been produced in Brazil since 2017 (such as those from the Caoa-Chery joint venture in Anápolis, Goiás), their electrified models, introduced in 2019, were limited in volume.

BYD’s plant marks a new era, designed to assemble 150,000 units annually initially, with plans to double that capacity. The project also includes battery and auto parts production, along with a logistics system, explained Mauro Pereira, general superintendent of Camaçari’s Industrial Development Committee (Cofic).

Cofic manages the Camaçari Industrial Park to create the best operating conditions for 88 local companies, including BYD.

“BYD is putting Brazil at the forefront of vehicle technology,” Pereira stated, anticipating 20,000 direct jobs and triple that in indirect employment. The plant could also turn Brazil into an export hub for vehicles and components, including batteries, to Latin America and possibly Europe.

The Camaçari plant benefited from land incentives and tax breaks, but the real driver was Brazil’s import tariffs on electric vehicles, introduced in January 2024. Starting at 10% (slightly higher for hybrids), they will gradually rise to 35% by 2027.

Chinese new-energy vehicles are cutting costs with advanced, efficient, and intelligent technologies—”they’re smartphones on wheels,” said Thiago Sugahara, VP of the Brazilian Electric Vehicle Association and GWM’s institutional relations manager. Users can control and monitor their cars remotely and safely via smartphone, he explained.

“An electric car is a battery with four wheels,” quipped Ana Lia Rojas, head of Chile’s Renewable Energy and Storage Association (Acera), highlighting both the vehicle’s key component —still  costly—,  and their potential to support power grids.

Colbert Marques, a sales consultant at Itavema (a BYD dealership network), noted that Chinese manufacturers halved EV prices. Today, models start at just over US$20,000, forcing Western brands to slash prices to stay competitive.

Buyers of EVs and hybrids “are more informed and tech-savvy, even older ones,” he observed, confident in his decision to switch to BYD in 2023, having driven traditional vehicles for 18 years.

With contributions from Orlando Milesi (Chile) and Emilio Godoy (Mexico)

At the San Felipe School, in Coyhaique, Chile, the solar panels of a 30 kW plant will be installed which will be inaugurated in the first week of December

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Nov 20 2024 (IPS)

Chile, a country rich in solar and wind energy and with huge photovoltaic power stations  and wind turbines in its elongated territory, managed to change its grid by incorporating renewable energies, which account for an installed capacity equivalent to 43.8 % of its electricity production.

However, it is woefully lacking in distributed generation projects, also known as decentralised generation, which are small scale, mostly dedicated to self-consumption and involving organised communities. This is so even though these initiatives would introduce the population to the advantages of clean energy.

Distributed generation would allow such a shift, but is currently in its infancy in this South American country of 19.8 million people. It lacks adequate legal impetus, access to financing and suffers from a cultural deficit among a population that knows little about it.“We are used to a centralised system and although there has been fossil energy replacement by renewable energy, it is still a large-scale, centralised model with negative impacts": Cristian Mires.

Successful projects belong to mega-companies that have installed parks and wind turbines in the northern Atacama Desert and in southern Patagonia, between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, selling their generation to the National Electricity System (SEN).

This profitable business does not benefit Chilean consumers who are suffering a huge tariff increase that will reach up to 60% in 2025. It is a gradual increase that began to be charged in July and will culminate next January after five years of tariff freezes due to the covid pandemic.

Thus, the impact of distributed generation with its panels on the roofs of homes, schools and community or municipal buildings is small.

The leftist government of Gabriel Boric sought to promote this citizen energy and reach the goal of 500 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity by the end of his term, in March 2026.

However, 17 months away from reaching that goal, distributed generation is minimal and only 0.1% corresponds to joint generation, as distributed generation is also known, according to the state-run National Energy Commission.

The Ministry of Energy told IPS that as of November 2024, the total installed capacity of distributed generation projects for self-consumption reached only 290 MW.

“Statistics show an upward trend in this type of project. Several initiatives promoted by the Ministry of Energy seek to encourage the development of this segment, such as the Public Solar Roofs 2.0 programme, which is being implemented and aims to install photovoltaic projects in public institutions,” said the institution that directs the country’s energy policy.

In 2015-2019, this programme installed photovoltaic systems on 136 buildings in 13 regions of Chile for a total of 5.3 megawatt peak (MWp). A technical office was then created to support public institutions in their feasibility analyses of solar energy plans.

Chile has decided, as part of its international climate commitments to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, that its non-conventional renewable energies will contribute 80% of electricity generation by 2030 and 100% by 2050, when it will reach net zero emissions.

Solar panels installed in the roof of the Industrial Secondary School of Valdivia, a city 850 kilometers south of Santiago. Credit: Courtesy of Sofía Alarcón

Barriers in Chile

Cristián Mires, lawyer and president of the NGO Energía Colectiva, says there are a number of barriers to developing jointly owned distributive energy.

“These projects are not cheap. Technical, legal and financial advice is required. A share is equivalent to at least US$530 per user. And if we want bigger savings, we are talking about up to US$2,100. And the majority of the population can’t afford that cost,” he told IPS.

There is no public or private funding for decentralised generation facilities, he claims.

This slows down the implementation of the 2014 Law on Distributed Generation for Self-consumption, which allows households, schools and businesses to self-supply their electricity use through their own generation and inject the surplus into the SEN. In practice, such generation has very restrictive rules for joint ownership.

“It needs to be modified, and as the Citizens‘ Energy Action Group we are participating in technical roundtables with the government and parliament to that end,” Mires said.

“We are used to a centralised system and although there has been fossil energy replacement by renewable energy, it is still a large-scale, centralised model with negative impacts,” he added.

In August, Energía Colectiva, based in Chile and present in other Latin American countries, launched the document Citizen energy in Chile, proposals for its promotion and implementation, where it claims there is potential to reach eight gigawatts (GW) of such citizen generation by 2040.

According to the document, Chile needs “a transition that conceives energy as a right, democratising its production and distribution. A transition focused on satisfying human needs, but which nevertheless understands the pressing need to reduce energy use. Such a transition can only be driven by citizens”.

Arrayán Wind Park, one of the 10 largest in Chile, located in the northern municipality of Ovalle. Credit: Ministry of Energy

Energy Communities, a key

So-called Energy Communities seek to encourage the participation of new groups in the production, management, use and marketing of energy.

They aim for a decentralised, local energy model with less environmental impact.

These communities seek to organise citizens to generate and manage their own energy, whether for social, economic and/or environmental purposes.

“These communities are considered a fundamental tool for carrying out just energy transitions, where people play a central role in the transformation towards more equitable systems of energy generation and use”, according to the specialised magazine Energía y Equidad.

Based on the use of renewable energy, the Communities offer access to affordable, clean and secure energy; enabling an active participation in response to the climate and ecological crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In short, these Communities aim to promote local energy autonomy, strengthen social cohesion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decontaminate the local environment.

The 2014 law and its regulation five years later set standards for joint generation and joint ownership.

The Nueva Zelanda school in the municipality of Independencia, in the northern part of the capital, and Coopeumo, a farmers’ cooperative in the O Higgins region, bordering the Santiago metropolitan region, are community projects developed by municipalities and with citizen participation.

Both are connected to a grid into which they inject the energy generated and then receive discounts on their electricity bills.

Jorge Nauto, principal of the Industrial Secondary School of Valdivia, a city 850 kilometres south of Santiago, praised the experience of installing photovoltaic panels on the roof of his school.

“It is a 70 kilowatt peak (kWp) system determined according to the available surface area and the building’s annual consumption. It allows generating power for the premises and the injection of surpluses into the conventional electricity grid through the use of the Distributed Generation Act,” he told IPS from his location.

“Thanks to this generation, we achieved a significant reduction in electricity bills,” Nauto said, before emphasising the value, also educational, of using clean, renewable energy.

New business model

Antu Energía is a company based in Coyhaique, in the southern region of Aysén, which implements a new business model with photovoltaic energy.

It allows remote discounts, which means that a person can own or participate in a photovoltaic plant that injects energy in one place and discount that value in another place from the same distribution company.

We are calling for small companies or individuals to participate in Virtual Solar Panels by acquiring a minimum unit equivalent to generating 500 watts,” Manuel Matta, founding partner of Antu Energía, told IPS from Coyhaique.

The model lowers the investment to US$737 per kilowatt (kW) installed and compares favourably with a similar individually driven project that costs US$2,632 per kW.

This electrical engineer has already sold 28 of 60 minimum units of participation in the 30 kW plant installed on the roofs of the San Felipe high school in Coyhaique’s Plaza de Armas.

Daniela Zamorano, project coordinator for Energía Colectiva, told IPS from Joao Pessoa, in the northern Brazilian state of Paraíba, where she lives, that Chile lacks the political will to promote jointly-owned distributed generation.

“We are seeing problems today with rising rates, and the solutions proposed by the government always come from the logic of subsidising consumption. This is a snowball that reaches gigantic public spending amounts. But they do not visualise options for a long-term solution such as distributed generation,” she said.

Residents pose behind the sprinkler that irrigates an alfalfa field thanks to the energy generated by a photovoltaic panel installed on Fanny Lastra's property in Mirador de Bío Bío, Chile. Credit: Courtesy of Fresia Lastra

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 29 2024 (IPS)

The production of solar energy by means of panels installed on small farmers’ properties or on the roofs of community organisations is starting to directly benefit more and more farmers in Chile.

This energy enables technified irrigation systems, pumping water and lowering farmers’ bills by supporting their business. It also enables farmers’ cooperatives to share the fruits of their surpluses.

The huge solar and wind energy potential of this elongated country of 19.5 million people is the basis for a shift that is beginning to benefit not only large generators.

The potential capacity of solar and wind power generation is estimated at 2,400 gigawatts, which is 80 times more than the total capacity of the current Chilean energy matrix.

The mayor of Las Cabras, Juan Pablo Flores, first on the left, on the roof of the building of his Municipality along with employees who installed the photovoltaic panels that will allow energy savings of more than US$ 10,000 per year. Credit: Courtesy of Municipality of Las Cabras

Two farming families

Fanny Lastra, 55, was born in the municipality of Mulchén, 550 kilometres south of Santiago, located in the centre of the country in the Bío Bío region. She has lived in the rural sector of Mirador del Bío Bío in the town since she was 8.

“We won a grant of 12 million pesos (US$12,600) to install a photovoltaic system with sprinklers to make better use of the little water we have on our five-hectare farm and have good alfalfa crops to feed the animals,” she told IPS from her home town.“We used to irrigate all night, we didn't sleep, and now we can optimise irrigation¨: Fanny Lastra.

She refers to the resources provided to applicants who are selected on the basis of their background and the situation of their farms by two government bodies, mostly through grants: the National Irrigation Commission (CNR) and the Institute for Agricultural Development (Indap).

“Before we had to irrigate all night, we didn’t sleep, and now we can optimise irrigation. The panel gives us the energy to expel the water through sprinklers. In the future we plan to apply for another photovoltaic panel to draw water and fill a storage pool,” Lastra said.

The area has received abundant rainfall this year, but a larger pond would allow to store water for dry periods, which are increasingly recurrent.

“We have water shares (rights), but there are so many of us small farmers that we have to schedule. In my case, every nine days I have 28 hours of water. That’s why we applied for another project,” she said.

Lastra works with her children on the plot, which is mainly dedicated to livestock.

The conversion of agricultural land like hers into plots for second homes, which is rampant in many regions of Chile, has also reached Bío Bío and caused Lastra problems. For example, dogs abandoned by their owners have killed 50 of her lambs in recent times.

That is why she will gradually switch to raising larger livestock to continue with Granny’s Tradition, as she christened her production of fresh, mature cheeses and dulce de leche.

Marisol Pérez, 53, produces vegetables in greenhouses and outdoors on her half-hectare plot in the town of San Ramón, within the municipality of Quillón, 448 kilometres south of Santiago, also in the Bío Bío region.

In February 2023 she was affected by a huge fire. “Two greenhouses, a warehouse with motor cultivators, fumigators and all the machinery burnt down. And a poultry house with 200 birds that cost 4500 pesos (US$ 4.7) each. Thank God we saved part of the house and the photovoltaic panel,” She told IPS from his home town.

Pérez has been working the land with her sister and their husbands for 11 years.

“We started with irrigation and a solar panel.  After the fire we reapplied to the CNR. As the panel didn’t burn, they helped us with the greenhouse. The government gives us a certain amount and we have to put in at least 10%,” she explained.

The first subsidy was the equivalent of US$1,053 and the second, after the fire, was US$842. With both she was able to reinstall the drip system and rebuild the greenhouse, now made of metal.

“Having a solar panel allows us to save a lot. Before, we were paying almost 200,000 pesos (US$210) a month. With what we saved with the panel, we now pay 6,000 pesos (US$6.3)”, she explained with satisfaction.

In her opinion, “the solar panel is a very good thing.  If I don’t use water for the greenhouses, I use it for my house. We live off what we harvest and plant. That’s our life. And I am happy like that,” she said.

Ignacio Mena, Coopeumo network administrator, in front of the warehouse where photovoltaic panels were installed. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The cases of one cooperative and two municipalities

The proliferation of solar panels is also due to the drop in their price. Solarity, a Chilean solar power company, reported that prices are at historic lows.

In 2021 its value per kilowatt (kWp) was 292 dollars. It increased to 300 in 2022, then dropped to 202 and reached 128 dollars in 2024.

In 2021 the Cooperativa Intercomunal Peumo (Coopeumo) commissioned the first community photovoltaic plant in Chile. Today it has 54.2 kWp installed in two plants, with about 120 panels in total.

The energy generated is used in some of its own facilities and the surplus is injected into the Compañía General de Electricidad (CGE), a private distributor, which pays its contribution every month.

This amount contributes to improving support for its 350 members, all farmers in the area, including technical assistance, the sale of agricultural inputs, grain marketing and tax consultancy.

Coopeumo’s goals also include reducing carbon dioxide (C02) emissions into the atmosphere and benefiting its members.

It also benefits the municipalities of Pichidegua and Las Cabras, located 167 and 152 kilometres south of Santiago, as well as school, health and neighbourhood establishments.

“The energy savings in a typical month, like August 2024, was 492,266 pesos (US$518),” said Ignacio Mena, 37, and a computer engineer who works as a network administrator for Coopeumo, based in the municipality of Peumo, in the O’Higgins region, which borders the Santiago Metropolitan Region to the south.

Interviewed by IPS at his office in Pichidegua, he said the construction of the first plant cost the equivalent of US$42,105, contributed equally by Coopeumo and the private foundation  Agencia de Sostenibilidad Energética.

Constanza López, 35, a risk prevention engineer and head of the environmental unit of the Las Cabras municipality, appreciates the contribution of the panels installed on the roof of the municipal building. They have an output of 54 kilowatts and have been in operation since 2023.

“We awarded them through the Energy Sustainability Agency.  They funded 30 percent and we funded the rest,” she told IPS at the municipal offices. “This year is the first that the programme is fully operational and we should reach maximum production,” she said.

In the case of the municipality of Las Cabras, the estimated annual savings is about US$10,605.

An expert explains to a group of small farmers at Mirador de Bío Bío the benefits and operation of solar panels. Credit: Courtesy of Fresia Lastra

Panels and family farming, a virtuous cycle

There is a virtuous cycle between the use of panels and savings for small farmers. The Ministry of Energy estimates this saving at around 15% for small farms.

“The use of solar technology for self-consumption is a viable alternative for users in the agricultural sector. More and more systems are being installed, which make it possible to lower customers‘ electricity bills,” the ministry said in a written response.

Since 2015, successive governments have promoted the use of renewable energy, particularly photovoltaic systems for self-consumption, within the agricultural sector.

“There has been a steady growth in the number of projects using renewable energy for self-consumption. In total, 1,741 irrigation projects have been carried out with a capacity of 13,852 kW and a total investment of 59,951 million pesos (US$63.1 million),” the ministry said.

The CNR told IPS that so far in 2024 it has subsidised more than 1,000 projects, submitted by farmers across Chile.

“This is an investment close to 78 billion pesos (US$82.1 million), taking into account subsidies close to 62 billion pesos (US$65.2) plus the contribution of irrigators,” it said.

Of these projects, at least 270 incorporate non-conventional renewable energies, “such as photovoltaic systems associated with irrigation works”, it added.

According to the National Electricity Coordinator, the autonomous technical body that coordinates the entire Chilean electricity system, between September 2023 and August 2024, combined wind and solar generation in Chile amounted to 28,489 gigawatt hours.

In the first quarter of 2024, non-conventional renewable energies, such as solar and wind among others, accounted for 41% of electricity generation in Chile, according to figures from the same technical body.

Gatherer Cristina Poblete, from the town of Pichilemu, carries one of the sacks of freshly harvested seaweed. This coastal town in the O'Higgins region of central Chile is known worldwide for its large waves. Credit: Courtesy of Cristina Poblete

By Orlando Milesi
PAREDONES, Chile, Aug 5 2024 (IPS)

The number of organisations that bring together fisherwomen who seek to be recognised as workers, make their harsh reality visible and escape the vulnerability in which they live is growing in Chile.

These women have always been present in the fishing sector, but have been ignored, classified as assistants, and relegated socially and economically.

There are 103,017 registered artisanal fisherpeople in Chile, and 26,438 of them are women who work as seaweed gatherers on the shore, known as algueras in Spanish, and related tasks.

According to statistics from the government’s National Fisheries Service  (Sernapesca), in 2023 there were 1,850 artisanal fisherpeople’s organisations in Chile, of which 81 were made up of women alone.

The fisheries sector in this long and narrow South American country of 19.5 million people exported 3.4 million tonnes of fish and seafood in 2021, bringing in USD 8.5 billion.

Chile is one of the 12 largest fishing countries in the world, being its industrial fishery the most economically relevant.

Meanwhile, artisanal fishing is carried out in 450 coves or inlets where groups of fisherpeople operate from the far north to the southernmost point of the country, stretching 4,000 kilometres in a straight line.

Seaweed harvesting, which is mainly carried out by women, lasts from December to April. In the remaining seven months, the algueras barely survive on their savings and must reinvent themselves in order to earn an income.

The invisible seawomen

Marcela Loyola, 55, is the vice-president of Agrupación de Mujeres de Mar (Seawomen Group) in the coastal town of Bucalemu, which belongs to the municipality of Paredones. It is 257 kilometres south of Santiago and part of the O’Higgins region, bordering the southern part of the capital’s metropolitan area.

The Agrupación brings together 22 algueras, as well as fish filleters, weavers who sew and place the hooks spaced out in the fishing nets, and shellfish shuckers, who extract their edible meat.

“The main problem is that we fisherwomen are invisible throughout the country. We have always been in the shadow of our husbands. There is a lack of recognition of women also from the authorities, in society and policies,” she told IPS in the Bucalemu cove.

“There are many trade unions, but their projects only reach men, never anything that serves women. And we don’t have health, welfare, nothing”, claims Loyola.

Together with Sernapesca, her group launched an activity to legalise workers in artisanal fishery.

“We held an application day and a lot of people came because they didn’t have a licence.  In Bucalemu alone, 60 people signed up. Some had fishing credentials, but no permit to collect cochayuyo (edible brown seaweed) or in other related activities,” she explained.

Bucalemu also hosted a National Meeting of Women of the Land and Sea on 31 May, attended by more than 100 delegates from different parts of Chile.

Gissela Olguín, 40, coordinator of the national Network of Seawomen in the O’Higgins region, told IPS that the meeting sought to defend seafood sovereignty.

“We are working to learn from seawomen about food sovereignty. From the right to land, water and seeds, we analysed how people of the sea are threatened today because the inequality of the rural model is now being repeated on the coast,” she said.

Marcela Loyola, vice-president of Agrupación de Mujeres de Mar in the coastal town of Bucalemu, at a local tourist lookout point. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Women-only management area

Delfina Mansilla, 60, heads the Women’s Union of Algueras in the municipality of Pichilemu, also in O’Higgins, 206 kilometres south of Santiago. It brings together 25 members and is in charge of the La Puntilla management area, the only one given to women in central Chile.

The leader told IPS by telephone from her town that the management area has cochayuyo (Durvillaea antárctica) and huiro (Macrocystis integrifolia) seaweed, along with the bivalve molluscs called locos (Concholepas concholepas) as its main products.

The cochayuyo is extracted by going into the sea with a diving suit and using a knife to cut the stalk attached to the rocks so that the seaweed can grow back.  In the case of huiro, an iron barrette, called chuzo by the algueras and fishermen, must be used.

“Our main issue is that the men are bothered by our management area and come diving in. Some people don’t respect women and also go into an area that was given to us and that we have taken care of for years,” she said.

These women sell the locos to restaurants in Pichilemu, while the cochayuyo is traded “in green (the estimated extraction, not yet extracted)”, to middlemen in Bucalemu.

According to Olguín, there has been significant growth in women’s organising nationwide thanks to the Gender Equity Law, number 20820, passed in 2020.

“The labour of women have been invisible in the fishing sector, and even more so within the fisheries organisation because, although unions have women, they are in the minority,” she said.

The law, she explained, opened up the possibility for women to train and organise themselves.

In spite of this progress, male chauvinist mentality persists in the fishery.

“They believe women can’t be on the boats or they have smaller spaces for them in the cove. It is a behaviour of men who still think that women only help in the fishing industry, but don’t work in it,” she said.

María Godoy ties and prepares in her home in the coastal town of Bucalemu, in the Chilean municipality of Paredones, the packets of cochayuyo seaweed collected by her husband and daughter. Credit: Courtesy of Gisela Olguín

Critical situation of the algueras

The leader describes the situation of women seaweed gatherers as bad.

“The women who work at sea live and sleep in little shacks with minimal conditions. They don’t have water or electricity and everyone has to make do as best they can.  The same goes for sanitation, they have to make makeshift toilets,” she said.

It is hard work because the timetable is set by the sea, she adds. The first low tides can be at 7:00 am or sometimes at noon in summer, with the sun over their heads.

“Conditions are always a bit extreme. Throwing seaweed out when cutting the cochayuyo is a job requiring much physical strength,” she explained.

Since the working season is short, the women prefer to stay in the shacks, improvised dwellings made of sticks and cloth that are erected on the sand or ground resembling tents.

“Here, women stop going to the sea only when their bodies prevent them from doing so. I know women over 70 who are still working on the shore because that’s how they subsist,” she added.

Another determining factor is the price of seaweed, which is set by buyers and ranges from 200 to 500 pesos per kilo (between 20 and 50 US cents).

The fisherwomen work long hours to extract more product. “It is a very vulnerable sector, with no social security or cultural recognition,” Olguín concluded Olguín.

Hortensia, Sonia, Cristina and Elizabeth, four seaweed workers from the Chilean municipality of Pichilemu, in front of the municipal building where they will meet the deputy mayor, Sergio Mella. The workers are seeking a concession and municipal premises to exhibit and sell their handicrafts, soaps and various products made from seaweed. The sale allows them to subsist during the southern winter, when seaweed extraction is banned. Credit: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The threat to seaweed

Alejandra González, a doctor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Chile, told IPS that some species of brown and red macroalgae found along Chile’s coasts are raw material for the food, pharmacological and medical industries.

This commercial value and high demand leads to direct extraction, “causing a reduction in natural populations and fragmentation, with a slow recovery rate of only those that survive harvesting”, she explains.

“This scenario makes populations less able to cope with environmental change, leaving them vulnerable to events such as Enos (El Niño), heat waves, increased tidal surges, changes in seawater pH, many of them associated with climate change,” she said.

Among the greatest threats to macroalgae are habitat destruction due to coastal port constructions, pollution caused by urbanization, and invasive species associated with ship movements and migrations.

Other threats are overexploitation related to human population growth, climate change caused by increased carbon dioxide (CO2) and its side effects, such as higher temperatures, storm surges and chemical changes.

According to González, the greatest threat to seaweed is the combination of all these variables.

Chile has developed various strategies for the conservation and management of natural seaweed meadows, but these measures are inadequate, argues the specialist.

“In Chile’s north, the exploitation of brown macroalgae from natural meadows is greater, because drying is free on the beaches themselves, but it is also affected by El Niño current events. While in the south it is necessary to invest in sheds or drying systems, it is more efficient to cultivate them because there are tamer bays,” she said.

González also believes that measures to recover natural seaweed meadows are not efficient “either because of legal loopholes, difficulties in on-site monitoring and/or other additional environmental variables such as those associated with climate change.”

Residents of the municipality of Castro, in Chiloé, an archipelago in southern Chile, demonstrate in the streets of their city, in front of the Gamboa Bridge, expressing their fear of threats to the water supply that they attribute to the lack of protection of peatlands, which are key to supplying water for the island's rivers. CREDIT: Courtesy of Chiloé en defensa del Agua

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, May 2 2024 (IPS)

The drinking water supply in the southern island of Chiloé, one of Chile’s rainiest areas, is threatened by damage to its peatlands, affected by sales of peat and by a series of electricity projects, especially wind farms.

The peat bog (Moss sphagnum magellanicum) known as “pompon” in Chile absorbs and retains a great deal of water, releasing it drop by drop when there is no rain. In southern Chile there are about 3.1 million hectares of peatlands."We condemn the fact that the extraction of peat is permitted in Chiloé when there is no scientifically proven way for peat to be reproduced or planted.... there is no evidence of how it can regenerate." ¨-- Daniela Gumucio

Peat is a mixture of plant debris or dead organic matter, in varying degrees of decomposition, neither mineral nor fossilized, that has accumulated under waterlogged conditions.

The pompon is the main source of water for the short rivers in Chiloé, an archipelago of 9181 square kilometers and 168,000 inhabitants, located 1200 kilometers south of Santiago. The local population makes a living from agriculture, livestock, forestry, fishing and tourism, in that order.

“We don’t have glaciers, or thaws. Our water system is totally different from that of the entire continent and the rest of Chile. Since we don’t have glaciers or snow, our rivers function on the basis of rain and peat bogs that retain water and in times of scarcity release it,” Daniela Gumucio told IPS by telephone.

The 36-year-old history and geography teacher said that the Chiloé community is concerned about the supply of drinking water for consumption and for small family subsistence farming.

Gumucio is a leader of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri) and chairs the Environmental Committee of Chonchi, the municipality where she lives in the center of the island.

This long narrow South American country, which stretches between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, has 19.5 million inhabitants and is facing one of the worst droughts in its history.

It’s strange to talk about water scarcity in Chiloé because it has a rainy climate. In 2011 more than 3000 millimeters of water fell there, but since 2015 rainfall began to decline.

In 2015 rainfall totaled 2483 millimeters, but by 2023 the amount had dropped to 1598 and so far this year only 316, according to data from the Quellón station reported to IPS by the Chilean Meteorological Directorate.

The forecast for April, May, and June 2024 is that below-normal rainfall will continue.

A water emergency was declared in the region in January and the residents of nine municipalities are supplied by water trucks.

To supply water to the inhabitants of the 10 municipalities of Chiloé, the State spent 1.12 million dollars to hire water trucks between 2019 and 2024. In Ancud alone, one of the municipalities, the expenditure was 345,000 dollars in that period.

A close-up shot of a peat bog in a watershed on the island of Chiloé, which has the ability to absorb water 10 times its weight. Because of this property, those who extract it today, without any oversight, dry it, crush it and pack it in sacks to sell it to traders who export it or sell it in local gardening shops. CREDIT: Courtesy of Gaspar Espinoza

Alert among social activists

The concern among the people of Chiloé over their water supply comes from the major boost for wind energy projects installed on the peat bogs and new legislation that prohibits the extraction of peat, but opens the doors to its use by those who present sustainable management plans.

Several energy projects are located in the Piuchén mountain range, in the west of Chiloé, where peat bogs are abundant.

“They want to extend a high voltage line from Castro to Chonchi. And there are two very large wind farm projects. But to install the turbines they have to dynamite the peat bog. This is a direct attack on our water resource and on our ways of obtaining water,” Gumucio said.

In 2020, the French company Engie bought three wind farms in Chiloé for 77 million dollars: San Pedro 1 and San Pedro 2, with a total of 31 wind turbines that will produce 101 megawatts (MW), and a third wind farm that will produce an additional 151 MW.

In addition, 18 kilometers of lines will be installed to carry energy to a substation in Gamboa Alto, in the municipality of Castro, and from there to the national power grid.

Another 92 turbines are included in the Tabla Ruca project, between the municipalities of Chonchi and Quellón.

Peat bogs accumulate and retain rainwater in the wetlands of Chiloé and release it drop by drop to river beds in times of drought. CREDIT: Courtesy of Gaspar Espinoza

Engie describes its initiatives as part of the transition to a world with zero net greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to the production of clean or green energy.

Leaders of 14 social and community organizations expressed their concerns in meetings with regional authorities, but to no avail. Now they have informed their communities and called on the region’s authorities to protect their main water source.

Local residents marched in protest on Mar. 22 in Ancud and demonstrated on Apr. 22 in Puente Gamboa, in Castro, the main municipality of the archipelago.

Thanks to peatlands, the rivers of Chiloé do not dry up. The peat bogs accumulate rainwater on the surface, horizontally, and begin to release it slowly when rainfall is scarce.

For the same reason, peat is dup up and sold for gardening. In 2019 Chile exported 4600 tons of peat.

The wind energy projects are set up in areas of raised peat bogs, known as ombrotophic, located at the origin of the hydrographic basins.

“We have had a good response in the municipal council of Chonchi, where the mayor and councilors publicly expressed their opposition to approving these projects,” said Gumucio.

Dozens of trees have been felled in Chiloé to install wind turbines and make way for high-voltage towers that will transmit green energy to Chile’s national power grid, without benefiting the inhabitants of the Chiloé archipelago. CREDIT: Courtesy of Gaspar Espinoza

The other threat to peatlands

The second threat to the Chiloé peat bogs comes from Law 21.660 on environmental protection of peatlands, published in Chile’s Official Gazette on Apr. 10.

This law prohibits the extraction of peat in the entire territory, but also establishes rules to authorize its use if sustainable management plans are presented and approved by the Agricultural and Livestock Service, depending on a favorable report from the new Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service.

The peatland management plan aims to avoid the permanent alteration of its structure and functions.

Those requesting permits must prove that they have the necessary skills to monitor the regeneration process of the vegetation layer and comply with the harvesting methodology outlined for sustainable use.

But local residents doubt the government’s oversight and enforcement capacity

“We condemn the fact that the extraction of peat is permitted in Chiloé when there is no scientifically proven way for peat to be reproduced or planted…. there is no evidence of how it can regenerate,” said Gumucio.

The activist does not believe that sustainable management is viable and complained that the government did not accept a petition for the law to not be applied in Chiloé.

“We have a different water system and if this law is to be implemented, it should be on the mainland where there are other sources of water,” she said.

But according to Gumucio, everything seems to be aligned to deepen the water crisis in Chiloé.

“The logging of the forest, the extraction of peat, and the installation of energy projects all contribute to the drying up of our aquifers and basins. And in that sense, there is tremendous neglect by the State, which is not looking after our welfare and our right to have water,” she argued.

Peatland is part of the vegetation of the island of Chiloé, but is threatened by unsupervised exploitation, which the authorities hope to curb with a recently approved law, whose regulations are to be ready within the next two years. CREDIT: Courtesy of Gaspar Espinoza

Scientists express their view

Six scientists from various Chilean universities issued a public statement asserting that the new law is a step in the right direction to protect Chile’s peatlands.

In their statement, scientists Carolina León, Jorge Pérez Quezada, Roy Mackenzie, María Paz Martínez, Pablo Marquet and Verónica Delgado emphasize that the new law “will require the presentation of a sustainable management plan” to exploit peat that is currently extracted without any controls.

They add that management plans must now be approved by the competent authorities and that those who extract peat will be asked to “ensure that the structure and functions of the peatlands are not permanently modified.”

They also say that the regulations of the law, which are to be issued within two years, “must establish the form of peat harvesting and post-harvest monitoring of the peat bog to protect the regeneration of the plant, something that has not been taken into consideration until now.”

They point out that the new law will improve oversight because it allows monitoring of intermediaries and exporters who could be fined if they do not comply with the legislation.

“While it is true that there is concern among certain communities and environmental groups, we believe that these concerns can be taken into account during the discussion of the regulations,” they say.

The scientists reiterate, however, that “peatlands are key ecosystems for mitigating the national and planetary climate and biodiversity crisis” and admit that “significant challenges remain to protect them, although this is a big step in the right direction.”

Rosa Guzmán harvests tomatoes on her family farm in San Pedro, in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago, the Chilean capital, where she is unable to extend her crops due to lack of funds, which prevents her from drilling deeper wells to obtain water and combat the drought. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
QUILLOTA, Chile , Apr 30 2024 (IPS)

Lack of water threatens the very existence of family farming in Chile, forcing farmers to adopt new techniques or to leave their land.

The shortage is caused by a 15-year drought and exacerbated by the unequal distribution arising from the Water Code decreed in 1981 by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which turned water into a tradable commodity and gave its owners rights in perpetuity.

In addition, there are problems such as the accumulation of water rights in the hands of large agro-export companies and real estate speculation with the land of small farmers who are forced to sell.

“We have no water for human consumption,” Julieta Cortés, 52, president of the Rural Women’s Association of the municipality of Canela, told IPS. “In Canela, more than 80 percent of the population depends on the water truck that delivers 50 liters of water per person per day. It’s hard to get by with that amount.”

Located in the Coquimbo region, 400 kilometers north of Santiago, Canela, with a population of just over 11,000, was known for its goat herds, now reduced by half. Local farmers also used to grow wheat and barley. Today, the fruit trees are drying up and the livestock are dying of thirst.

In contrast, the extensive plantations of avocados for export are irrigated and green on the slopes of the dry valleys.

Chile’s agro-exports are one of its major sources of income, together with mining. In 2023, the agro-export sector accounted for 3.54 percent of GDP, or 10.09 billion dollars.

Water problems are concentrated in isolated rural areas that lack technical, economic, and infrastructure capacities.

“Family and small farmers do not have access to water rights controlled by those who have money and can buy and transfer them,” Cortés said in a telephone interview.

“The lower part of the Choapa River flows through my municipality and none of us who live here have access to the water that is used upstream in the Los Pelambres mine and the large agro-industries along the way,” she said.

Hills stand out for their greenery in Quillota, north of Santiago, Chile, with avocado plantations that reach to the top, covering many hectares. They are able to avoid water shortages thanks to water use rights held by large agro-exporters, which allow them to evade the effects of the drought and send their abundant production abroad. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The Issue Is Not Lack of Water, but Inequality

In the publication Guardianas del Agua (Guardians of the Water), published by the German Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation, Macarena Salinas and Isaura Becker reported that 47.2 percent of the rural Chilean population had no formal drinking water supply or irrigation.

In this South American country, some 950 communities are not part of the Rural Drinking Water Program (RWP) and obtain water from informal sources such as wells, springs and water trucks. “We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority has always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water.” -- Evelyn Vicioso

The publication reported that between 2016 and 2021, the State invested 150 million dollars to use water trucks to supply the areas suffering from scarcity.

“While the RWP committees and cooperatives need drinking water and are supplied through emergency measures, there are individuals and companies that have surplus water and can profit from the sale of water using tanker trucks,” write Salinas and Becker.

Therefore, they point out, “rather than a lack of water, there is an unequal distribution of the resource.”

The drought in Canela has been repeated in other areas of this long, narrow country of 19.5 million people living between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The shortage of rainfall has lasted for 15 years, with a brief respite in 2023. It is unclear what will happen in 2024.

In Canela, farmers survive by using recycled water from washing machines and bathrooms, water harvested from rooftops or with fog catchers, systems used to capture or trap microscopic water droplets from mist, which are widely used in Chile.

“We have been reinventing ourselves. We have even rescued water from the dew. Many of us have adopted new techniques; others have moved away,” Cortés said from her community, Carquindaña.

Rosa Guzmán, 57, and her three brothers own a 40-hectare property in San Pedro, a community of some 5,000 inhabitants in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago in the Valparaíso region.

They only grow four hectares of vegetables and 2.5 hectares of avocados because they do not have the money to expand their crops.

“Sometimes we run out of water for the house because the wells are 10 meters deep. They are filled from two canals that rarely have water,” she said during a tour of the family’s farm with IPS.

Guzmán is director of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri) and president of her community’s environmental organization, San Pedro Digno.

Anamuri is an organization founded in 1998, composed solely of women, which organizes and promotes development among rural and indigenous women in this country. It also builds relationships of equality, regardless of gender, class, and ethnicity, on the basis of respect between people and nature.

“I used to collect medicinal herbs on the banks of the canal, but now there are none. The natural springs have dried up. This is a serious problem, and there are people who have no water to drink, which is a grave issue,” she said.

According to the rural activist, the State has abandoned small-scale agriculture.

“It would be very different if the State were to put more of a priority on small-scale agriculture and give us soft credits or subsidies. It has to pay attention to what is happening because, at this rate, it pains me to say it, family farming could disappear in Chile,” she said.

Water stored in a small reservoir allows the Guzmán siblings to maintain vegetable production on their 40-hectare plot of land, of which only 10 percent is planted due to a lack of resources. It is one of the few surviving family farms in the municipality. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Agro-export Model in the Spotlight

Water scarcity directly affects farmers’ livelihoods and way of life and often leads to complex environmental problems.

“The lack of safe water impacts household and community economies, especially for families who depend on small-scale family farming for their food,” write Salinas and Becker.

Guzmán criticized the agro-export model and called for a return to planting wheat, lentils and chickpeas, products that form part of Chile’s food security. But, she stressed, in order to do so, soft loans or subsidies are needed.

“We need food sovereignty. But if small farmers suffer losses every year, many end up selling their land. We want to live well without losing our identity and our know-how,” she underlined.

Sociologist Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of Sustainable Chile, criticized the agro-export model because “it is super intensive in water use and is extremely irresponsible with regard to crops. But above all, because it does not solve a problem nationally: the availability of water for many communities,” she said.

“We particularly depend on small-scale family farming for food, and if it disappears, we have a problem of costs and distribution. The big farmers think about ensuring food sovereignty for any country except their own communities,” she told IPS in Santiago.

Hernán Guzmán, one of four siblings who own a plot of land in Quillota, inspects a small area dedicated to growing basil that is destined, along with other vegetables, for the market in the nearby port city of Valparaíso, in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Watershed Management Slow To Take Off

To advance climate justice in a scenario of water scarcity, many experts agree on the need to manage watersheds with representative councils.

“Our country has a gigantic mass of mountains, but today we do not have a management system that allows us to link what happens in the headwaters with what is happening further downstream,” said Vicioso.

She listed a string of failures to create watershed councils, as there have been 25 attempts since 1994 and only one is functioning.

There is no will to create them, especially among water rights owners.

“We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority have always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water,” said Vicioso.

Salinas and Becker regret that the 2005 reforms to the Water Code are not retroactive.

“This generates the conditions for the holders of water use rights to exploit the water with a strictly economic focus, thus discouraging the development of uses not involving extractive industries, such as ancestral and ecological uses,” they argue.

The regulation hinders integrated management of the water cycle, as it does not consider the river basin as the minimum unit, does not establish mechanisms to jointly manage surface and groundwater, and allows rivers to be sectioned off.

Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of the non-governmental organization Sustainable Chile, sits in her office in Santiago, where she monitors the water situation among small farmers and coordinates actions to defend the human right to water. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Land speculation

In Quillota there is a growing sale of agricultural land to real estate companies that resell it as non-productive family recreational plots.

Thus, native trees disappear and the hope of reviving family farming is waning.

“Land has become a business. It sells for 60 million pesos (60,000 dollars) per half a hectare that sometimes does not even have water. That value attracts people to sell,” Guzmán said.

These plots will increase the demand for water and deforestation because the government’s Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG) has no oversight capacity.

“All the hills are being parceled out and water is brought to these people with water trucks,” said Guzmán.

Migration from the countryside has been driven by climate change.

In Canela, said Cortés, it used to be young people who moved away. But now it is entire families who go to nearby cities in search of access to water.

According to Guzmán, “young people do not want to stay in the countryside and women say that it is not even profitable to raise chickens.”

Cortés is grateful for the water from trucks, but stresses that the underlying problem is restoring watershed management.

“To rebuild this, resources must be allocated. And for that, we need forestation to make barriers to retain the scarce rainfall and restore the hydrological system,” she said.

Vicioso complained that “there is a lack of protection of the glaciers, which are the headwaters of the basins where the water comes from.”

The sociologist also urged a rethinking of the intensive use of water in productive activities.

“We have an underlying political problem with water that has a high market value and a State that does not dare, does not want, and does not seek the tools to intervene in this deregulated market, just like in drug trafficking,” she said.

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Excerpt:

On International Women's Day on Mar. 8, thousands of Chilean women of all ages took to Santiago's central Alameda avenue to demonstrate peacefully for several hours and turn the Chilean capital into a stage for protest and demands for their rights. Some of them were women caregivers accompanied by dependent women. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO , Mar 20 2024 (IPS)

In Chile, as in the rest of Latin America, the task of caring for people with disabilities, the elderly and children falls to women who, as a result, do not have access to paid jobs or time for themselves.

Unpaid domestic and care work is crucial to the economies of the region, accounting for around 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Measurements by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) found that in 16 Latin American countries, women spend between 22.1 and 42.8 hours per week on unpaid domestic and care work. Men only spend between 6.7 and 19.8 hours.

Ana Güezmes, director of ECLAC’s Division for Gender Affairs, told IPS that “in most countries women work longer total hours, but with a lower proportion of paid hours.”

“This work, which is fundamental for sustaining life and social well-being, is disproportionately assigned to women. This situation impacts women’s autonomy, economic opportunities, labor and political participation and their access to leisure activities and rest,” Güezmes said at ECLAC headquarters in Santiago.

The situation is far from changing as it is replicated in young women who devote up to 20 percent of their time to unpaid work.

Paloma Olivares, president for Santiago of the women’s organization Yo Cuido, works in her office in the working-class municipality of Estación Central, in the northeast of the Chilean capital. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Women left on their own as caregivers

Paloma Olivares, 43, chairs the Yo Cuido Association in Santiago, Chile, which brings together 120 members, only two of them men."Women caregivers are denied the right to participate on equal terms in society because we are forced to choose between exercising our rights or doing caregiving work. And we cannot choose because it is a job we do for a loved one, for a family member." -- Paloma Olivares

“Women caregivers are denied the right to participate on equal terms in society because we are forced to choose between exercising our rights or doing caregiving work. And we cannot choose because it is a job we do for a loved one, for a family member,” she told IPS.

“We are left in a position of inequality, of absolute vulnerability because you have to devote your life to supporting someone else at the expense of your personal life,” she said.

Olivares stopped working to care for Pascale, her granddaughter, who was born with cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus.

Three days after her birth, a bacterium became lodged in her central nervous system. She was hospitalized for almost a year and became severely dependent.

At the time, she was given a seven percent chance of survival. Today she is eight years old, goes to school and lives an almost normal life thanks to the work of her caregivers.

She is now cared for by her mother Valentina, who had her at the age of 15. Paloma was able to return to paid work, but her daughter abandoned her studies to take care of Pascale.

“When you start being a caregiver, friendships end, because no one can keep up. Even the family drifts away. That’s why most caregiving families are single-parent, the woman is left alone to care because the man can’t keep up with the pace and the emotional and economic burden,” she said.

Olivares participated from Mar. 12 to 14 in a public hearing, digital and in person, on the right to care and its interrelation with other rights, in a collective request of several social organizations and the governments of Chile and other Latin American countries before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR Court), based in San Jose, Costa Rica,

In the request for an opinion from the IACHR Court, “we asked the Court to take a stance on the right to care and how the rights of women in particular have been violated because there are no public policies in this regard. We want the Court to pronounce itself on the right to care and how the States should address it so that this right is guaranteed and so the rights of caregivers are no longer violated,” she explained.

It is expected that the Court’s pronouncement on the matter will come out in April and could establish minimum parameters regarding women caregivers for Chile and other Latin American countries.

Critical situation for women caregivers

Millaray Sáez, 59, told IPS by telephone from the southern Chilean city of Concepción that her son Mario Ignacio, 33, “is no longer the autonomous person he was. Since 2012 he has become a baby.”

She chairs the AML Bío Bío Corporación, an association of women in the Bío Bío region created in 2017 to address the question of female empowerment and today dedicated to the issue of caregivers.

“I have been a caregiver for 30 years for my son who has refractory epilepsy. He became prostrate in 2012 as a result of medical negligence,” said the international trade engineer who has become an expert in public policies on care with a gender perspective.

Sáez said “the situation of women caregivers is very bad, very precarious. There is a single cause, which is the work of caregiving, but the consequences are multidimensional…. from physical deterioration to the lack of legislation to protect against forms of violence, and ranging from the family to what society or the State adds.”

She also pointed to the economic consequences of dependent care.

She cited cases in which caregivers spend over 150 dollars a month on diapers alone for a person who needs them. And she pointed out that the government provides an economic aid stipend of just 33 dollars a month.

Teresa Valdés, head of the Gender and Equity Observatory of the Catholic University of Chile, praises the new registry of caregivers promoted by the Chilean government, but underlines the importance of municipal experiences and initiatives that promote homes and care centers to facilitate the lives of women caregivers. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The magnitude of the problem

It is a pending task to determine the number of women caregivers in Chile.

The government of leftist President Gabriel Boric created a system for caregivers to register and receive a credential that gives them access to public services.

“The credential is the gateway to the Chile Cuida System. With it we seek to make them visible in services and institutions and to reward them for their work by saving them waiting time in daily procedures,” the Minister of Women and Gender Equity, Antonia Orellana, explained to IPS.

So far, there are 85,817 people registered, of whom 74,650 are women, or 87 percent of the total, and 11,167 are men, according to data provided to IPS on Mar. 14 by the Undersecretariat of Social Services of the Ministry of Social Development and Family.

But Chile has 19.5 million inhabitants, and “17.6 percent of the adult population has some degree of disability and, therefore, requires the daily care and support of other people in the home,” the minister said.

That means 3.4 million Chileans depend on a caregiver.

According to Orellana, facing the care scenario projected by the aging of the population will require the collaboration of everyone to “create and sustain an economic and productive system that generates decent work and formal employment, leaving no one behind.”

Other urgent demands by women

Sociologist Teresa Valdés, head of the Gender and Equity Observatory, told IPS that there are many social problems facing Chilean women today, “especially those related to access to health care, social security, unequal pay and access to different goods and services.”

Valdés regretted that the term “women caregivers” is used to refer to the role that women play and the tasks that are culturally assigned to them as a priority.

“We are all caregivers, all women work double shifts. The time-use survey shows that we work an additional 41 hours per week of so-called unpaid reproductive care work,” she said.

According to Valdés, the main advance in this problem is to include it in the debate because these are policies that require a lot of resources and extensive development, since they have to do with the structure of the labor market.

“Part of the proposal should be how to ‘de-genderize’, how care becomes a task of shared responsibility and not only that women have more time to take on the care tasks,” she said.

“When we call women caregivers, we are referring to the group most affected by the conditions of sexual division of labor and family reproduction,” she added.

The expert proposes progressively identifying ways to support women caregivers in order to provide them with available time and take care of their mental health.

She praised the programs promoted by some municipalities to free up time for these women to enjoy leisure and self-care.

“We have to move towards a cultural conception that we are all dependent. Today I depend on you, tomorrow you depend on me. Care is a social task in which I take care of you today so that you can take care of me tomorrow. And that is something that has to start from the earliest childhood,” she argued.

The state-owned Punta Prieta thermoelectric plant generates much of the electricity in La Paz, in the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California Sur, with high economic and air pollution costs. In this and other vulnerable territories in Latin America, access to clean energy is part of the inequality they experience. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
LA PAZ, Mexico , Feb 19 2024 (IPS)

The specter of blackouts hovers over the Mexican city of La Paz, the capital of the state of Baja California Sur in Mexico’s far northwestern corner, as summer approaches, due to increased electricity demand from air conditioning and insufficient capacity in the local grid.

Since 2019, the local population has suffered the effects of this situation when it starts to heat up in June in this city located 1680 kilometers from Mexico City, which has the additional difficulty of being located in the south of a peninsula that it shares with the state of Baja California."The location of renewables rarely follows criteria where they are most needed, because the idea is to feed the centralized system. The more rural sectors or those far from cities are not connected to the grid; progress in those areas is slow." -- Gabriela Cabaña

Being separated from the national power grid, due to its distance, Baja California Sur is an energy island whose energy mix depends on thermoelectric plants that burn fuel oil, a very dirty fuel, diesel and gas, while renewable energy contributes about 10 percent. La Paz is where most of the energy is generated, although the highest level of consumption is in the neighboring municipality of Los Cabos, due to its urban growth and insufficient production.

Lucía Frausto, executive director of the non-governmental organization Cómo vamos La Paz, said the model reflects inequities in this city, which had a population of 292,241 according to the last census in 2020.

“The high costs leave no benefits to the community and that impacts everyone. There are sectors that use a lot of energy and others that barely have any. When there are blackouts the water can’t be pumped. It also affects the productivity and competitiveness of businesses,” she told IPS.

The evidence indicates that renewable energy, which is needed to reduce the polluting emissions that overheat the planet, does not address inequality and in some cases foments it.

For this reason, non-governmental organizations and academic groups in Latin America and around the world are pushing for a just transition, understood as an inclusive process, above and beyond mere technological substitution and in line with respect for human rights.

Energy inequality is not just seen in Mexico but extends throughout the Latin American region.

In Latin America and the Caribbean there has been progress in renewable energy, although its impact on inequality is still invisible in the least equitable region on the planet. In addition, almost the entire population has access to electricity, but challenges remain, such as clean energy for cooking and energy efficiency.

The report Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2023, released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which brings together governments, companies and civil society organizations, warns that the energy transition in Mexico presents a tendency to strengthen inequality.

In this Latin American country, where the energy transition is not moving forward, 15 percent of the population of 129 million lacks access to clean fuel sources in the kitchen and energy efficiency stands at 3.2 percent, below the world average of 4.6 percent. This is part of the persistence of energy inequality, even though poverty fell between 2016 and 2022.

This is reported by the Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report 2023, drawn up by the International Energy Agency, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the United Nations Statistics Division, the World Bank and the World Health Organization.

Population growth in the city of La Paz, capital of the northwestern peninsular Mexican state of Baja California Sur, is also driving the increase in electricity demand in a territory whose supply network is isolated from the national grid and is falling increasingly short. The city is an example of the inequality in access to energy, and especially to alternative sources, in the Latin American region. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Poorly distributed?

Latin America and the Caribbean, a region with 662 million inhabitants, 29 percent of whom live in poverty, have the largest proportion of modern renewable energy use, thanks to hydropower, bioenergy and biofuels.

According to Gabriela Cabaña, a researcher at the non-governmental Center for Socio-environmental Analysis, in most Latin American countries renewable energy is not installed in areas with economic and energy needs, but rather they are in areas privileged by the power grid.

“The location of renewables rarely follows criteria where they are most needed, because the idea is to feed the centralized system. The more rural sectors or those far from cities are not connected to the grid; progress in those areas is slow,” she told IPS from the island of Chiloé, in southern Chile.

In her view, this is a generalized phenomenon in Latin America, where local communities receive the impacts but not necessarily the benefits.

In Chile, the transition shows progress, but there are risks in terms of equity, says the WEF. In that nation, energy efficiency stands at 3.6 percent.

The WEF report says the transition to less polluting forms of energy in Argentina is stable in terms of equity, but local environmental organizations have suffered a major setback under the government of far-right President Javier Milei, in office since Dec. 10.

Moreover, the South American nation reports ups and downs on its path to a low-carbon energy system, and energy efficiency of 3.5 percent.

On the other hand, the transition is inequitable in Brazil, the WEF concludes. In the largest economy and most populous country in the region, with 203 million inhabitants, three percent of the population uses dirty cookstoves, and energy efficiency stands at four percent.

Back in La Paz, Alfredo Bermudez, a researcher at the Department of Fisheries Engineering of the public Autonomous University of Baja California Sur, said the energy scheme in the city has inherited environmental, economic and social consequences.

“La Paz bears the costs and the benefits are not compensated, they are not proportional. There is differential treatment” that is unfair, he told IPS.

Due to local grid congestion, the state can only interconnect 28 megawatts (Mw) and there will be more space perhaps in 2026, which poses obstacles to decentralized solar deployment and illegal connections to the grid.

Official figures indicate that in Mexico there are 367,207 distributed generation permits for 2,954 Mw, figures that have been growing since 2007. In the first half of 2023, 32,223 permits were approved, half of the total for 2022. But Baja California Sur only has 1634 authorizations for 23 Mw, one of the lowest rates in the country.

A photo of solar panels in the parking lot of the airport in La Paz, capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California Sur. The deployment of clean and renewable energies is not, at least for now, a factor in reducing inequality in Latin America; on the contrary, it sometimes fuels it. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

The electrified poor

While a minority can finance the installation of solar panels on their homes or drive an electric vehicle, the majority rely on dirty energy or polluting transport.

This gap poses a risk to the fulfillment of the seventh of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which promotes affordable, clean energy. One of its targets is to “ensure access to affordable, secure, sustainable and modern energy for all,” as part of the 2030 Agenda, adopted in 2015 by the United Nations member states.

In Mexico, the region’s second largest economy, the poorest areas lack renewable energy installations or do not benefit directly from such infrastructure. For example, the southern state of Chiapas, one of the most impoverished in the country, which relies on hydroelectric plants, has only one private wind farm, producing 49 Mw of power. Guerrero, a poor state in the southwest, has no wind farms.

And while Oaxaca, another poor southern state, has the largest installed wind capacity in the country, there are meager benefits for local communities. Oaxaca and Chiapas are among the territories with the fewest distributed generation connections.

In Brazil, Pernambuco in the northeast was the fourth poorest state in 2021 and is one of the largest generators of solar energy, but neither solar nor wind power benefit the population of this and other disadvantaged territories in the country, which in 2023 reached a new record for solar power generation.

In Argentina, population 46 million, the province of Buenos Aires, where the capital is located, has the second largest number of wind turbines, but at the same time has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. A similar phenomenon occurs in the case of solar energy.

In Chile, a country of 19.5 million people, the northern region of Atacama ranks third in solar generation and is a leading wind energy producer in the country, but it also has the second highest poverty rate. .

Improvements

By encouraging the use of computers and the Internet, promoting cleaner forms of cooking and heating or cooling, cleaner energy generates a host of benefits that can have an impact on reducing inequality.

Frausto the activist and Bermudez the academic proposed a greater deployment of renewables and decentralization of generation in Baja California Sur and other energy vulnerable states.

“We need to diversify production and distribution, to have generation throughout the country,” the activist said.

Meanwhile, Bermudez sees an opportunity in the high costs. “You can try things that are not possible in other places, because of the particularities of the state. Anything that reduces costs is advantageous” in electricity generation and efficiency, he said.

Cabaña from Chile recommended public investment to replace private fossil fuel infrastructure.

“We should consider that energy infrastructure should not be in pursuit of a centralized model, but should focus on something more community-based. A change is needed to help combat energy poverty,” she argued.

Myriam Miller and Freddy Vargas stand next to one of the three greenhouses on their farm, where tomatoes are growing, anticipating an optimal harvest this year. The couple uses no chemical fertilizers to ensure the healthy development of thousands of plants on their farm in Mostazal, a municipality in central Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
MOSTAZAL, Chile , Feb 2 2024 (IPS)

The installation of photovoltaic panels to use solar energy to irrigate small farms is expanding quickly in Chile because it lowers costs and optimizes the use of scarce water resources.

This long, narrow South American country that stretches from the northern Atacama Desert to the southern Patagonia region and from the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Ocean is extremely rich in renewable energies, especially solar and wind power."Solar panels have made an immensely important contribution to our energy expenditure. Without them we would consume a lot of electricity." -- Myriam Miller

Last year, 36.6 percent of Chile’s electricity mix was made up of Non-Conventional Renewable Energies (NCREs), whose generation in May 2023 totaled 2392 gigawatt hours (GWh), including 1190 GWh of solar power.

This boom in the development of alternative energies has been mainly led by large companies that have installed solar panels throughout the country, including the desert. The phenomenon has also reached small farmers throughout this South American country who use solar energy.

In family farming, solar energy converted into electricity is installed with the help of resources from the government’s Agricultural Development Institute (Indap), which promotes sustainable production of healthy food among small farmers, incorporating new irrigation techniques.

In 2020 alone, the last year for which the institute provides data, Indap promoted 206 new irrigation projects that incorporated NCREs with an investment of more than 2.1 million dollars.

That year, of the projects financed and implemented, 182 formed part of the Intra-predial Irrigation Program, 17 of the Minor Works Irrigation Program and seven of the Associative Irrigation Program. The investment includes solar panels for irrigation systems.

Within this framework, 2025 photovoltaic panels with an installed capacity of 668 kilowatts were installed, producing 1002 megawatt hours and preventing the emission of 234 tons of carbon dioxide.

The six solar panels installed on the small farm of Myriam Miller and Freddy Vargas, in the municipality of Mostazal, south of Santiago, Chile, allow them to pump water to their three greenhouses with thousands of tomato plants and to their vegetable garden. They also drastically reduced their electric energy expenditure. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

An experience in Mostazal

“Solar panels have made an immensely important contribution to our energy expenditure. Without them we would consume a lot of electricity,” 50-year-old farmer Myriam Miller told IPS at her farm in the municipality of Mostazal, 66 km south of Santiago, where some 54,000 people live in different communities.

Miller has half a hectare of land, with a small portion set aside for three greenhouses with nearly 1,500 tomato plants. Other tomato plants grow in rows outdoors, including heirloom varieties whose seeds she works to preserve, such as oxheart and pink tomatoes.

Indap provided 7780 dollars in financing to install the solar panels on her land. Meanwhile, she and her husband, Freddy Vargas, 51, who run their farm together, contributed 10 percent of the total cost.

In 2023, Miller and Vargas built a third greenhouse to increase their production, which they sell on their own land.

“We’re producing around 8,000 kilos of tomatoes per season. This year we will exceed that goal. We’re happy because we’re moving ahead little by little and improving our production year,” Miller said as she picked tomatoes.

On the land next to the tomato plants, the couple grows vegetables, mainly lettuce, some 7,000 heads a year. They also have fruit trees.

Vargas told IPS that they needed electricity to irrigate the greenhouses because “it’s not easy to do it by hand.”

Freddy Vargas turns the soil on his farm in the municipality of Mostazal, south of Santiago, Chile. Lettuce is his star vegetable, with thousands of heads sold on the farm. The farmer plans to buy a mini-tractor to alleviate the work of plowing the land. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The farm has two wells that hold about 30,000 liters of water that arrives once a week from a dam located two kilometers away. This is the water they use to power the pumps to irrigate the greenhouses.

“We have water rights and Indap provided us with solar panels and tools to automate irrigation. They gave us four panels and we made an additional investment, with our own funds, and installed six,” Vargas explained.

The couple consumes between 250 and 300 kilowatts per month and the surplus energy they generate is injected into the household grid.

“We don’t have storage batteries, which are more expensive. Every month the electric company sends us a bill detailing the total we have injected into the grid and what we have consumed. They calculate it and we pay the difference,” Vargas said.

The average savings in the cost of consumption is 80 percent.

“I haven’t paid anything in the (southern hemisphere) summer for years. In the winter I spend 30,000 to 40,000 pesos (between 33 and 44 dollars) but I only pay between 5,000 and 10,000 pesos a month (5.5 to 11 dollars) thanks to the energy I generate,” the farmer said.

Above and beyond the savings, Miller stressed the “personal growth and social contribution we make with our products that go to households that need healthier food. We feel good about contributing to the environment.”

“We have a network, still small, of agroecological producers. There is a lack of information among the public about what people eat,” she added.

Their tomatoes are highly prized. “People come to buy them because of their flavor and because they are very juicy. Once people taste them, they come back and recommend them by word of mouth,” Miller said.

She is optimistic and believes that in the municipalities of Mostazal and nearby Codegua, young people are more and more interested in contributing to the planet, producing their own food and selling the surplus.

“We just need a little support and more interest in youth projects in agriculture to raise awareness that just as we take care of the land, it also gives to us,” she said.

Valentina Martínez stands on her father’s small plot of land in the municipality of María Pinto, north of Santiago, Chile. The fruit trees provide the shade needed to keep the planted vegetables from being scorched by the strong southern hemisphere summer sun in central Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

A pesticide-free new generation

Valentina Martínez, 32, is an environmental engineer. Together with her father, Simón, 75, they work as small farmers in the municipality of María Pinto, 60 kilometers north of Santiago. She has a 0.45 hectare plot and her father has a 0.35 hectare plot.

Both have just obtained funding from the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture (TAS) project, which operates within Indap, and they are excited about production without chemical fertilizers and are trying to meet the goal of securing another larger loan that would enable them to build a greenhouse and expand fruit and vegetable production on the two farms.

“It’s a two-year program. In the first year you apply and they give you an incentive of 450,000 pesos (500 dollars) focused on buying technology. I’ve invested in plants, fruit trees, worms, and containers for making preserves,” Valentina told IPS.

In the second year, depending on the results of the first year, they will apply for a fund of 3900 dollars for each plot, to invest in their production.

“This year my father and I will apply for solar panels to improve irrigation,” said Valentina, who is currently dedicated to producing seedlings.

“My father liked the idea of producing without agrochemicals to combat pests,” she said about Simón, who has a fruit tree orchard and also grows vegetables.

In María Pinto there are 380 small farmers on the census, but the real number is estimated at about 500. Another 300 are medium-sized farmers.

Simón Martínez, 75, proudly shows some of the citrus fruits harvested on his farm where he practices agroecology and does not use agrochemicals. He and his daughter Valentina won a contest to continue improving the sustainability of their farming practices on their adjoining plots, located outside the Chilean town of María Pinto. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The rest of the area is monopolized by large agricultural companies dedicated to monocultures for export. Most of them have citrus, avocado, cherry and peach trees, as well as some walnut trees, and they all make intensive use of chemical fertilizers.

Chile exports mainly copper, followed by iron. But it also stands out for its sales of fish, cellulose pulp and fruit. In 2023, it exported 2.3 million tons of fruit, produced by large farms and bringing in 5.04 billion dollars. Agriculture represents 4.3 percent of the country’s GDP.

Family farming consists of some 260,000 small farms, which account for 98 percent of the country’s farms, according to the government’s Office of Agrarian Studies and Policies (Odepa).

Family farms produce 40 percent of annual crops and 22 percent of total agricultural production, which is key to feeding the country’s 19.7 million people.

Valentina is excited about TAS and the meetings she has had with other young farmers.

“It’s fun. We’re all on the same page and interested in what each other is doing. We start in December and January and it lasts all year. The young people are learning about sustainable agriculture and that there are more projects to apply for,” she explained.

She said that 15 young people in María Pinto have projects with pistachio trees, fruit trees, greenhouse gardens, outdoor gardens, animal husbandry and orchards. They are all different and receive group and individual training.

The training is provided by Indap and the Local Development Program (Prodesal), its regional representatives and the Foundation for the Promotion and Development of Women (Prodemu).

“The idea is that more people can learn about and realize the benefits of sustainable agriculture for their own health and for their land, which in a few years will be impossible due to the spraying of monocultures,” Valentina said.

It targets large entrepreneurs who produce avocado and broccoli in up to four harvests a year, both water-intensive crops, even on high hillsides.

“We need to come together, do things properly and recruit more people to create a legal group to reach other places and be able to organize projects. When you exist as an organization, you can also reach other places and say I am no longer one person, we are 15, we are 20, 100 and we need this,” she said.

María José Valenzuela, Director of the Environment of the Chilean municipality of María Pinto, stands next to Mario Rojas, caretaker of the Miyawaki project, a pilot experience of this technique that works with little water and only requires irrigation for the first two years. A native forest has been created that improves the biodiversity of the area, in a municipality that defines itself as sustainable. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 30 2023 (IPS)

A return to nature is the main solution being promoted by communities and municipalities to avoid the water shortage that threatens to leave Santiago, the capital of Chile, home to more than 40 percent of the 19.5 million inhabitants of this South American country, without water.

The water supply in Greater Santiago depends on the Maipo River, whose waters run for some 250 kilometers from the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, near the port of San Antonio, some 130 kilometers north of Santiago."We must move towards greener or nature-based solutions in the conservation, restoration and protection of ecosystems involved in the water cycle. Wetlands, swamps, headwaters forests, native trees. This generates a greater impact in terms of water supply, in less time and at a lower cost. " -- Gerardo Díaz

In the Andes mountains, the Volcán, Yeso and Colorado rivers are tributaries of the Maipo River. The Maipo ranks ninth among the 18 most water-stressed rivers in the world and is the only South American river in this ranking.

Chile is experiencing an unprecedented drought that has dragged on for 15 years, caused by climate change and other phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña.

This year 2023 there was more rainfall. The Maipo even flooded and caused turbidity in the water and all the outlying districts were threatened with a total lack of supply for three days. But the authorities warn that the drought is not over and are preparing contingency plans to cope with its increasing effects now that the southern hemisphere summer is approaching.

Of the groundwater wells measured in Santiago and its surrounding region, 72 percent show a significant decline because extraction exceeds the natural recharge capacity.

In the basin, the current water gap – the difference between available water supply and demand – is 63.5 cubic meters per second. But by 2050, the water gap will be 92.1 cubic meters per second, if demand does not increase.

This water stress is caused by the high summer temperatures and rainfall that is scarce and concentrated in a short period of the winter, which has been happening since the onset of the current drought in 2008.

Gerardo Díaz of the Chile Foundation mans a stand set up at the Mapocho Station Cultural Center in Santiago, during a public event to educate and raise awareness about the need to take care of household water. Banners explain the water crisis and illustrate ways to deal with it. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

According to Water Scenarios 2030, an innovative initiative promoted by the Chile Foundation, in a collaborative effort with different stakeholders, water efficiency would contribute 73 percent of water within the set of solutions for this basin, while the conservation and protection of its ecosystems would contribute 18 percent.

The incorporation of new water sources would contribute nine percent to the solution, but requires an excessively high investment, says the study led by the Chile Foundation, a public-private organization dedicated to working for sustainable development.

These studies indicate that in the basin there are 35 percent more groundwater rights granted than the natural recharge capacity of the aquifer. This overexploitation has repercussions on the availability of groundwater in the present and the future.

Gerardo Díaz, head of projects at the Chile Foundation’s sustainability department, told IPS that no solution has been ruled out, but said “we are focusing on looking at how nature and strengthening natural water systems can help us resolve the crisis we are in.”

IPS visited several localities in Greater Santiago, which is made up of 52 municipalities, to observe some nature-based solutions and the water improvement they bring.

Fabian Guerrero, director of the San Mateo Park in the Chilean municipality of Curacaví, walks through the 14-hectare open space in the center of town that was once a garbage dump where the trees have signs identifying their species and the trails are marked for visitors. Five compost bins operate on site to receive organic matter that is turned into compost to nourish the gardens, trees and seedlings. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Miyawaki technique to grow trees in rural municipality María Pinto

In the rural municipality of María Pinto, with a population of 14,000 people, located 40 kilometers from the center of Santiago, a technique created by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, which accelerates the growth of native forests by up to 10 times, was successfully implemented for the first time in Chile. Trees are planted at low density in soil fertilized with nutrients.

It is a method of ecological restoration based on the potential natural vegetation of a given area, reproducing in an accelerated manner the landscape that would exist if there had been no human presence and turning it into a refuge for native biodiversity and its many different forms of life.

“We are carrying out an ecological restoration of the hillside to replace a 40-year-old radiata pine plantation that dried out due to a plague,” María José Valenzuela, the municipality’s environmental director, told IPS.

The restoration was carried out on one of the seven hectares of the San Pedro Sports Field and involved numerous volunteers from the Liceo Polivalente, a municipal high school, who called themselves Forjadores Ambientales (roughly, environmental creators).

Forests generate conditions for greater water infiltration for the trees, which are also fog trappers. And they help to prevent rainwater from running off quickly and to infiltrate the soil instead.

“Global warming is manifesting with more fog and that is something that is noticeable,” Valenzuela explained.

Campo San Pedro also points to a problem with the hillsides in the center of this long narrow country, which arises from monoculture farming.

The Miyawaki lot now has 3500 trees of 10 native species on 500 square meters.

It functions as a laboratory of sclerophyllous forest, typical of Chile, where the Miyawaki technique provides an example for recovery of the remaining forests in central Chile. This kind of forest is characterized by species with hard evergreen leaves that enable them to withstand droughts.

“Many monoculture farms after exploiting the wells leave hills converted into deserts, with infertile soil due to so many agrochemicals and all the times they were plowed and not covered,” explained Valenzuela, a civil engineer specializing in sustainability and social ecology.

She was alluding to the repeated abandonment of hillsides in central Chile that are dedicated to monoculture, mainly avocado and fruit trees, and then deserted when they become wastelands due to lack of water.

In Chile, agriculture accounts for more than 60 percent of water consumption, in a country with a dynamic agro-export sector that expanded with few controls.

And as in most of Chile’s rural areas, the municipality is full of “loteos”, the name given locally to divisions of land without infrastructure services or regulatory plans. Added to this are the sale of water rights and the excessive use of water by digging irregular wells to fill swimming pools or maintain lawns.

In this country, water has been largely privatized after water rights were separated from land tenure during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). This resulted in water rights being traded on the market as a commodity, restricting public access to water.

Nearly 40 percent of Chile’s population lives in the Maipo River basin, because it is home to Greater Santiago and its 52 municipalities. A new study warns that it is under maximum pressure, while the inhabitants have little awareness about the stress of their drinking water supply. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Ecological recovery in Curacaví

In the rural municipality of Curacaví, 53 kilometers from downtown Santiago and home to 33,000 inhabitants, the community mobilized in 2018 to recover 14 hectares of hillside that had turned into an open-air landfill.

Alarmed by a fire, in January of that year local residents removed 50 tons of garbage and organized themselves in the San Mateo Park to reforest and plant, to date, 5,000 native trees.

Fabian Guerrero, general director of the park, told IPS that the municipal government provides them with 40,000 liters of water per week. It also supplies machines to remove the soil, and to use guano (the excrement of seabirds) and organic matter to prepare a Miyawaki forest with native species planted at high density in a small space.

“We have drip and sprinkler irrigation techniques to use water efficiently. In the park there are organic vegetable gardens, compost bins, trails and guided tours for students and families, to whom we teach how and which trees to plant, in which location, which one gives more shade or withstands more sunshine,” he told IPS.

The community won seven reforestation projects and their dream is two other initiatives: to have their own water, with a dam or pond, and to create a nursery with all kinds of trees, medicinal plants, vegetables and flowers.

“We plan to create a green lung so that people see this place as a space for family recreation, connected to nature, a place to come and reflect and learn about trees. We aim for education and for people to learn to take care of the trees,” said Guerrero, a computer programmer who describes himself as a “passionate organic farmer and nature lover.”

Local residents can plant and harvest in the organic community vegetable gardens, and they can also sponsor trees.

On Las Industrias Avenue, in the south of the Chilean municipality of San Joaquín, a section of the Permeable Pavement project was built, consisting of concrete in a grid pattern that allows water to drain and infiltrate the soil. The project was tested in a sloped bike path area where water can be captured to go directly into the soil. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Water supply initiatives in San Joaquín

The municipality of San Joaquín, population 94,000 located 12 kilometers southwest of the capital, is one of the poorest in the Greater Santiago area.

It is promoting water projects and protecting two parks and will create a third, called the Victor Jara Flood Park, which will be ready by 2025.

“It is the bank of the Zanjón de la Aguada, a canal that is very problematic for Santiago because it received industrial runoff and stank,” said environmental engineer Claudia Silva, in charge of environmental management and control for San Joaquín.

The Flood Park has underground sections and is designed so that, in case of heavy rainfall, it can receive and contain the water. It includes plans for a swimming pool and vegetation on its banks capable of withstanding a flood.

A Rain Garden was created in Mataveri, a street that flooded every time in rained. It consisted of removing cement structures to channel water to plants grown there. And Permeable Pavement, with a reticular pattern, was installed in a bicycle lane to capture water that previously drained into the sewer and thus facilitate its infiltration into the ground.

The Victor Jara Flood Park, to be completed in 2025, covers the municipalities of San Miguel, San Joaquín and Pedro Aguirre Cerda and is promoted by the government of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. It has underground sections and is designed with plants suitable for areas with heavy water runoff. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The Water Scenarios 2030 study found that another cause of the water crisis is the dispersal of the governance process, with more than 52 institutions at the national level involved in water management.

Díaz also criticized the fact that the measures adopted are heavily oriented towards new sources of water through desalination or accumulation in reservoirs.

“Our view is that we must move towards greener or nature-based solutions in the conservation, restoration and protection of ecosystems involved in the water cycle. Wetlands, swamps, headwaters forests, native trees. This generates a greater impact in terms of water supply, in less time and at a lower cost,” he said.

According to the Chile Foundation expert, the first step is to implement solutions based on nature and then move forward in demand management to reduce water consumption through greater efficiency in agriculture and irrigation of green areas, among other aspects.

“And finally, we must move towards new sources such as the use of treated wastewater or desalination to close the water gap. But nature-based solutions and demand management should address more than 50 percent of the territorial gap in the basins analyzed,” he asserted.

Alfalfa farmer Dionisio Antiquera stands in front of one of the wastewater treatment ponds at the modernized plant in Cerrillos de Tamaya, a rural community in the Coquimbo region of northern Chile. The thousands of liters captured from the sewers are converted into clear liquid ready for reuse in local small-scale agriculture. CREDIT : Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
COQUIMBO, Chile , Sep 18 2023 (IPS)

The reuse of treated wastewater in vulnerable rural areas of Chile’s arid north is emerging as a new resource for the inhabitants of this long, narrow South American country.

The Coquimbo region, just south of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest in the world, is suffering from a severe drought that has lasted 15 years.

According to data from the Meteorological Directorate, a regional station located in the Andes Mountains measured 30.3 millimeters (mm) of rain per square meter this year as of Sept. 10, compared to 213 mm in all of 2022.“Rural localities today are already reusing wastewater or gray water. This is going to happen, with or without us, with or without a law. The need for water is so great that the communities are accepting the use of treated wastewater." -- Gerardo Díaz

At another station, in the coastal area, during the same period in 2023, rainfall stood at 10.5 mm compared to the usual level of 83.2 mm.

Faced with this persistent level of drought, vulnerable rural localities in Coquimbo, mostly dedicated to small-scale agriculture, are emerging as a new example of solutions that can be replicated in the country to alleviate water shortages.

The aim is to not waste the water that runs down the drains but to accumulate it in tanks, treat it and then use it to irrigate everything from alfalfa fields to native plants and trees in parks and streets in the localities involved. It is a response to drought and the expansion of the desert.

“We were able to implement five wastewater treatment projects and reuse 9.5 liters per second, which is, according to a comparative value, the consumption of 2,700 people for a year or the water used to irrigate 60 hectares of olive trees,” said Gerardo Díaz, sustainability manager of the non-governmental Fundación Chile.

These five projects, promoted by the Fundación Chile as part of its Water Scenarios 2030 initiative, are financed by the regional government of Coquimbo, which contributed the equivalent of 312,000 dollars. Of this total, 73 percent is dedicated to enabling reuse systems, for which plants in need of upgrading but not reconstruction have been selected.

The common objective of these projects, which together benefit some 6,500 people, is the reuse of wastewater for productive purposes, the replacement of drinking water or the recharge of aquifers.

Díaz told IPS that the amount of reuse obtained is significant because previously this water was discharged into a stream, canal or river where it was perhaps captured downstream.

The Huatulame treatment plant in the rural municipality of Monte Patria in northern Chile is being completely repaired with the support of the local municipality. Waterproof plastic sheeting and rocks have been installed, and in the final stage sawdust and earthworms will be incorporated before receiving wastewater from local households for reuse. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

A successful pilot experience

In Coquimbo, which has a regional population of some 780,000 people, there are 71 water treatment plants, most of which use activated sludge and almost all of which are linked to the Rural Drinking Water Program (APR) of the state Hydraulic Works Directorate.

Activated sludge systems are biological wastewater treatment processes using microorganisms, which are very sensitive in their operation and maintenance and rural sectors do not have the capacity to maintain them.

“Most of these treatment plants are not operating or are operating inefficiently,” Diaz acknowledged.

But one of the plants, once reconditioned, has served as a model for others since 2018. Its creation allowed Dionisio Antiquera, a 52-year-old agricultural technician, to save his alfalfa crop.

“We have had a water deficit for years. This recycled water really helps us grow our crops on our eight hectares of land,” he said in the middle of his alfalfa field in Cerrillos de Tamaya, one of the Coquimbo municipalities that IPS toured for several days to observe five wastewater reuse projects.

Raúl Ángel Flores stands in his nursery, where the plants and trees are irrigated with recycled water from the Punta Azul project in the town of Villa Puclaro, in Chile’s Coquimbo region. All profits from the town’s wastewater treatment are reinvested in its maintenance. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

He explained that using just reused water he was able to produce six normal alfalfa harvests per year with a yield per hectare of 100 25-kg bales.

“That’s 4500 to 4800 bales in the annual production season,” he said proudly.

These bales are easily sold in the region because they are cheaper than those of other farmers.

The water he uses comes from an APR plant that has 1065 users, 650 of whom provide water, including Antiquera.

On one side of his alfalfa field is a plant that accumulates the sludge that is dehydrated in pools and drying courts, and on the other side, the water is chlorinated and runs into another pond in its natural state.

“This water works well for alfalfa. It is hard water that has about 1400 parts per million of salt. Then it goes through a reverse osmosis process that removes the salt and the water is suitable for human consumption,” the farmer explained.

In Chile, treated wastewater is not considered fresh water or water that can be used directly by people, and its reuse is only indirect.

Antiquera sold half a hectare to the government to install the plant and in exchange uses the water obtained and contributes 20 percent to the local APR.

He recently extended his alfalfa field to another seven hectares, thanks to his success with treated water.

Deysy Cortés, president of a rural drinking water system in Huatulame, stands in front of the dry riverbed of the town of the same name. Today there is no water in the river, where local residents swam and summer vacationers camped on its banks 15 years ago. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Flowers and trees also benefit

In Villa Puclaro, in the Coquimbo municipality of Vicuña, Raúl Ángel Flores, 55, has an ornamental plant nursery.

“I’ve done really well. My nursery has grown with just reuse water….. I have more than 40,000 ornamental, fruit, native and cactus plants. I deliver to retailers in Vicuña and Coquimbo,” a port city in the region, he told IPS.

The nursery is 850 square meters in size, and has an accumulation pond and pumps to pump the water. He has now rented a 2,500-meter plot of land to expand it.

Flores explained to IPS that he manages the nursery together with his wife, Carolina Cáceres, and despite the fact that they have two daughters and a senior citizen in their care, “we make a living just selling the plants…I even hired an assistant,” he added.

In the southern hemisphere summer he uses between 4,000 and 5,000 liters of water a day for irrigation.

“I have water to spare. Here it could be reused for anything,” he said.

Joining the project made it possible for Flores to make efficient use of water with a business model that in this case incorporates a fee for the water to the plant management, which is equivalent to 62 cents per cubic meter used.

Arnoldo Olivares operates the water treatment and recycling plant in Plan de Hornos, northern Chile. The plant’s infrastructure and operation have been upgraded, and it can now deliver water to rural residents to irrigate trees and plants, instead of using potable water. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Eliminating odors, and creating new gardens

In the community of Huatulame, in the municipality of Monte Patria, Fundación Chile built an artificial surface wetland to put an end to the bad odors caused by effluents from a deficient waste-eater earthworm vermifilter treatment plant.

“This wetland has brought us peace because the odors have been eliminated. For the past year people have been able to walk along the banks of the old riverbed,” Deysy Cortés, 72, president of the APR, told IPS.

The municipality of Monte Patria is financing the repair of the plant with the equivalent of 100,000 dollars.

“The sprinklers will be changed, the filtering system will be replaced, and sawdust and worms will be added. It will be up and running in a couple of months,” explained agronomist Jorge Núñez, a consultant for Fundación Chile.

As in other renovated plants, safe infiltration of wastewater is ensured while the project simultaneously promotes the protection of nearby wells to provide water to the villagers.

The Huatulame treatment plant in the rural municipality of Monte Patria in northern Chile is being completely repaired with the support of the local municipality. Waterproof plastic sheeting and boulders have been installed, and in the final stage sawdust and earthworms will be incorporated before receiving wastewater from local households for reuse. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Cortés warned of serious difficulties if no more rain falls in the rest of 2023, despite the relief provided by the plant for irrigation.

“I foresee a very difficult future if it doesn’t rain. We will go back to what we experienced in 2019 when in every house there were bottles filled with water and a little jug to bathe once a week,” she said.

During a recent crisis, the local APR paid 2500 dollars to bring in water from four 20,000-liter tanker trucks.

In Plan de Hornos, a town in the municipality of Illapel, irrigation technology was installed using reused water instead of drinking water to create a green space for the community to enjoy.

The project included water taps in people’s homes for residents to water trees and flowers.

Arnoldo Olivares, 59, is in charge of the plant, which has 160 members.

“I run both systems,” he told IPS. “I pour drinking water into the pond. After passing through the houses, the water goes into the drainage system, where there is a procedure to reclaim and treat it.”

“This water was lost before, and now we reuse it to irrigate the saplings. We used to work manually, now it is automated. It’s a tremendous change, we’re really happy,” he said.

Antiquera the alfalfa farmer is happy with his success in Cerrillos de Tamaya, but warns that in his area 150 to 160 mm of rainfall per year is normal and so far only 25 mm have fallen in 2023.

“The water crisis forces us to find alternatives and to be 100 percent efficient. Not a drop of water can be wasted. They have forecast very high temperatures for the upcoming (southern hemisphere) summer, which means that plants will require more water in order to thrive,” he said.

Díaz, the sustainability manager of Fundación Chile, said the Coquimbo projects are fully replicable in other water-stressed areas of Chile if a collaborative model is used.

He noted that “in Chile there is no law for the reuse of treated wastewater. There is only a gray water law that was passed years ago, but there are no regulations to implement it.”

He explained, however, that due to the drought, “rural localities today are already reusing wastewater or gray water. This is going to happen, with or without us, with or without a law. The need for water is so great that the communities are accepting the use of treated wastewater.”

The governor of Coquimbo, Krist Naranjo, argued that “a broader vision is needed to value water resources that are essential for life, especially in the context of global climate change.”

“We’re working on different initiatives with different executors, but the essential thing is to value the reuse of graywater recycling,” she told IPS from La Serena, the regional capital.

Aida Moreno, founder of the Huamachuco Women's House in the municipality of Renca in northern Santiago, Chile, walks past a large burlap embroidery that represents one of the community soup kitchens organized during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship to provide food for children and adults in this low-income neighborhood. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Aug 14 2023 (IPS)

Women social activists recognize that gender equality is gaining ground in Chile, but maintain that there is still a long way to go to turn into reality the promises to “level the playing field” between women and men, while they highlight the importance of addressing the issue of care work.

“We push feminism for the people, because we are looking at everything, not just women but the whole family, from a gender perspective,” social activist Aída Moreno, a veteran weaver who founded the Huamachuco Women’s House in 1989 in the municipality of Renca, northeast of Santiago, told IPS."In many cases the person has been born with some type of disability or dependency. Their situation is precarious, they are vulnerable. And the State and society punish you for being in care. You are left without health care, unemployed, often without support or family co-responsibility" -- Carolina Cartagena

She argued that gender inequality is still “an open wound in Chile.”

“The issue of care work, for example, is on the table, but nothing has been resolved yet. All we have is hope,” said the 77-year-old campaigner for women’s rights at her organization’s offices.

Carolina Cartagena, 42, is the national secretary of the Asociación Yo Cuido – an association of caregivers – based in the municipality of Villa Alemana, in the Valparaíso region, 131 kilometers north of the Chilean capital.

In an interview with IPS at the association’s headquarters, she said, “There are many women caregivers whose mental health is already overwhelmed. We have extreme cases…and where does that leave the person being cared for, if his or her caregiver is not well mentally, economically and emotionally?” she asked.

The rights of caregivers emerged as a much more visible issue after left-wing President Gabriel Boric included them among the priorities of his social policy and instructed the respective ministries to mainstream the issue.

A celebration held by instructors and participants at the welcome day of the launch of the Cycle of Workshops for caregivers organized by the Asociación Yo Cuido, at its headquarters in the municipality of Villa Alemana, in the Chilean region of Valparaíso. The workshops include dance therapy, home gardens, music therapy and yoga, among other activities. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The first step was to open a registry of caregivers within the Social Registry of Households. Since 2022, the State has been providing accredited caregivers with a credential that for the time being provides them with facilities to speed up procedures in public services.

The Ministry of Social Development and Family estimates that in a first stage some 25,800 people will be registered in the national registry of caregivers. Their estimate is that there are 470,000 informal live-in caregivers, as they define people who live in the same household and take care of family members on an unpaid basis.

There are also 1.12 million Chileans who require a caregiver and a survey by the ministry found that 85 percent of caregivers are women.

Cartagena sees the registry as a step forward but said that “much remains to be done” for caregivers.

The activist believes that “the most urgent thing is a system of care that is ongoing and permanent. In many cases there are government programs, but they last three months and what do you do for the rest of the year?”

Cartagena was referring to a pilot project implemented so far only in a few municipalities such as Villa Alemana, which lasts three months and provides caregivers with medical assistance, therapies and rehabilitation. Her demand is for it to be made permanent and nationwide.

Yo Cuido brings together 800 families from five regions of this long narrow country wedged between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean: Metropolitan Santiago, in the center; O’Higgins and Valdivia, in the south; and Valparaíso and Coquimbo, in the north.

The association argues that caregiving is a responsibility that should be shared by the government and not just a responsibility of a family or a couple, as the State saves funds thanks to the work of caregivers.

Aida Moreno (R) poses with three other participants in the Huamachuco Women’s House in front of a series of burlap embroideries that will be exhibited at the Cultural Center of the presidential palace of La Moneda on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on Sept. 11, 1973. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Changing conditions

The overall living conditions of women in this South American country of 19.5 million people have changed over the last two or three generations, with advances in economic participation and educational levels.

The extension of pre- and post-natal leave and an increase in day care centers were followed by stiffer laws against femicides – gender-based killings – and the decriminalization of therapeutic abortion under three circumstances: fetal malformation, danger to the mother’s life or rape.

But this last achievement is threatened today by the far-right Republican Party, which holds a majority in the council that aims to propose the text of a new constitution that voters will approve or reject in a plebiscite in December.

Sociologist Teresa Valdés, of the Gender and Equity Observatory, told IPS that “gender gaps remain, as do conditions of discrimination, mainly related to machismo (sexism), harassment and the difficulty of getting ahead in the workplace.”

She added that the experience of inequality varies greatly, depending on where the women live.

In Chile, 47.7 percent of households are headed by women, according to the government’s 2022 National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey, and 58.7 percent of these live in poverty.

The latest National Time Use Survey, from 2015, showed that the hours dedicated to unpaid work in a typical day average 2.74 for Chilean men and 5.89 for Chilean women.

Valdes also warned about the high rates of violence against women in the country, despite policies to promote gender parity.

“The latest prevalence survey says that two out of five women have experienced situations of intimate partner violence and these are higher numbers than before. We do not know if this is because there are more cases than before or because there is more sensitivity and recognition of the violence,” said the sociologist.

And she complained that there is a lack of capacity in public programs to attend to these victims in the healthcare or judicial systems.

“That is a huge debt owed to women, and we continue to see a significant number of femicides per year,” Valdes said. In 2022 there were 43 gender-based murders of women in the country, according to the Ministry of Women and Gender Equity.

Carolina Cartagena, national secretary of the Asociación Yo Cuido in Chile, wears the purple sweatshirt that identifies the members of this movement of women caregivers. The central headquarters, which carries the same color, is where they hold meetings, workshops and sessions for training, education and forging ties among caregivers. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Huamachuco, a pillar of training and community services

The Huamachuco Women’s House is a center for training and combating poverty and discrimination against women.

It began in 1989 as a soup kitchen for children and families. Then it became a center for training, especially traditional embroidery on burlap made from jute or hemp, whose handcrafted works are about to be exhibited in the presidential palace of La Moneda. Later it became a place to learn trades such as hairdressing or sewing.

It currently offers a wide range of workshops and courses including baking, jewelry making, therapeutic massage and a digital skills course provided by Mujeres Emplea, a United Nations employment training program led by UN Women.

But above all, it is a place of support for women who suffer various types of violence and who feel protected by their peers.

Moreno said that women used to work the same amount or more than today and their work was not recognized. She added that now their work is more highly valued, but still “very insufficiently.”

“There are many gaps we have in terms of men who go out to work and come back home just to rest. He never lays awake at night thinking about what he is going to cook the next day, which is double work when there is no money,” she said.

“Today we are placing value on women’s work. I don’t say price, although I could say it because if a man on his own had to pay for laundry services, food, etc., he wouldn’t be able to afford it with what he earns,” she said.

Moreno is also concerned about children and stressed that “preventing violence against them is a job that has no price.”

The Huamachuco Women’s House is now promoting a very important project: getting kids who have dropped out of basic education back into school, with follow-up.

“We work with children and families and aim to reinsert them in another school. We look for schools and provide them with support. In general, they are critical cases, of parents who are in prison or similar circumstances,” she said.

Two young nursery school teachers pose for a photo in a room of the day care center that serves 30 children a day in the low-income neighborhood of Huamachuco. The day care center is an initiative of local residents themselves and was awarded a prize by UN Women, which provided all the equipment needed to open a similar center in the same municipality of Renca, part of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Women caregivers plead for time off

“Recognition of caregiving is urgently needed because we women become poorer by staying at home and not being able to go out and work to improve our quality of life,” Moreno said.

It is also a central demand of the Asociación Yo Cuido.

“My daughter, age five, has cerebral palsy,” Cartagena said. “There are many moms with children on the autism spectrum. There are caregivers caring for two or three people. The problem is cross-cutting and includes Alzheimer’s. There are women who take care of their 90-year-old mothers.”

And she regretted that there is no legislation to protect caregivers.

“We are fighting for a support and care system that is being promoted with participatory dialogues in different municipalities to learn about the needs of caregivers,” she said.

“Never again alone” is the motto of the association, created in 2018, which defines itself as national, non-profit, social action and non-welfare oriented in character.

“In many cases the person has been born with some type of disability or dependency. Their situation is precarious, they are vulnerable. And the State and society punish you for being in care. You are left without health care, unemployed, often without support or family co-responsibility,” said Cartagena.

She added that many caregivers suffer from psychological and emotional deterioration, as well as poverty.

“A main objective of our association is to ensure the mental health rights of caregivers,” she underlined.

She pointed out that caregiving work involves mainly women: 90 percent of the members of the association are women.

“We want centers to be opened where they can drop off the person they take care of, so they can have just a few hours off a day,” she said.

This is the role of the day care center in Huamachuco that serves women who suffer physical, psychological or economic violence.

“Most of the mothers in these projects are single women who have no networks. And they have to go out to work leaving their children with other people,” said Moreno.

UN Women rewarded the work of this day care center by donating another similar one, fully equipped, to be installed in another part of Renca.

The elderly activist said with pride that “the fruits are there for us to see because there are young people who are now professionals and who say well…if it hadn’t been for this day care center I don’t know what would have become of us.”

Perla Venegas is one of 1444 female bus drivers in the surface public transport network in Santiago, Chile, which aims at gender inclusion and offers job stability and shift flexibility compatible with family life. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jun 26 2023 (IPS)

Sexual harassment and discrimination are daily realities for women on public transport in Chile and also an obstacle for plans to expand mass transit in order to reduce pollution in several cities in this South American country.

Santiago, the capital, is the most polluted city based on fine air particulate matter among the large Latin American cities, according to the World Air Quality Report 2022, ahead of Lima and Mexico City, while five other Chilean cities are among the 10 most polluted in South America.

Sexual harassment is the most visible form of discrimination against women in Chilean public transportation, in addition to insecurity due to poorly lit bus stops, inadequate buses, and more frequent trips at times when women are less likely to travel.

Personal accounts gathered by IPS also mentioned problems such as the constant theft of cell phones and the impossibility for young women to wear shorts or low-cut tops when traveling on buses or the subway, the backbone of Santiago’s public transportation system.

To address these problems, the Chilean government and the Santiago city government adopted gender strategies: they put in place special telephones to report harassers and thieves, began installing “panic buttons” and alarms at bus stops, and incorporated more women in driving and security.

“When I was younger I suffered a lot of harassment because I didn’t have the character to stand up to the harassers. Now that I am older, I am able to confront an aggressor without fear, even when he is harassing another person, whether a man or a woman. When I confront them, they run away,” Bernardita Azócar, 34, told IPS.

Bernardita Azócar, in a subway station in Santiago, Chile, heads to her job in a collection agency. She says she suffered sexual harassment on public transport in the capital when she was younger, but now she is more alert to any aggression and feels empowered to help others who suffer the same bad experience. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

“It happened to me a couple of times when I was younger. They want to grope you or try to touch another girl and now I confront them. I suffer less because I’m more aware and I try not to put myself at risk,” she added during a dialogue at the University of Chile subway station in Santiago.

Azócar, who works for a collection company, said the root cause of harassment lies in education and in Chilean society.

“If you wear a miniskirt or show cleavage, society points the finger at you, as if you were provoking men and it was your fault. And I don’t think that’s why it happens. It’s abuse to be harassed in the public system…or anywhere else,” she said.

Maite, a humanities student at the Catholic University, feels that women are at a disadvantage on public transportation.

“When a woman takes a bus, she tends to sit next to the aisle to have an easier way to flee from any threat. Or she sits next to another woman so as not to travel alone. There are many things that women do that are not explicit. They are behaviors we learn, to get by on public transportation,” said the young woman who, like her friends, preferred not to give her last name.

According to Maite, “women can’t wear shorts or backpacks on the bus, or openly use a cell phone. Every time you get on the bus you have to take a lot of measures.”

Maite and four other classmates told IPS that they take a combination of buses and the subway to go to school and that none of them have suffered harassment on the bus, but they know of several cases that happened to their friends.

“If someone tries to touch me or crowd me too closely I don’t feel so safe,” said Elena, a commercial engineering student.

“A friend of mine had her cell phone stolen. I have not been harassed, but I would never go on the bus or subway in shorts even if I were dying of heat. I wear long pants because wearing shorts is a risk,” added Emilia, a psychology student.

The five university students in this group lament the discrimination women suffer on Chilean public transport and recognize that they have a “code of conduct” that they personally follow to avoid problems, such as not wearing shorts or miniskirts or showing cleavage, even in summertime, although it sometimes restricts their personal freedom. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The joys and pitfalls of being a female bus driver

Getting more people to use buses and other public transport in Chile, a long narrow country with a population of 19.8 million, is difficult because 71 percent of households own at least one car.

The incorporation of more female bus drivers is aimed at a friendlier mass transit system.

Perla Venegas, 34, has been working as a bus driver in Santiago’s public transportation system for six years.

“I like my job and driving. The most complicated thing is dealing with cyclists, pedestrians and passengers, who are never satisfied,” she told IPS while parked waiting to pull out on the corner of Santa Rosa and Alameda, in the heart of downtown Santiago.

Her route connects downtown Santiago with the municipality of Maipú, in the western outskirts of the capital.

“I’m on a par with the male drivers, but I’m more cautious, not so aggressive and I’m a more defensive driver. I have been complimented several times, especially by elderly people,” said Venegas, who lives with her two daughters, aged 16 and 8.

“I have female colleagues who have been hit and beaten. I received a death threat from a passenger because when the route ended he wouldn’t get off. He was a homeless drug addict. It was 5:30 AM. In the end I found a carabineros (police) patrol car and I turned him in,” she said.

She added that she has had both pleasant and negative experiences and acknowledged that she is proud that her eldest daughter also wants to be a bus driver “although I would not like her to experience the hard parts.”

The Santiago subway is the backbone of the mass transit system in the Chilean capital. It makes it possible to reach 23 of the 32 municipalities that encompass the capital and allows passengers to combine with a bus network to reach any point of the metropolitan region. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Staying alert in the subway, the main means of public transport

On the Santiago subway there are 2.3 million trips on working days. Its tracks cover 140 kilometers on six lines, with 136 stations in 23 of the 32 municipalities that comprise the metropolitan area. Greater Santiago is home to 7.1 million people.

An additional 2.1 million average daily trips are made on surface public transport.

According to official statistics, during the first five months of the year there were 21 pollution episodes in Santiago above the maximum standard level and eight environmental alerts for excess fine particulate matter, so increasing the use of public transport instead of private vehicles is considered a priority for the authorities.

Paulina del Campo, the subway’s sustainability manager, told IPS that gender issues are a strategic objective in this state-owned company.

“We have taken the issue of harassment very seriously. We do not have large numbers, but we do have moments like March 2022 when the issue was raised because of situations in the streets and in universities that included public transportation,” she said.

After meetings with authorities and student leaders, the subway increased the presence of female security guards at stations in the university district.

“One of the things they said is that in a situation of harassment it is much more comfortable to ask for help from a woman than from a man,” explained Del Campo.

The company thus hired a specific group of female guards to receive and respond to complaints.

“Qualified staff respond and are trained to provide support for the victims. We can quickly activate the protocols with the carabineros police. When it happens we can intercept the train and often arrest the people (aggressors) on the spot,” said Del Campo.

In another campaign, a standard methodology designed by international foundations with expertise in harassment was adapted to the situation in Chile.

At the same time, the subway increased its female staff and the number of women in leadership positions.

“Two years ago we had a female staff of around 20 percent and now, in May, 26.5 percent of the 4,400 subway workers are women. In the area of security guards we have a staff of approximately 700 and of these 110 are women,” explained the company’s Sustainability Manager.

These two women are security guards at the Plaza Egaña subway station, on line 6 in Chile’s capital. The state-owned Metro company is increasing the number of women in its services as part of a gender policy that even includes the maintenance of trains. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Gender policies in public transportation

The Metropolitan Public Transport Directorate (DTPM) informed IPS that it aims to reduce the male-female gap in public transport.

It also plans to increase the number of women bus drivers.

The Red system, with buses running throughout Santiago, currently employs 1,444 women – only 7.6 percent of all drivers.

“Many women who have entered this field come from highly precarious and unregulated jobs, so this opportunity has allowed them greater autonomy and, on many occasions, to leave violent environments and improve their self-confidence,” the DTPM stressed in response to questions from IPS.

“This has meant an effort to train and generate conditions to keep and promote women who are part of the system,” it added.

Origin-Destination Surveys reveal that women are the main users of public transport and 65 percent of trips for the purpose of caring for the home, children or other people are made by women. They are more likely to make multidirectional trips and in the so-called off-peak hours, with little traffic.

According to the DTPM, waiting for the bus is one of the most critical moments in every trip.

“This is why we installed the panic button at bus stops and real-time information on the arrival of buses to improve the perception of security,” it explained.

The information is available through an application on cell phones, while the panic buttons began as a women’s safety pilot plan in October 2022 at stops in one of the capital’s municipalities. The plan is to extend them to a large number of stops in Santiago.

Construction workers in Chile are among those who will benefit from the gradual reduction of the workweek from the current 45 hours to 40, within five years. A 40-hour workweek already exists in countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela, but in most of the region the workweek is longer. CREDIT: Camila Lasalle/Sintec

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 4 2023 (IPS)

The reduction in the workweek recently approved by the Chilean Congress forms part of a trend of working fewer hours and days that is spreading in today’s modern economies, but also highlights how far behind other countries in Latin America are in this regard.

Latin America “has legislation that is lagging in terms of working hours and it is imperative that this be reviewed,” said the director of the International Labor Organization (ILO) for the Southern Cone of the Americas, Fabio Bertranou, after Chile’s new law was passed."Non-human work, that of artificial intelligence, can massively reduce employment and make 40 hours a week seem like an immense amount of work." -- Francisco Iturraspe

The workweek in Chile will be gradually reduced from 45 to 40 hours, by one hour a year over the next five years, according to the bill that a jubilant President Gabriel Boric signed into law on Apr. 14.

“After many years of dialogue and gathering support, today we can finally celebrate the passage of this bill that reduces working hours, a pro-family law aimed at improving quality of life for all,” said Boric.

The law provides for the possibility of working four days and taking three off a week, of working a maximum of five overtime hours per week, while granting exceptions in sectors such as mining and transportation, where up to 52 hours per week can be worked, if the worker is compensated with fewer hours in another work week.

Chile is thus aligning itself with its partners in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in some of which, such as Australia, Denmark and France, the workweek is less than 40 hours, while in others, such as Germany, Colombia, Mexico or the United Kingdom, the workweek is longer.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric (L) celebrates the modification of the labor law by the Chilean Congress to reduce the workweek, as an achievement aimed at “improving quality of life for all,” with the understanding that workers will have more time to rest and for family life. CREDIT: Presidency of Chile

The range in Latin America

According to ILO data, until the past decade two countries in the region, Ecuador and Venezuela, had a legal workweek of 40 hours, while, like Chile up to now, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Guatemala were in the range between 42 and 45 hours.

Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay had a workweek of 48 hours.

According to national laws, the maximum number of hours that people can legally work per week under extraordinary circumstances for specific reasons is 48 in Brazil and Venezuela, and between 49 and 59 in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and Uruguay.

In Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras the maximum is 60 or more hours, and in El Salvador and Peru there is simply no limit.

But in practice people work less than that, since the regional average is 39.9 hours, more than in Western Europe, North America and Africa (which range between 37.2 and 38.8 hours), but less than in the Arab world, the Pacific region and Asia, where the average ranges between 44 and 49 hours per week.

ILO figures showed that in 2016 in Latin America, male workers worked an average of 44.9 hours a week and women 36.3, 1.7 hours less than in 2005 in the case of men and half an hour less in the case of women.

Among domestic workers, the decrease was 3.3 hours among men and more than five hours among women (from 38.1 to 32.9 hours a week), which is partly attributed to the fact that after 2005 legislation to equate the workweeks of domestic workers with other workers made headway.

A teacher connects from her home with her students in an online class. This trend expanded in different sectors in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic and allows workers more freedom to organize their time, although sometimes it leads to longer working days. CREDIT: Marcel Crozet/ILO

Health and telework

A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the ILO attributes the death of some 750,000 workers each year to long working hours – especially people who work more than 55 hours a week.

The study showed that in 2016, 398,000 workers died worldwide from stroke and 347,000 from ischemic heart disease – ailments that are triggered by prolonged stress associated with long hours, or by risky behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol and eating an unhealthy diet.

María Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health, said in this regard that “working 55 hours or more per week poses a serious danger to health. It is time for all of us – governments, employers and employees – to realize that long working hours can lead to premature death.”

On the other hand, the telework trend boomed worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching 23 million workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, mainly formal wage- earners with a high level of education, stable jobs and in professional and administrative occupations.

Access to telework has been much more limited for informal sector and self-employed workers, young people, less skilled and lower-income workers, and women, who have more family responsibilities.

ILO Latin America expert Andrés Marinakis acknowledged in an analysis that “in general, teleworkers have some autonomy in deciding how to organize their workday and their performance is evaluated mainly through the results of their work rather than by the hours it took them to do it.”

But “several studies have found that in many cases those who telework work a little longer than usual; the limits between regular and overtime hours are less clear,” and this situation is reinforced by the available electronic devices and technology, explained Marinakis from the ILO office in Santiago de Chile.

This means that “contact with colleagues and supervisors is possible at any time and place, extending the workday beyond what is usual,” which raises “the need to clearly establish a period of disconnection that gives workers an effective rest,” added the analyst.

Artificial intelligence, for example with robots that work with great precision and speed, favors the technological development of countries and increases productivity by reducing costs in the production of goods or services, but it can lead to significant reductions in employment. CREDIT: IDB

The other face

Argentine labor activist Francisco Iturraspe told IPS by telephone that on the other hand, in the future it appears that “non-human work, that of artificial intelligence, can massively reduce employment and make 40 hours a week seem like an immense amount of work.”

Iturraspe, a professor at the National University of Rosario in southeastern Argentina and a researcher at the country’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, said from Rosario that the reduction in working hours “responds to criteria typical of the 19th century, while in the 21st century there is the challenge of meeting the need for technological development and its impact on our countries.”

He argued that “to the extent that abundant and cheap labor is available, and people have to work longer hours, business owners need less investment in technology, which curbs development.”

But, on the other hand, Iturraspe stressed that investment in technologies such as artificial intelligence reduces the cost of producing goods and services, evoking the thesis of zero marginal cost set out by U.S. economist Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The End of Work” and other books.

This translates into a reduction in the workforce needed to produce and distribute goods and services, “perhaps by half according to some economists, a Copernican shift that would lead us to a situation of mass unemployment.”

The quest to reduce the workday walks along that razor’s edge, “with the hope that the reduction of working time can give working human beings new ways of coping with life,” Iturraspe said.

The Maipo River on its way from the Andes mountain range to the valley of the same name is surrounded by numerous small towns that depend on tourism, receiving thousands of visitors every weekend. There are restaurants, campgrounds and high-altitude sports facilities. The water comes down from the top of the mountain range and is used by the company Aguas Andinas to supply the Chilean capital. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Apr 19 2023 (IPS)

Good management of the 101 hydrographic basins which run from the Andes mountain range to the Pacific Ocean is key to solving the severe water crisis that threatens the people of Chile and their main productive activities.

This vulnerability extends to the economy. Since 1990 Chile has gradually become wealthier, but along with the growth in GDP, water consumption has also expanded.

Roberto Pizarro, a professor of hydrology at the universities of Chile and Talca, told IPS that this “is an unsustainable equation from the point of view of hydrological engineering because water is a finite resource.”"This decade we have half the water we had in the previous decade. Farmers are seeing their production decline and are losing arable land. Small farmers are hit harder because they have a more difficult time surviving the disaster. Large farmers can dig wells or apply for loans, but small farmers put everything on the line during the growing season.” -- Rodrigo Riveros

According to Pizarro, “there are threats hanging over this process. From a production point of view, Chile’s GDP depends to a large extent on water. According to figures from the presidential delegation of water resources of the second administration of Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018), at least 60 percent of our GDP depends on water.”

This South American country, the longest and narrowest in the world, with a population of 19.6 million people, depends on the production and export of copper, wood, agricultural and sea products, as well as a growing tourism industry. All of which require large quantities of water.

And water is increasingly scarce due to overuse, excessive granting of water rights by the government, and climate change that has led to a decline in rainfall and snow.

To make matters worse, since 1981, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), water use rights have been privatized in perpetuity, separated from land tenure, and can even be traded or sold. This makes it difficult for the branches of government to control water and is a key point in the current debate on constitutional reform in Chile.

Ecologist Sara Larraín maintains that the water crisis “has its origin in the historical overexploitation of surface and groundwater by the productive sectors and in the generalized degradation of the basins by mining, agro-industry and hydroelectric generation. And the wood pulp industry further compounded the problem.”

Larraín, executive director of the Sustainable Chile organization, adds that the crisis was aggravated by a drought that has lasted for more than a decade.

“There is a drastic decline in rainfall (of 25 percent) as a result of climate change, reduction of the snow surface and increase in temperatures that leads to greater evaporation,” she told IPS.

The small town of El Volcán has just over a hundred inhabitants, 80 kilometers from Santiago and 1,400 meters above sea level, in the Andes foothills. Local residents are witnessing a sharp decrease in snowfall that now rarely exceeds 30 centimeters in the area, a drastic reduction compared to a few years ago. CREDIT: Arturo Allende Peñaloza/IPS

First-hand witnesses

The main hydrographic basin of the 101 that hold the surface and underground water in Chile’s 756,102 square kilometers of territory is the Maipo River basin, since it supplies the Greater Santiago region, home to 7.1 million people.

In this basin, in the town of El Volcán, part of the San José de Maipo municipality on the outskirts of Santiago, on the eastern border with Argentina, lives Francisco Rojo, 62, a wrangler of pack animals at heart, who farms and also works in a small mine.

“The (inactive) San José volcano has no snow on it anymore, no more glaciers. In the 1990s I worked near the sluices of the Volcán water intake and there was a surplus of over 40 meters of water. In 2003 the snow was 12 to 14 meters high. Today it’s barely two meters high,” Rojo told IPS.

“The climate has been changing. It does not rain or snow, but the temperatures drop. The mornings and evenings are freezing and in the daytime it’s hot,” he added.

Rojo gets his water supply from a nearby spring. And using hoses, he is responsible for distributing water to 22 families, only for consumption, not for irrigation.

“We cut off the water at night so there is enough in the tanks the next day. Eight years ago we had a surplus of water. Now we have had to reduce the size of the hoses from two inches to one inch,” he explained.

“We were used to a meter of snow. Now I’m glad when 40 centimeters fall. It rarely rains and the rains are always late,” he said, describing another clear effect of climate change.

Agronomist Rodrigo Riveros, manager of one of the water monitoring boards for the Aconcagua River in the Valparaíso region in central Chile, told IPS that the historical average at the Chacabuquito rainfall station, at the headwaters of the river, is 40 or 50 cubic meters, a level that has never been surpassed in 12 years.

“This decade we have half the water we had in the previous decade,” he said.

“Farmers are seeing their production decline and are losing arable land. Small farmers are hit harder because they have a more difficult time surviving the disaster. Large farmers can dig wells or apply for loans, but small farmers put everything on the line during the growing season,” he said.

Large, medium and small users participate in the Aconcagua water board, 80 percent of whom are small farmers with less than 10 hectares. But they coexist with large water users such as the Anglo American mining company, the state-owned copper company Codelco and Esval, the region’s sanitation and drinking water distribution company.

“The decrease in rainfall is the main problem,” said Riveros..”The level of snow dropped a lot because the snow line rose – the altitude where it starts to snow. And the heavy rains increased flooding. Warm rain also falls in October or November (in the southern hemisphere springtime), melting the snow, and the water flows violently, carrying a lot of sediment and damaging infrastructure.

“It used to snow a lot more. Now three meters fall and we celebrate. In that same place, 10 meters used to fall, and the snow would pile up as a kind of reserve, even until the following year,” he said.

In Chile, the water boards were created by the Water Code and bring together natural and legal persons together with user associations. Their purpose is the administration, distribution, use and conservation of riverbeds and the surrounding water basins.

Many residents of El Volcán, in the foothills of the Andes mountains, lack drinking water and have built  tanks to collect water from a nearby spring. They have also reduced the diameter of their hoses to a minimum because the flow of water is steadily shrinking, only providing a supply for domestic use and not enough to irrigate their crops and trees. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Enormous economic impact

Larraín cited figures from the National Emergency Office of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security and from regional governments that reveal that State spending on renting tanker trucks in the last decade (2010-2020) was equivalent to 277.5 million dollars in 196 of the total of 346 municipalities that depend on this method of providing drinking water.

“The population served in its essential needs is approximately half a million people, almost all of them from the rural sector and shantytowns and slums,” said Larraín.

According to the environmentalist, Chile has not taken actions to mitigate the drought.

“Although the challenge is structural and requires a substantial change in water management and the protection of sources, the official discourse insists on the construction of dams, canals and aqueducts, even though the reservoirs are not filled due to lack of rainfall and there is no availability in the regions from which water is to be extracted and diverted,” she said.

She added that the mining industry is advancing in desalination to reduce its dependence on the water basins, “although there is still no specific regulation for the industry, which would prevent the impacts of seawater suction and brine deposits.”

Larraín acknowledged that the last two governments established sectoral and inter-ministerial water boards, but said that coordination between users and State entities did not improve, nor did it improve among government agencies themselves.

“Each sector faces the shortage on its own terms and we lack a national plan for water security, even though this is the biggest problem Chile faces in the context of the impacts of climate change,” the environmental expert asserted.

Chile’s Colina hot springs, in the open air in the middle of the Andes mountains and just 17 kilometers from the border with Argentina, in the east of the country, can now be visited almost year-round. In the past, it was impossible to go up in the southern hemisphere winter because the route was cut off by constant rain and snow storms. CREDIT: Arturo Allende Peñaloza/IPS

Government action

The Ministry of the Environment admits that “there is still an important debt in terms of access to drinking water and sanitation for the rural population.”

“There is also a lack of governance that would make it possible to integrate the different stakeholders in each area for them to take part in water decisions and planning,” the ministry responded to questions from IPS.

In addition, it recognized that it is necessary to “continue to advance in integrated planning instruments that coordinate public and private initiatives.

“We coordinated the Inter-Ministerial Committee for a Just Water Transition which has the mandate to outline a short, medium and long-term roadmap in this matter, which is such a major priority for the country,” the ministry stated.

The committee, it explained, “assumed the challenge of the water crisis and worked on the coordination of immediate actions, which make it possible to face the risk of water and energy rationing, the need for rural drinking water, water for small-scale agriculture and productive activities, as well as ecosystem preservation.”

The ministry also reported that it is drafting regulatory frameworks to authorize and promote the efficiency of water use and reuse.

Furthermore, it stressed that the Framework Law on Climate Change, passed in June 2022, created Strategic Plans for Water Resources in Basins to “identify problems related to water resources and propose actions to address the effects of climate change.”

The government of Gabriel Boric, in office since March 2022, is also promoting a law on the use of gray water for agricultural irrigation, with a focus on small-scale agriculture and the installation of 16 Pilot Basin Councils to achieve, with the participation and coordination of the different stakeholders, “an integrated management of water resources.”

Alleged gang members are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison built by the government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to house 40,000 detainees accused of belonging to organized crime. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, Apr 17 2023 (IPS)

Violence involving organized crime has made Latin America the most dangerous region in the world and has helped paved the way for a repressive kind of populism with a dangerous future, whose most visible symbol is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.

According to United Nations reports, Latin America, home to eight percent of the global population, accounts for 37 percent of the world’s homicides. (These statistics do not include deaths in wars, accidents and suicides.)

Observers talk about a generalized security crisis, and the Salvadoran president boasted of a 56.8 percent decline in the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, while Ecuador, at the other end of the spectrum, showed an increase of 82 percent.

But comparisons in percentages from one year to the next are misleading if the absolute numbers are not taken into account. For example, the homicide rate in Chile increased 32.2 percent in 2022, although in actual numbers that meant 4.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. In El Salvador, the figure for the same year was 7.8 per 100,000.

Statistics in percentages, magnified by the media and by the rise in the degree of violence in the crimes committed, spread a sensation of insecurity and fear among the public.

The terrain of politics

Politics have seized onto the insecurity crisis, which serves in some cases for the opposition to question the government, or in others for those in power to seek to neutralize their opponents. Both sides come up with shortsighted measures that do not attack the roots of the problem and can actually aggravate it in the medium to long term.

The most common reaction is to beef up the police force while providing it with greater means and authority to crack down on criminals. Police officers are given a greater margin of discretion to size up the danger and shoot – in other words, to become “trigger-happy”.

The expression is not new in the region. It became widespread in various countries between the 1960s and 1980s, under military dictatorships, when the law enforcement and armed forces murdered opponents in staged shootouts or brutally cracked down on social mobilizations.

The revival of these practices in the 21st century has required legitimization through laws, such as the so-called “law of privileged legitimate defense”, passed in Chile on Apr. 10, or broader norms that involve the police, the military and the powers of the State, as Bukele has pushed through in El Salvador.

Bukele, the leader of El Salvador’s Nuevas Ideas party, used his majority in the legislature to allow him to be re-elected as president. And on Mar. 22, 2022, he declared a state of emergency, accompanied by various legislative reforms that in practice gave him a free hand in his fight against crime, namely gangs known in Central America as maras.

More than a year after the state of emergency was declared, Amnesty International denounced widespread violations of human rights in the small Central American country:

“This policy has resulted in more than 66,000 detentions, most of them arbitrary; ill-treatment and torture; flagrant violations of due process; enforced disappearances; and the deaths in state custody of at least 132 people who at the time of their deaths had not been found guilty of any crime,” the human rights watchdog said in a statement released on Apr. 3.

“Key to the commission of these human rights violations has been the coordination and collusion of the three branches of government; the putting in place of a legal framework contrary to international human rights standards, specifically with regard to criminal proceedings; and the failure to adopt measures to prevent systematic human rights violations under a state of emergency,” it added.

A member of the carabineros, Chile’s militarized police, is photographed while opening fire on a street in Santiago. CREDIT: Courtesy of El Desconcierto

Repressive populism

Bukele replaced prisons with virtual concentration camps. A total of 1.5 percent of Salvadorans are currently deprived of liberty, which means the Central American country has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

However, opinion polls show that eight out of 10 Salvadorans are satisfied with the current president and want him to be reelected, while some dissident voices warn that the State is replacing the gangs as an agent of intimidation and concentration of power.

The temptation to imitate Bukele with repressive populism that feeds on showy measures is present throughout Latin America. While the “privileged legitimate defense law” was being debated in Chile, Rodolfo Carter, mayor of the municipality of La Florida, in Santiago, demolished houses registered as belonging to drug traffickers, in front of the television cameras.

In Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso, threatened by impeachment, announced in early April that he was authorizing the “possession and carrying of weapons for civilian use for personal defense” as an urgent measure against the “common enemies: delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Delinquency, drug trafficking and criminal organizations are recurring terms when talking about insecurity, but a dangerous drift is often observed where ‘trigger-happy’ laws and measures give way to repression against social protests or empower political persecution under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Criminalizing the poor

Javier Macaya, president of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a far-right Chilean party that vindicates the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), accused the United Nations of supporting “political violence” when its High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned of the dangers posed by the “law of privileged self-defense”.

The authoritarian scope of “trigger-happy” laws also includes the criminalization of immigrants and poor neighborhoods, classified as gang territories that shelter drug trafficking rings, although large drug traffickers and drug users from high-income sectors are rarely prosecuted in the cities of Latin America.

Political persecution is often disguised as security, as in Nicaragua in February when 222 dissidents were expelled and stripped of their nationality. The government of Daniel Ortega accused them of “treason”, described them as “terrorists” and “mercenaries” and justified the measure in the name of national peace.

Security has been instated as Latin America’s most pressing issue. The latest Amnesty International report documents arbitrary acts in Venezuela that include forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. Haiti, mired in ungovernability, is another country where human rights are a victim of insecurity.

The complexities of the fight against crime involve strengthening the police and also growing vigilante justice on the part of citizens. In Brazil, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) authorized the police to kill criminals and loosened restrictions on gun ownership for civilians. His successor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, suspended the measures after taking office on Jan. 1.

Latin America has become a kind of arsenal, with more powerful weapons for the police, and also with the illegal trade that feeds organized crime. A third of the firearms seized in 2017 in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama came from the United States.

Eliana and Carla, two Venezuelan sisters who came to Chile without legal documents through the border town of Colchane, complained about the lack of clear procedures to regularize their immigration status. The lack of papers causes problems when it comes to accessing healthcare and social security and to bringing children and siblings to Chile for family reunification. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Mar 27 2023 (IPS)

The Chilean government tightened controls on the northern border to curtail the influx of migrants, especially Venezuelans, along a 1,030-km stretch of border with Bolivia and Peru.

Some 600 military personnel joined the police force to reinforce control, initially for a period of three months.

Left-wing President Gabriel Boric, in office for a year, visited Colchane, a small town in the Andean highlands, on Mar. 15 to talk with the 1,800 local residents, most of whom are Aymara indigenous people."It was very hard. I wouldn't want to go through that ever again. The border is very dangerous, there is tremendous insecurity. You experience hunger, cold, thirst and many other things on the journey.” -- Carla

Undocumented migrants coming to this country enter mainly through that town, triggering social tension and growing expressions of xenophobia, although also drawing shows of solidarity and support from society.

“We have decided to take responsibility for the neglect and lack of equipment and have launched a plan to improve infrastructure and living conditions on the northern border,” said the president.

He said the area was receiving “absolutely uncontrolled migration” that brought the total number of immigrants to 1.4 million, equivalent to seven percent of the current population of this long, narrow Andean country.

The military will have adequate accommodation and will be equipped with thermal cameras and satellite communication systems to double the detection capacity and monitor uncontrolled areas.

The aim, said Boric, is “to contain and reduce irregular migration, but in particular to combat criminal organizations that take advantage of these flows and of people’s needs, to commit crimes such as human, drug and arms trafficking.”

Chile’s border with Peru is 169 kilometers, and with Bolivia 861.

Boric said it was important to “not open the door to hate speech,” just days after a 22-year-old Venezuelan who was proven to be drunk was arrested and charged for allegedly running over and killing a police officer, sparking a wave of xenophobia.

The president also announced that in the next six months he would present a “national migration policy in accordance with the new challenges facing the country,” which in recent decades has become a growing destination for migrants from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and in the last decade for Haitians and especially Venezuelans.

Hundreds of Venezuelans gather early every day in front of the Venezuelan consulate in the municipality of Providencia, in Santiago, to apply for the documents that would allow them to move forward in the regularization of their migration status and that of their family, and make it possible for them to to legally bring in relatives. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), since 2013 more than 7.13 million people have fled Venezuela, the majority to other Latin American countries, in one of the largest international displacement crises in the world.

Minister of the Interior and Public Security Carolina Tohá confirmed that there was a list of more than 20,000 reportedly undocumented migrants to be deported.

“When President Boric took office, there were already 20,000 people facing pending deportation orders,” she said.

Two draft laws are making their way through the legislature aimed at expediting deportations for immigrants convicted of drug crimes.

The National Migration Service informed IPS that “in 2022, 1,070 people were deported, which represented a 19 percent increase from the 913 deportations carried out in 2021.”

It also stated that “of the almost 500,000 pending applications (for regularization of immigration status), in the entire year of 2022 until January 2023, more than 365,000 have received a favorable response.”

“About 265,000 involved Temporary Residence applications, which will gradually become applications for Permanent Residence,” the National Migration Service added.

Erika Vargas and José González are Venezuelan immigrants who came to Chile legally and only have to regularize their children’s citizenship status to complete the process and gain peace of mind. They said they have only suffered sporadic misunderstandings because of the use of different idioms or vocabulary. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Marginal conditions for undocumented migrants

A survey of “campamentos”, the term given to slums in Chile, found 39,567 migrant families living in them, representing 34.7 percent of the total.

The number of migrants coming in through unauthorized border crossings has mushroomed from 2,905 in 2017, to 56,586 in 2021 and to 13,928 in the first quarter alone of 2022 – figures that do not take into account migrants under 18 years of age, according to the Catholic Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM).

Macarena Rodriguez, chair of the SJM board of directors, told IPS that the influx of migrants through unauthorized border crossings “is not synonymous with people fleeing from justice,” but with people escaping poor life opportunities in other countries.

That is the case of two Venezuelan sisters, Eliana, 36, and Carla, 33, who have traumatic memories of their entry through Colchane, on separate trips, coming by land from Venezuela.

“I came with a ‘travel advisor’ (smuggler or coyote). In Bolivia it was complicated because of many groups that operate there. They kidnapped us in a border area. We were locked up for six or seven days waiting for that person to pay to get us released,” said Eliana.

She came to Chile in September 2021 after living in Peru for almost three years.

“We paid that person to take us to Santiago on a trip without complications. The normal journey is three to four days from Peru, but it took me 15,” she told IPS.

Carla traveled with her eight-year-old son Eduardo and arrived in Chile 15 months ago.

“It was very hard. I wouldn’t want to go through that ever again. The border is very dangerous, there is tremendous insecurity. You experience hunger, cold, thirst and many other things on the journey,” she said.

Immigrants of various nationalities go daily to the offices of the National Migration Service, on San Antonio street in Santiago, where they are attended if they have made an online appointment. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The sisters both work in Santiago and live in a small rented room in the municipality of Quinta Normal, on the west side of the Chilean capital, for which they pay 312 dollars a month.

“It was difficult to find a school. I thought it was like in Venezuela where you just register your child with his birth certificate. But here they ask for an identity document and educational records,” said Carla, who, like her sister, only wanted to be identified by her first name.

They have both adapted, but they complain about the lack of a protocol to regularize their situation.

“I would like to stay. I am in the process of bringing my daughter, who stayed in Venezuela, but it has become very difficult because I don’t have papers,” Carla said.

“I miss my family and the beaches. I am from the East, where it’s all coastline. There are beaches and islands there, it’s spectacular,” she added.

Eliana said “Chile is a country that opens its doors. There is a lot of work. We have never experienced hunger here, or gone without a place to sleep.”

She wants to bring another sister and her three children to Chile.

“I would like to make a life here, but it is difficult without papers,” she said. “With papers it would be easier to get health coverage, for example. I tried to legalize my status, but there are many hurdles. There is no set procedure with clear steps to follow.”

Another Venezuelan Erika Vargas, 42, originally from the western Andean state of Táchira in that country, lives with her husband and four children in Rancagua, 90 kilometers south of Santiago. She came to Chile five years ago.

“My husband came a year earlier and sent me a permit to travel with the children,” she told IPS.

“We’re doing fine…the children have documents and now we are in the process of getting permanent residency,” she explained while lining up at the Venezuelan consulate in the capital.

Her husband José González, 40, came from the eastern Venezuelan state of Anzoátegui thanks to a “democracy visa” created by former President Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022).

“I’m a civil engineer and I have a degree in public accounting, and I work in logistics in a mining company,” he said. “My wife came a year ago, she works in education. We all came legally.”

González lamented that he could not practice his profession because “to get my degrees recognized I would have to pay about six million pesos (7,500 dollars).”

What the experts say

The SJM’s Macarena Rodríguez said the presence of the military in the north “is aimed at preventing or reducing the influx of people with criminal records and the entry of weapons.”

“It’s a temporary measure that will be in place as long as the military is there, but it doesn’t address the root of the problem, which is providing care for these people,” she told IPS.

According to Rodríguez, the movement of troops is designed to attack the security crisis rather than forming part of a public policy regarding mobility.

“If you came in by means of an unauthorized crossing, which is the case with the majority, you have no way to regularize your situation… it doesn’t matter if you have a work contract or ties to Chile,” she said.

Located in front of the Venezuelan consulate, in the Santiago municipality of Providencia, Rincón Venezolano offers a popular menu of typical products from that country. Venezuelan food businesses and restaurants are making their way into the landscape of the capital and other Chilean cities. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Germán Campos-Herrera, an academic at the Diego Portales University, said the deployment of military troops forms part of “an institutional framework that guarantees that the use of firearms is restricted to cases where people’s lives are endangered.”
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He believes, however, that elements such as “a much stricter control of those who enter and leave and knowing who are the migrants who commit crimes and are in an irregular situation” are missing.

Rodríguez said “We had not experienced these levels of exodus in the region. None of the countries of the Southern Cone (of South America) have experienced this before.”

That is why Boric wants to talk with Bolivia and Venezuela and raised the issue at the 28th Ibero-American Summit, held in Santo Domingo on Mar. 24.

“There have been positive signals, from both Bolivian and Venezuelan authorities. They are willing to talk and it is an opportunity that we have to take advantage of,” said Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren.

“It was not a central theme of the Summit, but it was an opportunity to have contact with the authorities of both countries, express concern and make progress in a forum, towards contact and dialogue,” he added.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants await a solution to their lack of papers, and they praise positive examples, such as the Temporary Work Residence granted by Colombia.

“We could regularize ours status and contribute to the State,” commented Eliana, one of the Venezuelan sisters.

The National Migration Service told IPS that it is developing a project to connect visa applications with the National Employment Service.

“Every year there are unfilled vacancies available in agriculture, transportation or construction. With this project we not only seek to make the flow of migration more orderly but to regulate it and make our migration policy more economically rational,” the National Migration Service said.

Miguel Barraza, secretary of the Chigualoco fisherpersons union in northern Chile, leans against a pile of Chilean kelp that has been drying in the sun for three days. The kelp used to fetch 1.5 dollars per kg, but the price has collapsed. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Feb 28 2023 (IPS)

Management areas in Chile for benthic organisims, which live on the bottom of the sea, are successfully combating the overexploitation of this food source thanks to the efforts of organized shellfish and seaweed harvesters and divers.

Benthic organisms are commercially valuable marine species that live at the lowest level of a body of water, including sub-surface layers, such as molluscs and algae.

The most widely harvested molluscs in Chile include the Chilean abalone (Concholepas concholepas), razor clam (Mesodesma donacium) and Chilean mussel (Mytilus chilensis), and the most harvested algae is Chilean kelp (Lessonia berteorana).“When there is free unregulated access, the resources do not recover, they tend to be overexploited and in the end there is nothing left. The only places where you can see these resources is in the management areas because fisherpersons are obliged to take care of them and help them recover.” -- Luis Durán Zambra

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The Undersecretariat for Fisheries and Aquaculture told IPS that in this country with a long coastline on the Pacific Ocean there are currently 853 Benthic Resources Management and Exploitation Areas (AMERB), with a total combined surface area of ​​close to 130,000 hectares.

The areas vary in size from one to 4,000 hectares, although 91 percent are under 300 hectares and the average is 150 hectares. They range from beaches and rocky coastal areas to places that are a maximum of five nautical miles offshore.

They were created in 1991, when geographical sectors were established within reserve areas for artisanal fishing in order to implement management plans, which set closed seasons, regulated catches and outlined recovery measures, and which are only assigned to organizations of legally registered artisanal fisherpersons.

The aim is to regulate artisanal fishing activity, restricting access to benthic organisms, under the supervision of the authorities.

Leaders of three local fishing coves or inlets that operate as production units where artisanal fisherpersons extract and sell marine resources told IPS about the efforts made to prevent poaching, and underscored the benefits of sustainable exploitation of these resources.

They said they managed to make a living from their work but expressed fears about the future.

This South American country of 19.2 million people has 6,350 km of coastline along the Pacific ocean and is among the world’s top 10 producers of fish.

Luis Durán Zambra presides over the Association of Guanaqueros Fisherpersons in Chile, which brings together 170 members, 70 of whom are registered for the assigned management area. Durán poses in his boat where he drives up to 20 tourists around the bay, an activity with which he earns extra income during the southern hemisphere summer. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

It has 99,557 registered artisanal fisherpersons, of whom 25,181 are women. There are 13,123 registered artisanal fishing vessels and 403 industrial fishing vessel owners. The country also has 456 fishing plants that employ 38,014 people, according to data provided by the Undersecretariat of Fisheries in response to questions from IPS.

As of October 2022, there were 1,538 aquaculture centers and 3,295 aquaculture concessions, 69 percent of which involved companies that employ a total of 10,719 people.

The Undersecretariat said it is in the process of creating 516 new AMERBs, and that in more than 30 years under the system 435 proposals have been rejected and the status of 34 sectors has been canceled.

Leaders of fisherpersons unions describe different realities

Luis Durán Zambra, president of the Fisherpersons Association of Guanaqueros, a town in the Coquimbo region, 430 kilometers north of Santiago, said that these areas have been very successful.

“When there is free unregulated access, the resources do not recover, they tend to be overexploited and in the end there is nothing left. The only places where you can see these resources is in the management areas because fisherpersons are obliged to take care of them and help them recover,” he told IPS during an interview in his cove.

Durán, 64, is the fifth generation of fishermen in his family.

The unions, advised by marine biologists, analyze each management area, its conditions, the reproduction of resources and then inform the Undersecretariat of Fisheries to authorize the size of the annual harvest.

Tasting seafood and fish ceviches – a local dish – in the market of the Tongoy resort town, in the Coquimbo region in northern Chile, is also an opportunity to educate tourists on the flavor and nutritional value of these products fresh from the sea. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Miguel Tellez, president of the Mar Adentro de Chepu Artisanal Fisherpersons Union, on the island of Chiloé, 1,100 kilometers south of Santiago, told IPS that they have worked for 20 years in four 300-hectare management areas that start at the Chepu River, where they harvest different molluscs.

The main species they harvest is the Chilean abalone, although there are also mussels, sea urchins (Echinoidea) and red seaweed (Sarcothalia crispata) that is harvested in the southern hemisphere summer. The production of Chilean abalone varies, but in a good year 400,000 are caught.

“We are 34 active members, half of us divers, who monitor the entire year, with four people taking turns overseeing day and night for six days,” Tellez said from his home in the town of Chepu.

He explained that poaching “has been our main problem, especially when we just started.”

He was referring to illegal fishermen and divers who enter the management zones, affecting the efforts of those legally assigned to exploit and protect them.

His union installed surveillance booths on the coast of Parque Ahuenco, a reserve belonging to some fifty families that preserve 1,200 hectares along the sea.

Tellez is worried about the future because the average age of union members is 40 years old.

“I don’t know how much longer we can do this. There are very few young people and because of their studies they are involved in other things,” he said.

In Chepu, fisherpersons sell Chilean abalone in the shell to a factory in the nearby town of Calbuco where they are cleaned and packaged for sale within Chile or for export. The price depends on the market. It has now dropped to 60 cents of a dollar per abalone.

“This is a low price given that we have to oversee the shellfish year-round, paying dearly for fuel, motors and boats and making a tremendous investment. An outboard motor, like the ones we use, costs 40 million pesos (about 50,000 dollars),” said Tellez.

At the pier in Tongoy, a seaside resort in northern Chile, shellfish divers prepare piures (a kind of sea squirt), which they try to sell to tourists by explaining how to eat them. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

He is dubious about moving towards industrialization, asking “How much more could we harvest and how much more would we have to invest?”

Proudly, he said his was “one of the best unions in the country. Partly because we are from the same area,” since all of the members live in Chepu or nearby towns.

In the Coquimbo region, Miguel Barraza, secretary of the Chigualoco fisherpersons union, 248 kilometers north of Santiago, is enthusiastic about transforming his cove.

At the cove, he told IPS that “1.1 billion pesos (1.37 million dollars) are going to be invested to make this a model cove. A new breakwater will be built, along with a bypass on the freeway and facilities to serve tourists.”

The new breakwater will protect boats from waves as they enter and exit the cove.

Thirty members and their families, including shellfish divers, fisherpersons and kelp harvesters, live in Chigualoco.

They have three management areas, the largest of which is 5000 square meters in size. From these areas they harvest 100,000 Chilean abalones and 300 tons of Chilean kelp a year.

“We earn enough to live year-round,” Barraza said, adding that they were not interested in processing their catch because “fishermen like to come ashore and sell.”

“We have overseers, but poachers come in from various sides. They are stealing a lot. We won a project to buy a drone to monitor the shore to find them,” he said.

In Guanaqueros, where Durán’s union is located, despite their seniority they have only now registered a management zone in their overexploited fishing area.

“We have an area that is not yet well developed. It has been difficult for us because most of us are fisherpersons. But the area is going to recover. The marine biologist says that 100,000 abalones could be harvested annually,” said Durán, looking for a shady spot to chat in his cove.

Today the area is looked after. It is about three kilometers in size and before it began to be regulated, people harvested abalone there for more than half a century without any limits.

“People are used to just harvesting without regulations and it is difficult to change that behavior. It’s a constant struggle and a problem to prevent disputes between fisherpersons…Many do not understand that the resources are there because other people take care of them,” he said.

As soon as fisherpersons and divers unload their products at the Tongoy pier, in the northern Chilean region of Coquimbo, crowded with tourists during the southern hemisphere summer, they are approached by customers seeking to buy products directly, without the need for intermediaries. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Low consumption of seafood, a public health problem

Durán lamented the low levels of consumption of fish and shellfish in Chile, despite the country’s abundant seafood.

“We don’t have culinary habits like in Peru (a country on Chile’s northern border) and we eat what we shouldn’t. There is no government promotion or policy that calls for consumption and it is a public health issue,” he said.

“I can’t conceive of the fact that there is a plant making fishmeal from Chilean jack mackerel (Trachurus murphyi) and that children are eating tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus),” a farmed fish, he added.

The Undersecretariat informed IPS that the annual consumption of seafood in 2021 was 16.6 kg per inhabitant, below the global average of 20 kg.

In Chile, fishing is the third largest economic activity, contributing around five billion dollars a year to the economy.

Chile is among the 10 largest fish producing countries in the world and is the global leader in aquaculture, second in salmon production and first in mussel exports.

The Undersecretariat is currently drafting a new law on the exploitation and conservation of seafood, for which it organized 150 meetings with artisanal fishermen and another 22 with representatives of industrial fishing and sector professionals.
The Undersecretariat told IPS that the objective is to promote and diversify the activity not only as a development strategy but also as a resource conservation strategy.

Mapuche activist Maria Hueichaqeo stands in front of the ruca (traditional Mapuche circular house) built on the Antu Mapu campus, which serves as the headquarters for the work of the Tain Adkimn Mapuche Indigenous Association, aimed at raising awareness in Chilean society of the situation of indigenous peoples and of how the Chilean state has mistreated them up to now. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jan 24 2023 (IPS)

Mapuche indigenous leaders were hit hard by what they see as a collective defeat: the rejection in a September referendum of a plurinational, intercultural constitution proposed to Chile by an unprecedented constituent assembly with gender parity and indigenous representatives.

“We felt devastated, some leaders cried. This defeat never crossed our minds because we thought this was going to change,” Nelly Hueichan, president of the Mapuche Trepeiñ Community, a women’s collective in the Lo Hermida municipality on the southside of Santiago, told IPS.

“For our people there has never been an easy solution…This is not the first time that we have been defeated,” added the 64-year-old activist.

“It was a tremendous challenge and an opportunity to change this society that has discriminated against us so much,” she said. “Now we have to stand up and resume the fight. We continue to organize and get ourselves ready.”

Hueichan came to Santiago when she was 17, from San Juan de la Costa, in the province of Osorno, 930 kilometers to the south. Her first job was as a domestic worker.

More than 13 million of Chile’s 19.5 million people voted in the Sept. 4 referendum, when 61.86 percent of voters (7,882,238) cast their ballot against the draft constitution and only 38.14 percent (4,859,039) voted to approve it.

Thus, voters rejected the proposal approved by more than two-thirds of the 154 elected members of the constituent assembly that sought to turn Chile into a plurinational and intercultural state.

According to the last census, 1.8 million Chileans belong to an indigenous group. The Mapuches make up the largest native community (80 percent of the total). They come from the south of the country, but half have moved away from there, mainly to Santiago. The next biggest communities are the Aymaras (7.1 percent) and the Diaguitas (4 percent), followed by the Atacameño, Quechua, Rapa Nui, Colla, Chango, Kawésqar and Yagán peoples.

The rejected constitution contained “the dreams of those who were not and have not been in power; it proposed a new path for Chileans that the citizens did not want to take,” said Mapuche linguist and professor Elisa Loncón, who presided over the first period of the constituent assembly.

Salvador Millaleo, a Mapuche professor at the University of Chile Law School, told IPS that “without a doubt indigenous peoples were harmed and damaged the most, because the proposal that was rejected had the most comprehensive framework of rights that has ever been put forth.”

The campaign for the “no” vote ahead of the referendum argued that excessive rights would be given to indigenous people, giving them a privileged position over other Chileans. The fearmongering played on long-standing racism embedded in Chilean society.

The Trepeiñ Community, presided over by Nelly Hueichan, brings together 35 Mapuche members who live in the municipality of Lo Hermida, mainly women with a similar background of labor and social discrimination. Their activities and meetings are carried out in a ruca (traditional Mapuche dwelling) that they also lend to other local residents to hold activities for social benefit. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Racism and repression

This racism was nourished by the repressive policies imposed on indigenous people by successive governments, especially the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Back then, the conflict over ownership of land claimed by indigenous groups but now in private hands, especially of forestry companies, was declared non-existent. In addition, Mapuche activists were tried and sentenced as terrorists, when they carried out actions demanding the return of their ancestral lands.

Indigenous leaders are demanding reparations for the violation of the human rights of the Mapuche people during crackdowns by the authorities and argue that priority must be given to the issue of usurped lands.

The poor handling of the Mapuche question means that the southern regions where most of them live are the poorest in Chile, plagued by precarious jobs and high unemployment, as well as serious deficiencies in education, infrastructure and healthcare.

“A fairly generalized climate has been generated among the political elites that are opposed to or do not prioritize the rights of indigenous peoples,” said Millaleo.

This environment contrasts with the one prevailing during the 2019 protests under the government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022), when Mapuche flags were raised in the massive demonstrations.

“Back then we were all very happy, but the leaders had little awareness that they had to consolidate this support, adopt strategies, seek broader backing in the indigenous world and among non-governmental organizations, and keep people in the territories informed,” said Millaleo.

The triumph of the “no” vote was the other side of the coin from the majority election of independent constituents in May 2021, which culminated in the installation two months later of a constituent assembly presided over by Loncón.

The Ceremonial Center of Indigenous Peoples, located on José Arrieta avenue in the municipality of Peñalolén, was inaugurated in May 2022. Sitting on 4.2 hectares of land it represents expressions and promotes traditions and customs of the Mapuche, Aymara and Rapa Nui cultures present in the municipality. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

False threat

María Hueichaqueo chairs one of the 130 Mapuche organizations in Santiago: the Tain Adkimn Mapuche Indigenous Association in the working-class municipality of La Pintana, where the population is 16 percent indigenous.

At the same time, rightwing politicians convinced many voters that indigenous people would take over the Chilean territory if the new constitution was approved.

“Nowhere in the world have indigenous peoples seized land that was ancestrally ours,” said Hueichaqueo. “In some cases mechanisms, treaties or agreements have been created to solve conflicts over land.”

Hueichaqueo, 57, moved to Santiago from Chol Chol, a municipality in the Araucanía region, 700 kilometers south of the capital.

“I was born in a ruca (traditional Mapuche house) and at the age of seven months I came here with my mother. My father is a cacique (chief) and lives in the Lonko José Poulef Community in Chol Chol,” she told IPS at the Antu Mapu (Land of the Sun) campus, the largest University of Chile campus, where the Faculty of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine is located.

According to Hueichaqueo, “what is happening is that the powers that be do not want to lose power. They feel that if the indigenous peoples have rights, their power will decline.”

The activist acknowledged that “we were unable to make a deeper analysis of the situation we were experiencing, in order to better understand what kind of representatives we needed in the constituent assembly.”

Indigenous errors

“Unfortunately not all of our indigenous brothers and sisters handled themselves well in the assembly,” she said. “Some took very extreme positions not in line with the real situation in the country. We are aware of the land claims and the violations of human rights. But that has to do with the State and we were talking about a new constitution, about everyone living together in the same territories.”

According to Hueichaqueo, the indigenous constituents distanced themselves from the organizations. To illustrate, she pointed out that some were elected with a large number of votes but then, in their own territories, a majority voted against the draft constitution.

Millaleo said that another mistake made by the indigenous representatives was “not daring to ask the radicalized groups that did not support the constituent assembly process to put down their weapons, and to clearly differentiate themselves from these groups.”

Hueichaqueo said that now the Mapuche people “are in a state of reflection. But we’re not sitting with our arms crossed, because indigenous peoples have a history of more than 500 years of mobilization and demands, and they are not going to stop us because of a constituent assembly that failed.”

“If it is not us, it will be our children, and if it is not our children it will be our grandchildren, but our demands will continue to be voiced as long as the Chilean State does not listen to the peoples and does not recognize the rights that it needs to recognize,” she said.

María Hueichaqueo stands surrounded by figures that represent men and women on the Antu Mapu university campus (“land of the sun” in Mapuche), in Santiago. They welcome students who attend an elective course to learn Mapudungun (Mapuche or Araucanian language) and to study indigenous inclusion in the history of Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

New attempt to rewrite the constitution

Hueichaqueo said she was “pessimistic regarding how much progress can be made in any new constitution that could be drafted because neither the State nor the government nor the political class are delivering democratic, participatory and governance guarantees” in this new process.

The Chilean Congress approved a new process with a committee of 24 experts elected by an equal number of votes from the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, which will draft a new constitution. It will start working on Mar. 6, the same day that another technical-administrative commission of 14 experts also appointed by Congress will be installed.

On May 7, 50 members of a joint Constitutional Council will be elected by Chile’s voters, with a gender balance and a minimum number of indigenous representatives. It will have five months to set forth a new constitution drawn up based on the preliminary draft created by the experts.

On Dec. 17, the new draft constitution will be submitted to a referendum.

But according to Loncón, this strategy is aimed at continuing to exclude indigenous people.

“Today they intend to write the new constitution with a discredited political elite, which will never speak the language of the peoples because they are not the peoples, and we can suspect that they only seek to maintain their positions of power and their benefits,” she said.

The poet’s view

For 50-year-old poet Elicura Chihuailaf, the first Mapuche to win the National Literature Prize, in 2020, it is difficult to understand the defeat “after it seemed that the majority of the population of Chile began to recognize it also has native heritage.”

Speaking to IPS from Cunco, 736 kilometers south of Santiago, he said that he sees ignorance among Chileans about the world view of native peoples.

“Everything that happened had to do to a great extent with the media, because of that superficial and alienated group that owns the media,” he asserted.

In his opinion, “history has been handled in a manner biased by the vested interests of a small group that I have called the superficial or alienated Chile, which has written its own version of history.”

“It ignores what was and continues to be the occupation of a territory, of a country, which was called and continues to be called ‘wal mapu’, the meeting of all the lands”, in the Mapuche language, Chihuailaf said.

“When you talk about development, it is said that the native peoples do not want it, but our peoples say we want development, but with nature and not against it,” he argued.

The award-winning poet said “the first step to recover the dignity of this country is for the popular classes to recognize their identity, and acknowledge that it comes from native peoples and that all cultures are important.”

“That the most beautiful blackness, the most beautiful yellowness, the most beautiful whiteness and the most beautiful brownness are neither more nor less than others,” he said.

The Municipal Theater building, the main artistic and cultural venue in Santiago, the capital of Chile, was lit up with LED bulbs in order to show local residents the benefits of energy efficiency to reduce costs and provide bright lighting. CREDIT: Fundación Chile

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Dec 8 2022 (IPS)

The Energy Efficiency Law began to gradually be implemented in Chile after the approval of its regulations, but more efforts and institutions are still lacking before it can produce results.

In Chile, the energy sector accounts for 74 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, producing 68 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. For this reason, energy efficiency is decisive in tackling climate change and saving on its costs.

The law passed in February 2021 and its regulations were issued on Sept. 13 of this year, but full implementation will still take time. The law itself states that its full application will take place “gradually”, without setting precise deadlines.

For example, the energy rating of homes and new buildings is voluntary for now and will only become mandatory in 2023. In addition, only practice will show whether the capacity will exist to oversee the sector and apply sanctions.

The aims of the law include reducing the intensity of energy use and cutting GHGs.

According to the public-private organization Fundación Chile, energy efficiency has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by 44 percent – a decisive percentage to mitigate climate change in this long, narrow South American country of 19.5 million people.

“For the first time in Chile, we have an Energy Efficiency Law. This is a key step in joining efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, since energy efficiency has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases by 35 percent,” the Foundation’s assistant manager for sustainability, Karien Volker, told IPS.

The law sets standards for transportation, industry, mining and the residential, public and commercial sectors. Land transportation accounts for an estimated 25 percent of the energy used in Chile and the 250 largest companies operating in the country consume 35 percent of the total.

Volker underscored that the law incorporates energy labeling, the implementation of an energy management system for large consumers and the development of a National Plan.

“Upon implementation of the law, a 10 percent reduction in energy intensity, a cumulative savings of 15.2 billion dollars and a reduction of 28.6 million tons of CO2 are expected by 2030,” she said.

She also argued that the law will push large companies to meet minimum energy efficiency standards, which will change the way they operate.

“New homes with energy efficiency certifications will raise the standard of construction in Chile and push builders to innovate,” said Volker.

She added that “the transportation sector will also be positively impacted by establishing efficiency and performance standards for vehicles entering Chile.”

Buildings with the new standards will consume only one third of the energy compared to the current ones.

In Chile, 53.3 percent of electricity is generated with renewable energy: hydroelectric, solar, biomass and geothermal. The remaining 46.7 percent comes from thermoelectric plants using natural gas, coal or petroleum derivatives, almost all of which are imported.

The refrigerators currently sold in Chile must have a mandatory label indicating their energy efficiency, where the highest A++ and A+ levels are labelled in green to demonstrate the savings they provide. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Negative track record on energy efficiency

But in the recent history of this South American country the experience of energy savings has not been a positive one. There was total clarity in the assessment of the situation and concrete suggestions of measures to advance in energy efficiency, but nothing changed, said engineer and doctor in systems thinking Alfredo del Valle, a former advisor to the United Nations and the Chilean government in these matters.

Del Valle told IPS that between 2005 and 2007 he acted as a methodologist for the Chilean Ministry of Economy’s Country Energy Efficiency Program to formulate a national policy in this field.

“With broad public, private, academic and citizen participation, we discovered almost one hundred concrete energy efficiency potentials in transportation, industry and mining, residential and commercial buildings, household appliances, and even culture,” he explained.

However, he lamented, “Chilean politicians fail to understand what politicians in the (industrialized) North immediately understood 30 years earlier: that it is essential to invest money and political will in energy efficiency, just as we invest in energy supply.”

Although a National Energy Efficiency Agency was created 12 years ago, “nothing significant is happening,” said Del Valle, current president of the Foundation for Participatory Innovation.

To illustrate, he noted that “the public budget for energy efficiency in 2020 is equivalent to just 10 million dollars compared to an investment in energy supply in the country of 4.38 billion dollars in the same year.”

According to the expert, “we need a new way of thinking and acting to be able to carry out social transformations and to be able to create our own future.”

Boric’s energy policy

The Energy Agenda 2022-2026 promoted by the leftist government of Gabriel Boric, in office since March, states that “energy efficiency is one of the most important actions for Chile to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.”

The document establishes actions and commitments to be implemented as part of the National Energy Efficiency Plan. Published at the beginning of this year, it proposes 33 measures in the productive sectors, transportation, buildings and ordinary citizens, according to the Ministry of Energy.

“With all these measures, we expect to reduce our total energy intensity by 4.5 percent by 2026 and by 30 percent by 2050, compared to 2019,” the Agenda states.

The plan announces an acceleration of the implementation of energy management systems in large consumers to encourage a more efficient use in industry, “as mandated by the Energy Efficiency Law that will be progressively implemented.”

According to the government, by 2026, 200 companies will have implemented energy management systems.

The authorities also announced support to micro, small and medium-sized companies for efficient energy use and management and will support 2000 in self-generation and energy efficiency.

“Although as a country we have made progress in the deployment of renewable energies for electricity generation, we have yet to transfer the benefits of renewable energy sources to other areas, such as the use of heat and cold in industry,” the document states.

Cambia el Foco is the name of the program promoted by Fundación Chile that included educating students to raise awareness about the need for energy efficiency. CREDIT: Fundación Chile

Improvement in housing quality

In Chile there are more than five million homes and most of them do not have adequate thermal insulation conditions, requiring a high use of energy for heating in the southern hemisphere winter and cooling in the summer.

The hope is that by making the “energy qualification” a requirement to obtain the final approval, the municipal building permit, the quality of housing using efficient equipment or non-conventional renewable energies will improve. This will allow greater savings in heating, cooling, lighting and household hot water.

In four years, the government’s Agenda aims to thermally insulate 20,000 social housing units, install 20,000 solar photovoltaic systems in low-income neighborhoods, recondition 400 schools to make them energy efficient, expand solar power systems in rural housing, improve supply in 50 schools in low-income rural areas and develop distributed generation systems up to 500 megawatts (MW).

In recent years, the Fundación Chile, together with the government and other entities, has promoted energy efficiency plans with the widespread installation of LED lightbulbs along streets and in other public spaces. It also promoted the replacement of refrigerators over 10 years old with units using more efficient and greener technologies.

One milestone was the delivery of 230,000 LED bulbs to educational facilities, benefiting more than 200 schools and a total of 73,000 students, employees and teachers.

The initiative made it possible to install one million LED bulbs, leading to an estimated saving of 4.8 percent of national consumption.

Meanwhile, the campaign for more efficient cooling expects the market share of such refrigerators to become 95 percent A++ and A+ products, to achieve savings of 1.3 terawatt hours (TWh – equivalent to one billion watt hours).

That would mean a reduction of 3.1 million tons of CO2 by 2030.

An old refrigerator accounts for 20 percent of a household’s electricity bill and a more efficient one saves up to 55 percent.

There are currently an estimated one million refrigerators in Chile that are more than 15 years old.

The administration of President Gabriel Boric, a self-described environmentalist, is facing a growing rift between scientists, social leaders and energy companies that have differences with regard to the production of green hydrogen in Magallanes. The first wind turbines have already been installed in the Magallanes region, in the far south of Chile, such as these in Laredo Bay, east of Cabo Negro, where companies are pushing green hydrogen projects in a scenario where environmental costs are beginning to take center stage. CREDIT: Courtesy of Erika Mutschke

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 12 2022 (IPS)

In Magallanes, Chile’s southernmost region, doubts and questions are being raised about the environmental impact of turning this area into the world’s leading producer of green hydrogen.

The projects require thousands of wind turbines, several desalination plants, new ports, docks, roads and hundreds of technicians and workers, with major social, cultural, economic and even visual impacts."The scale of production creates uncertainties, heightened because there is no baseline. The question is whether Chile currently has the capacity to carry out large-scale green hydrogen projects.” -- Jorge Gibbons

This long narrow South American country of 19.5 million people sandwiched between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean has enormous solar and wind energy potential in its Atacama Desert and southern pampas grasslands. This has led to a steady increase in electricity generation from clean and renewable sources.

In 2013, only six percent of the country’s total electricity generation came from non-conventional renewable sources (NCREs) – a proportion that climbed to 32 percent this year. Installed NCRE capacity in September reached 13,405 MW, representing 40.7 percent of the total. Of the NCREs, solar energy represents 23.5 percent and wind power 12.6 percent.

In Chile, NCREs are defined as wind, small hydropower plants )up to 20 MW), biomass, biogas, geothermal, solar and ocean energy.

According to the authorities, the wind potential of Magallanes could meet 13 percent of the world’s demand for green hydrogen, with a potential of 126 GW.

Green hydrogen is generated by low-emission renewable energies in the electrolysis of water (H2O) by breaking down the molecules into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2). It currently accounts for less than one percent of the world’s energy.

However, it is projected as the energy source with the most promising future to advance towards the decarbonization of the economy and the replacement of hydrocarbons, due to its potential in electricity-intensive industries, such as steel and cement, or in air and maritime transportation.

The National Green Hydrogen Strategy, launched in November 2021 by the second government of then right-wing President Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022), seeks to increase carbon neutrality, decrease Chile’s dependence on oil and turn this country into an energy exporter.

The government of his successor, leftist President Gabriel Boric, in office since March, created an Interministerial Council of the Green Hydrogen Industry Development Committee, with the participation of eight cabinet ministers.

A spokesperson from the Ministry of Energy told IPS that “this committee has agreed to bring forward, from 2025 to 2022, the update of the National Green Hydrogen Strategy and the new schedule for the allocation of state-owned land for these projects.”

“We will promote green hydrogen in a cross-cutting manner, with an emphasis on harmonious, fair and balanced local development. By bringing forward the update of the strategy, we seek to generate certainty for investors and to begin to create the necessary regulatory framework for the growth of this industry in our country,” he said.

In the area known as Cabo Negro, in the Chilean region of Magallanes, several companies have installed wind turbines to generate wind energy. The installation of thousands of turbines will affect the landscape of Magallanes and environmentalists believe it will impact many birds that migrate annually to this southern region. CREDIT: Courtesy of Erika Mutschke

Warnings from environmentalists

In a letter to the president, more than 80 environmentalists warned of the risk of turning “Magallanes y La Antarctica Chilena” – the region’s official name – into an environmental sacrifice zone for the development of green hydrogen.

“The energy transition cannot mean the sacrifice of migratory routes of birds that are in danger of extinction, otherwise it would not be a fair or sustainable transition,” said the letter, which has not yet received a formal response.

Environmentalists argue that the impact is not restricted to birds, but also affects whales that breed there, due to the effects of desalination plants, large ports and harbors.

Carmen Espoz, dean of science at the Santo Tomás University, who signed the letter, told IPS that “the main warning that we have tried to raise with the government, and with some of the companies with which we have spoken, is that there is a need for zoning or land-use planning, which does not exist to date, and for independent, quality baseline information for decision-making” on the issue.

Espoz, who also heads the Bahía Lomas Center in Magallanes, based in Punta Arenas, the regional capital, clarified that they are not opposed to the production of green hydrogen but demand that it be done right.

It is urgently necessary, she said in an interview in Santiago, to “stop making decisions at the central level without consultation or real participation of the local communities and to generate the necessary technical information base.”

The signatories asked Boric to create a Regional Land Use Plan with Strategic Environmental Assessment to avoid unregulated development of projects.

“We are not only talking about birds, but also about profound social, cultural and environmental impacts,” said Espoz, who argued that the model promoted by the government and green hydrogen developers “does not have a social license to implement it.”

Sunset at Laredo Bay in the Magallanes region where the Chilean government will have to decide on what changes in the grasslands are acceptable, in the face of a flood of requests to use the area for largescale green hydrogen projects. CREDIT: Courtesy of Erika Mutschke

The bird question

Prior to this letter to Boric, the international scientific journal Science published a study by Chilean scientists warning about potential impacts of wind turbines on the 40 to 60 species of migratory birds that visit Magallanes.

“It is estimated that the installation of wind turbines along the migratory paths of birds could affect migratory shorebird populations, which is especially critical in the cases of the Red Knot (Calidris canutus rufa) and the Magellanic Plover (Pluvianellus socialis),” said Espoz.

Both species, she said, “are endangered, as is the Ruddy-headed Goose (Chloephaga rubidiceps).”

She added that if 13 percent of the world’s green hydrogen is to be generated in southern Chile, some 2,900 wind turbines will have to be installed by 2027, “which could cause between 1,740 and 5,220 collisions with bird per year.”

Jorge Gibbons, a marine biologist at the University of Magallanes, based in Punta Arenas, said the big problem is that Magallanes does not have a baseline for environmental issues.

“The scale of production creates uncertainties, heightened because there is no baseline. The question is whether Chile currently has the capacity to carry out large-scale green hydrogen projects,” he told IPS from the capital of Magallanes.

Gibbons believes it would take about two years to update the data on the dolphin and Southern Right Whale (Eubalaena australis) populations

“The greatest risks to dolphins will be seen in the Strait of Magellan. I am talking about Commerson’s Dolphins (Cephalorhynchus commersonii), which are only found there in Chile and whose population is relatively small,” he said.

He proposed studying the route to ports and harbors of these species and to analyze how they breed and feed.

“The issue is how noise disturbs them or interrupts their routes. These questions are still unanswered, but we know some things because it is the best censused species in Chile,” he explained.

According to Gibbons, the letter to Boric is timely and will help reduce uncertainty because “the process is just beginning and the scientific and local community are now wondering if the plan will be well done.”

Conflict of interests

The partnership between HIF Chile and Enel Green Power Chile withdrew from the Environmental Evaluation System the study of the Faro del Sur Wind Farm project, involving an investment of 500 million dollars for the installation of 65 three-blade wind turbines on 3,791 hectares of land in Magallanes.

The study was presented in early August with the announcement that it was “a decisive step for the future of green hydrogen-based eFuels.”

But on Oct. 6, its withdrawal was announced after a series of observations were issued by the Magallanes regional Secretariat of the Environment.

“The observations of some public bodies in the evaluation process of this wind farm exceed the usual standards,” the consortium formed by the Chilean company HIF and the subsidiary of the Italian transnational Enel claimed in a statement.

The companies argued that “the authorities must provide clear guidelines to the companies on the expectations for regional development, safeguarding the communities and the environment.

“In light of these exceptional requirements, it is necessary to understand which requirements can be incorporated and which definitely make projects of this type unfeasible in the region,” they complained.

The government reacted by stating that it is important to remember that Faro del Sur is the first green hydrogen project submitted to the environmental assessment process in Magallanes.

“During the process, some evaluating entities made observations on the project, so the owners decided to withdraw it early, which does not prevent them from reintroducing it when they deem it convenient,” the Ministry of Energy spokesperson told IPS.

He added that the ministry stresses “the conviction to develop the green hydrogen industry in the country and that this means sending out signals, but in no case should this compromise environmental standards and citizen participation in the evaluation processes.”

The Nueva Zelandia school is leading a pioneering experience of community electricity generation with solar panels that will reduce the cost of consumption for the school and 20 local families taking part in the project in the poor municipality of Independencia to the north of Santiago. To this initiative, the school will add another one to recycle gray water to irrigate the gardens. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Aug 25 2022 (IPS)

Renewable energies, especially solar and wind power, are growing inexorably in Chile, driven by large companies. But community generation of alternative energy is not taking off, despite a law promoting it.

This long, narrow country of 19.5 million people, rich in solar energy due to the northern Atacama Desert as well as wind thanks to its location between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, can accelerate the transition to carbon neutrality, thanks to non-conventional renewable energies (NCRE), which also include hydroelectricity.

On Jul. 28 at 15:00 hours, NCRE broke the record for hourly participation in electricity generation in the country, accounting for 62.3 percent of the total. In 2021, renewable generation accounted for 44.8 percent of all electricity generated, equivalent to 35,892 gigawatt hours (GWh). The total generated that year was 80,116 GWh.

Ana Lía Rojas, executive director of the Chilean Association of Renewable Energies and Storage (Acera), which brings together companies in the field, said that all sectors are making progress in NCRE, especially energy and mining.

Acera estimated that 2022 could end with 13,000 to 14,000 megawatts (MW) of NCRE installed, and in fact there were already more than 12,370 MW in May.

“It’s been a long while since we represented 10 percent, we surpassed 20 percent five years before the date set by law and NCRE are currently above 35 percent of the total. This is a worldwide milestone,” said Rojas.

The target is now 50 percent in the next few years and 70 percent by 2030.

Andrés Díaz, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy and Development at the private Diego Portales University, said “the increase in the share of NCRE in the energy mix, as well as the promotion of storage systems, is fundamental as part of the energy transition we are facing.

“When it comes to meeting the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets resulting from the retirement of coal-fired plants, NCRE must be able to ensure stability in the electric power system,” he told IPS.

Díaz added that this implies providing the capacity to act in the event of possible failures in the transmission systems.

“There is a pedagogical aspect, the solar panels teach children how elements of nature can contribute technologically to making available a resource essential for human life that does not harm the environment,” says Rita Méndez, principal of the Nueva Zelandia school, in the municipality of Independencia on the northern outskirts of Santiago, Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Community generation lacks momentum

These enormous advances in NCRE have not gone hand in hand with the meager development of community generation projects, the distributed or decentralized generation modality focused on self-consumption, mostly solar and collectively owned.

Nicolás O’Ryan, an electrical civil engineer and founding partner of Red Genera, promoted a community NCRE project at the Nueva Zelandia school in the low-income municipality of Independencia, on the northern outskirts of Santiago, by installing solar panels on the roof of the gymnasium.

The initiative is one of the very few promoted using Law 21118, which has been in force for two years, to encourage community electricity generation, also known as citizen generation.

The government’s Energy Sustainability Agency financed 50 percent of the 21,000-dollar investment. A further 3,158 dollars were contributed by Red Genera and the remaining 7,368 dollars were raised by five individuals and a campaign of donations from individuals and companies.

The panels will provide 26,703 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Of that total, 29.67 percent will go to the school and 3.52 percent to each of the beneficiaries and investors.

The connection process with Enel Chile, the subsidiary of the Italian transnational electricity group Enel, “is well advanced and only the last step remains – notifying the connection,” O’Ryan told IPS.

The energy will serve the school’s consumption and that of 20 neighboring families. The rest will be managed through a process known locally as Net Billing, the simultaneous measurement of consumption and injection of energy into the grid, which enables any user to self-generate electricity and inject the surplus into the grid, receiving a payment for it.

“By the end of the year I hope we will be ready…we need institutional support to channel the process and resolve difficulties such as the change of administration of the school, that will be transferred to the Local Education Service,” he said.

The school’s principal, Rita Méndez, told IPS that the plant contributes to the education of the 393 children (more than 50 percent of them sons and daughters of immigrants, mostly Venezuelans) who are in the 10 grades in the school in this underprivileged neighborhood, starting in kindergarten.

“The plant helps us to train new citizens in environmental awareness, who help care for the environment and think about how to use clean energy to contribute to the development of life,” she said in an interview at the center.

Part of the 33,600 solar panels installed in August 2020 in the vicinity of Til Til, in northern Santiago, with an investment of 15 million dollars and a useful life of about 30 years. In this municipality, one of the poorest in Chile, the project covers 23 hectares and will generate nine megawatts of electric power. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Pioneer project, five years on

Environmental lawyer Cristian Mires, co-founder of the non-governmental Energía Colectiva, presides over Buin Solar, the first initiative in Chile aimed at generating electricity on a community basis, founded in 2017.

At the time 100 people contributed upwards of 52 dollars each to finance a 10 KW solar panel plant installed at the energy laboratory of the Environment Institute (Idma) in Buin, a town 47 kilometers south of Santiago.

The energy is consumed by the Institute and any surplus is injected into the grid. After 10 years of operation, the plant will be transferred to Idma.

Idma pays about 215 dollars a month for the energy, but without panels the cost would have been twice as much. And it consumes clean energy, an important aspect for an Institute that trains professionals to combat climate change.

“Buin Solar was a pioneer collective project to build the first community plant. It is a successful project that has been a great learning experience and has highlighted the importance of working in associative projects,” said Mires.

He added that “community energy is an urgent solution to address the climate crisis. Buin Solar has social, environmental and economic benefits.”

However, the environmentalist regrets the slow progress made in community generation despite the existence of a legal framework that promotes its development.

“The promotion of community energy is very weak, the democratization of energy is very low,” he argued.

According to Mires, trust must be built to work collectively, but incentives are also needed to overcome the financing barrier and the lack of technical capabilities.

“It would be very important to have instruments for promotion. There is a commitment in the government program of President Gabriel Boric (in power since March), which mentions community generation. We are committed to greater development of this kind of energy generation. Up to now, most of them are individual projects,” he said.

The Los Cururos wind farm, inaugurated in 2014, is located in the middle of the desert of the Coquimbo region, facing the Pacific Ocean. The plant contributes 109.6 megawatts of power to Chile’s Central Interconnected System. It belongs to the private EPM Group and has 57 wind turbines of 1.8 and 2.0 megawatts. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Distributed generation – a minimal contribution to the energy mix

Distributed generation is characterized by small power plants that do not exceed 300 kilowatts (kW), as opposed to centralized generation, with large plants that inject all their production into the transmission grid. And while it has grown in terms of the number of individual actors, their contribution to the system is very small.

Felipe Gallardo, a research engineer at Acera, told IPS that as of June there were 12,365 distributed or decentralized NCRE generation facilities in private hands, totaling 125 MW, equivalent to 0.4 percent of the country’s installed capacity.

“Of the Net Billing installations, over 98 percent involve solar photovoltaic technology,” he said. The largest number are in the central regions of Chile.

Diaz, meanwhile, stressed the importance of increasing the number of individuals who generate energy for their own consumption and contribute their surpluses to the grid.

“Energy self-management allows customers not only to receive income for the energy injected into the grid, but also to avoid contingencies in the national electricity system,” he said.

A view of the sunrise amid the steam from the geysers of El Tatio, in the Antofagasta region, where geothermal energy, a non-conventional, clean, infinite source of energy from the earth’s internal heat that abounds in northern Chile, has begun to be harnessed. CREDIT: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Obstacles to NCRE

A worrying figure is the explosive growth in the dumping of non-conventional renewable energy, due to difficulties in transporting it because of the lack of transmission lines to large consumption centers.

This year 290 GWh of wind and solar energy could not be used.

“Future development depends on storage systems to ensure the stability of NCRE while we move forward in fulfilling the agreements for the retirement of coal-fired plants,” said Diaz.

Gallardo regretted the impact of dumping energy at the country level “because as long as there are these types of limitations, thermal power plants are necessary, which have a higher variable cost and generate polluting emissions.”

“As renewables expand and, on the other hand, coal-fired plants are retired, it will be necessary to adopt additional measures to increase the levels of maximum NCRE participation,” he said.

The Acera advisor believes that in the medium term, storage systems should be implemented to avoid NCRE dumping.

He also says it will be necessary to continue improving the regulatory framework for storage systems.

During the first three months of the year, the Quebrada Santander Rural Sanitation System supplied three to four truckloads of water daily to supply the empty tanks in the neighboring town of Pichasca - solidarity typical of these systems in Chile, which did not endanger the supply of its members and was supported by special subsidies to cover the water emergency. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
RENGO, Chile, Aug 16 2022 (IPS)

Local leaders of the Rural Sanitation Services (RSS) warn that the digging of illegal wells by large agro-export companies in Chile is aggravating the effects of drought and threatening drinking water supplies and social peace.

Leaders of these programs also emphasize that the new constitution that may emerge from the Sept. 4 plebiscite would guarantee the human right to water, which would strengthen its management and that of river basins, in addition to facilitating a response to the water crisis to prevent it from triggering protests and social conflict.

Water rights were commercialized during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and between 1994 and 2006 the governments in power during the democratic transition sold the large water utilities to foreign companies, which have controlled the water supply in Chile’s cities since then.

The water supply in rural areas, considered unprofitable by these companies, was left in the hands of the country’s 2,306 RSS, which were institutionalized and transformed into Rural Sanitation Services in 2020 by a legal reform. They operate throughout this long narrow South American country of 19.5 million people and have 7,000 leaders and 6,000 workers.

The RSS, made up of cooperatives, local residents’ committees and other social organizations of different sizes, have the role of guaranteeing the drinking water supply in rural areas, with the State as supervisor and infrastructure provider. It is possible that in the future they will also take on responsibility for sanitation.

These systems benefit 2.1 million people, to whom they provide water at a lower price than the distribution and sanitation companies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 90 percent of the RSS never stopped serving their users, and despite the quarantine most of them paid their monthly fees, to maintain the system.

The Directorate of Hydraulic Works (DOH) of the Public Works Ministry told IPS that during the 2021-2022 period it will invest some 57 million dollars in seeking new sources of supply, and in the conservation and integral improvement of the systems. For 2023 the projected investment is 14 million dollars.

Maintenance is an ongoing job at the La Alianza RSS in the town of Choapino, some 105 km south of Santiago, Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Relief for growing water stress

The Chilean economy is based on mining, especially copper, and large agricultural exports, two industries that require large amounts of water in a country with limited water resources.

The result is growing water stress, which accentuates the tension between powerful industries and human consumption and small-scale agriculture, aggravated by the private management of an essential resource such as water.

Against this backdrop, the RSS have alleviated access to water, but as recurrent droughts and other climatic impacts accentuate the water deficit, their role is becoming more difficult, without a substantial change in the right to water.

Francisco Santander, treasurer of the RSS in Quebrada Santander, in the Andes foothills 450 km north of Santiago, told IPS that “the first well we drilled by hand with 20 members in 1999. Now there are 45 of us.”

“The largest 50-meter well was dug five years ago. It is one of the deepest in the municipality of Río Hurtado. We bought a piece of land and applied for a drilling project. The money was provided by the DOH,” he said in an interview from his hometown.

The investment included pumps, a solar panel for energy, gabions (a basket or container filled with earth, stones, or other material), a well and a 50,000 liter tank.

“Last summer, faced with the drought crisis, we sold water to Pichasca (a neighboring town). They asked us for help. We gave them up to four truckloads a day for their tanks and they paid with an emergency subsidy. Our well is holding up well under a moderate level of consumption,” Santander proudly explained.

The solar panel was the first in Rio Hurtado and reduced energy costs by one-sixth. It contributes to the low price charged for water: 1.3 dollars per cubic meter and 2.2 dollars as a basic service fee.

Gloria Alvarado with the RSS in El Patagual, which serves 800 members in Pichidegua, a municipality of 18,000 inhabitants 165 km south of Santiago, was president of the National Federation of Rural Drinking Water and was a member of the Constitutional Convention that drafted the new constitution that voters will approve or reject in next month’s plebiscite.

Speaking to IPS from El Patagual, as a national expert, she warned about the critical water situation caused by climate change and drought, which is aggravated by overuse, poor distribution of rights and deficient watershed management.

A view of the 75-cubic-meter water storage tank installed at La Alianza, in Choapino, where the office also operates to attend to the needs of members and receive payment of their bills. The users of these rural sanitation systems, which are common in Chile, are not usually late with their payments, because thanks to these systems they have water in a country where water management has mostly been privatized. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

“Petorca (a municipality 205 km north of Santiago) has a very green side with avocado plantations, but has another where the people have no water to drink and are supplied by water trucks. It is difficult for a 50-meter RSS well to compete with a 200-meter well,” she said, complaining about the agro-export companies.

She also alluded to the heavy use of water by forestry companies in southern Chile and mining companies “which until recently had no obligation to report their water use,” as they now do thanks to Article 56 of the new Water Code.

In Chile’s central valley, the plantations of fruit exporters have expanded exponentially, without any limits on their expansion, which has left many areas at water risk, Alvarado said.

“There is no land use planning or protection of the ecological function of the land. Today rural drinking water is at serious risk because there is unequal competition between those who extract for human consumption and those who extract for commercial and industrial use,” she said.

“Seventy-nine percent of water rights are in the hands of one percent of Chileans. It is inequitable and many families suffer the consequences,” she said, complaining that an essential resource has been transformed in Chile into a tradable commodity.

José Rivera is the administrator of the 500-family RSS in La Alianza in Choapino, in the municipality of Rengo, 105 km south of Santiago.

The town is part of the central region of O’Higgins, the largest exporter of fruit, wine, pork and chicken, “which basically means it exports water,” he said during a visit by IPS to the La Alianza facilities. As a result, he said, “we used to make 30-meter wells here, today we dig 100-meter wells, and in the nearby municipality of Machalí we dig 200 meters.”

According to Rivera, who is secretary of the National Federation of RSS Chile, another problem in O’Higgins is that for the last 10 years wells have been dug stealthily and without oversight.

“Farmers have so many plantations that they began to extract groundwater and make clandestine wells. There are thousands of wells” that nothing is known about and which are subject to no controls, he said.

Their RSS has two wells: one is 80 meters deep and the other 100. One collects water in a 75,000-liter metal tank and the other in a 200,000-liter concrete tank. A third 200,000-liter tank is planned.

“Before, we were basically the only ones who used groundwater. Today the agribusiness companies are replacing river water with groundwater and we have no inspectors in the General Water Directorate. They have no resources and no authorization to enter a farm,” Rivera said.

One solution, in his opinion, would be the use of drones to investigate unregistered wells.

“The biggest problem, and I’m speaking for the association, is that there is a war of wells. If I dig a 40-meter well, the farm will dig a 100-meter well and so on and so forth. The State will not have resources and neither will we. And there will be another outbreak of social unrest,” he predicted.

Rivera calls the situation “a silent water earthquake,” after touring the region and seeing the thousands of hectares of land planted.

“The coastal dry land is full of olive trees, where there were none before. Pichidegua is full of avocado trees. It is a crime because we have no water. The powerful, who own 500 or 1000 hectares, take water from here and transport it to the hills, where there are more and more plantations,” he said.

Meanwhile, “there are small farmers with five or six hectares who are without water,” he said, describing the situation as “serious, a powderkeg.”

José Rivera, administrator of the La Alianza RSS, checks the instruments of the new flow measurement system that indicates, second by second, how much water is in the tank and how much is being consumed in the water starters installed in the houses of each of the members of this rural sanitation system, a social organization unique to Chile, which alleviates the water deficit in the country. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Water as a human right

Alvarado said the solution to water management lies in the new constitution.

The text approved by the Constitutional Convention “will redistribute the right to use water,” she said. “It will put an end to the ownership of rights, which will be converted into use authorizations.”

She said that one of the origins of the water crisis is that there is an over-granting of rights that exceed the actual water sources and that there are very few water inspectors.

“An autonomous National Water Agency will be created and there will be integrated basin management in which users will be on an equal footing,” she said.

Rivera said the large landowners deceive small farmers by telling them that if the new constitution is approved they will be left without water, while “the constitutional proposal actually states that water is a public good.”

A step in the right direction

He highlighted, as a positive step, the promulgation in April of this year, under the government of leftwing President Gabriel Boric, of the reformed Water Code “for which we fought for 15 years.”

“The new law is very good because it protects rural areas and indicates that no one can ask for a concession in a rural area. They cannot privatize. Urban sanitation companies cannot enlarge their area of operation,” he stressed.

“We were recognized as RSS and today we can dig wells and draw water if it is for survival and basic consumption,” he added.

“Nobody wanted to change the Water Code, nobody wants to change the constitution…who is ‘nobody’? the economic powers-that-be. They do not want to change. We have to change,” he argued.

View of the interior of the Reborn plant, where electric buses are manufactured, for now for the state-owned copper company Codelco, to which a hundred units are to be delivered in December, destined for the El Teniente mine, the largest underground copper mine in the world, with some 3,000 tunnels. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jul 15 2022 (IPS)

The manufacture in Chile of an electric bus christened Queltehue, a wading bird native to the country, is another step towards electromobility and in the fight against pollution that triggers frequent environmental crises and smog emergencies in Santiago and other cities.

The National Electromobility Strategy, updated and relaunched in 2021, aims for 100 percent of the public transport vehicle fleet and 40 percent of private cars to be electric by 2050. By 2035, internal combustion engine cars will no longer be sold in this country.

That means that in less than 30 years some five million vehicles will switch from fuel to electricity, avoiding the emission of some 11 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year and reducing spending on oil and petroleum products by more than 3.3 billion dollars a year.

Electric mobility can also be clean and with zero emissions, if this long narrow South American country sandwiched between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean takes advantage of its enormous potential to produce solar and wind energy thanks to the abundant sunlight in the Atacama Desert and the strong winds in coastal areas and in the southern region of Magallanes.

However, much remains to be done because there are currently only about 2,750 electric vehicles in circulation in Chile and there are only about 310 public chargers to serve them.

A notable stride forward in the last four years has been the increase in the number of electric public transport buses, which now account for 20 percent of the 6,713 buses that serve passengers in Santiago, where 7.1 million of the country’s 19.1 million inhabitants live.

At the Los Espinos Electroterminal, in the municipality of Peñalolén in the Andes foothills bordering Santiago, the electric buses of the private company Metbus begin and end their routes through the Chilean capital. “We noticed that the passengers are more relaxed,” company inspector José Bazán, who traveled twice to Shenzhen, China to buy the electric buses, told IPS. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

In May, Minister of Transport and Telecommunications Juan Carlos Muñoz confirmed that another 70 electric buses will serve some 50,000 daily passengers in the working-class municipalities of La Pintana, San Joaquín and Puente Alto, on the southern outskirts of Santiago.

“Bringing electromobility and its benefits to sectors that have been left behind by development not only makes a city more sustainable, it makes it more inclusive,” he said at the time.

“Quality transportation is fundamental for people to leave their cars parked and opt for more efficient modes, which will allow us to make Santiago an environmentally friendly city,” Muñoz added.

So far, electric buses for public transport, a sector that is in private hands in Chile, have come from Chinese companies, especially BYD and Foton, but that is expected to change as electric mobility expands.

The strategy not only targets public transportation, but also freight, commercial vehicles and vehicles used in key industries in the local economy, such as mining.

Engineers Ricardo Repenning and Felipe Cevallos, partners in Reborn, pose for a photo in front of their factory in Rancagua, the first in Chile to manufacture and reassemble electric buses, for now for the state copper industry, but with the intention of extending to urban and rural public transport. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Successful experience in the mines

Felipe Cevallos, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer, and Ricardo Repenning, a 33-year-old electrical engineer, are partners in the Chilean company Reborn Electric Motors, which began by converting diesel vehicles to electric ones, but this year will manufacture 104 electric buses for the El Teniente mine of the state-owned copper company Codelco.

These buses do not emit CO2 or make noise and can safely carry 24 passengers each.

“We have successfully carried passengers a total of 210,000 kilometers in the mine in difficult conditions of mud and salt, steep slopes and high levels of humidity,” Cevallos proudly told IPS during a visit to the company’s plant in the municipality of Rancagua, 86 kilometers south of Santiago.

The 3,000-square-meter automotive facility employs 50 people whose average age is 30, and can produce up to 200 vehicles per year.

The buses are made up of 45 percent Chilean parts, while the bodies are brought from Brazil, the engines come from Canada and the batteries are made in China.

“We manufacture the power and control branches, the distribution strip and the low to high voltage domains, the structures, displays and software to run the systems and the engine cooling cycles and other components,” Cevallos said.

A picture of one of the electric buses on the assembly line at the Reborn plant. Each bus contains 45 percent Chilean parts, while the rest are imported from Brazil, Canada and China. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

At El Teniente, the world’s largest underground copper deposit, there are 24 double-gun 150-kw chargers that can charge two Queltehue buses in 40 minutes.

(The scientific name of the Queltehue or Southern Lapwing, the species for which the bus was named, is Vanellus chilensis.)

Other buses operate from Rancagua and another 10 chargers are being installed at the terminal of Transportes Link, the operator of the public transport service, in partnership with Reborn.

“Fast charging requires more power and better splicing. The electrolinera charging station charges faster, but the vehicle must be able to support faster charging,” Repenning explained.

Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer and exporter, is committed to using only electric vehicles to transport workers at El Teniente, which is located under the hill of the same name in the municipality of Machalí, some 120 kilometers from Santiago.

“The 104 buses that we will deliver will transport the workers between their arrival points and locker rooms to the interior of the mine. Each one travels 15 to 20 kilometers, largely through tunnels,” said Repenning.

He added that Reborn manufactures and reassembles electric buses.

“We started out by reconverting diesel buses that had reached the end of their useful life and transforming them into 100 percent electric. In 2020 we started making brand-new 100 percent electric buses in the Rancagua factory,” he explained.

Cables of all colors and sizes are used at the Reborn electric bus plant in the Chilean town of Rancagua. The company is recognized by the international Society of Automotive Engineers. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The company is now focused on transportation in the mining industry, but its technology can be applied to urban and rural transportation – and that is the direction of its future expansion.

Reborn has been recognized by SAE International, formerly named the Society of Automotive Engineers.

“When the batteries were very heavy, a lot of passenger capacity was lost. Today, batteries have greatly improved their energy density,” and that facilitates the electrification of public transportation, Repenning said.

Pending challenges

Land transportation absorbs about 30 percent of the total energy consumed by Chile and the greenhouse gases it generates represent between 17 and 25 percent of the total gases emitted by this country.

Luciano Ahumada, director of the School of Information Technology and Telecommunications at the Diego Portales University (UDP), told IPS that “electromobility is a tremendous tool, perhaps the most important one, for achieving carbon neutrality and thus making us responsible for our environment.”

Ahumada said that among the biggest problems of electromobility are the high price of vehicles and the lack of confidence among users that they can count on a network that recharges batteries in a timely manner.

The private company Metbus is a pioneer in electromobility in Chile. It brought the first two electric buses from China in 2017. It now operates 1,430 electric buses, the largest fleet in South America, with vehicles equipped with air-conditioning, WIFI, USB and camera systems. At the Electroterminal it installed solar panels to generate the energy it consumes in its offices. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

An electric bus in Chile costs around 300,000 dollars and a car around 50,000 dollars. But the operating cost of both is a third or a quarter of that of combustion engine vehicles.

“The biggest challenge is to generate an incentive for the purchase and production of electric vehicles and to create and install charging infrastructure and a charging management system that is reliable and sustainable,” said Ahumada.

Héctor Novoa, a professor at the UDP Faculty of Architecture who is working on a doctoral thesis on electric mobility, believes that the Chilean electromobility strategy has pros and cons.

“Chile has the largest fleet in the southern hemisphere with electric buses in public transportation,” he noted.

“But its public policy has gone hand in hand with favoring the involvement of actors that have a share of the energy business. Electromobility is also a business model,” Novoa said.

He cited as examples the Copec group of companies, dedicated to forestry, energy and gas stations, and the Chilean subsidiary of the Italian transnational Enel, focused on electricity and gas.

Many young university graduates work at the Reborn company that operates in the city of Rancagua, south of the Chilean capital, where electric buses are assembled for the El Teniente copper mine, but which has a goal of producing buses for urban and rural public transport. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

“Copec has electric vehicle terminals. Where previously the buses were supplied with fuel, now they are sold electricity. Public policy has gone hand in hand with the private sector to secure for it certain parts of the business,” Novoa told IPS.

But the academic regretted that the installation of public electric chargers “has targeted certain upscale neighborhoods and municipalities of Santiago, which points to a strengthening of inequality.

“The charging infrastructure is too limited to allow charging in public places without being exposed to being vandalized,” he acknowledged.

Novoa also called for greater clarity regarding how the city would absorb the new charging infrastructure and make the distribution more egalitarian.

He concurred with Ahumada that “electromobility is a key element for decarbonization” and he also believes that the high price of electric vehicles limits their development.

He stressed, however, that “electromobility is based on an awareness linked to scientific evidence in international forums that brings the ecological and scientific world closer to politics.”

The academic also urged consideration of a largely ignored aspect: the fact that an important part of vehicle emissions comes not from exhaust but from brake pad and tire wear that produces toxic particulate matter.

In saturated zones this fine particulate matter pollutant is significant, Novoa said.

“Climate change has accelerated the transformation processes associated with decarbonizing not only transport, but also other areas linked to industry, such as energy generation,” he said.

The municipality of Puchuncaví in central Chile turns greens after days of rain, but next to it are the smokestacks of the industries located in this development pole that turned this town and the neighboring town of Quintero into "sacrifice zones", with the emission of pollutants that damaged the environment and the health of local residents, which will finally begin to be dismantled. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
QUINTERO, Chile, Jul 4 2022 (IPS)

A health crisis that in 20 days left 500 children poisoned in the adjacent municipalities of Quintero and Puchuncaví triggered the decision to close the Ventanas Smelter, in a first concrete step towards putting an end to a so-called “sacrifice zone” in Chile.

The measure was supported by President Gabriel Boric who reiterated his determination to move towards a green government.

The decision by the state-owned National Copper Corporation (Codelco), the world’s leading copper producer, was announced on Jun. 17, following a temporary stoppage of the plant eight days earlier, and was opposed only by the powerful Federation of Copper Workers.

The union reacted by calling a strike, which ended after two days, when the leaders agreed to discuss an organized closure of the smelter, which will take place within a maximum of five years. The smelting and refining facility will be replaced by another modern plant at a site yet to be determined.

The smelter is an outdated facility that has suffered repeated episodes of sulfur dioxide pollution, one of the chemicals causing the deteriorating health of the inhabitants of Quintero, a city of 26,000, and Puchuncaví, population 19,000.

In the last three years Codelco invested 152 million dollars to modernize the smelter but without success, admitted Codelco’s president, Máximo Pacheco.

Pacheco argued that the closure was due to “the climate of uncertainty that has existed for decades, which is very bad for the workers, their families and the community.”

Sara Larraín, executive director of the non-governmental organization Sustainable Chile, said the definitive closure of the plant does justice.

“It is the first step for Quintero and Puchuncaví to get out of the category of damage that is called a ‘sacrifice zone’ where for decades the emission standards have been exceeded,” she told IPS.

“Sacrifice zones” are areas that have suffered excessive environmental damage due to industrial pollution. Residents of poor communities in these areas bear a disproportionate burden of pollution, toxic waste and heavy industry.

The back of the Ventanas Smelter reveals the poor operating conditions of the copper processing facility in Chile, which will be replaced by a new one within a maximum of five years at an as yet undefined site. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The two adjacent municipalities, 156 kilometers west of Santiago, qualify as a sacrifice zone, as do Mejillones, Huasco and Tocopilla, in the north, and Coronel in southern Chile, because the right to live in a pollution-free environment is violated in these areas.

In Quintero and Puchuncaví the main source of sulfur dioxide is the Ventanas Smelter, responsible for 61.8 percent of emissions of this element, causing widespread health problems.

Fisherman-diver forced to move away returns to Quintero

Carlos Vega, a fishermen’s union leader in Quintero, is the third generation of divers in his family.

“My grandfather, a fisherman, taught me how to make fishing nets. He had a restaurant on the coast,” he told IPS, visibly moved, adding that his two brothers are also fishermen and divers, who catch shellfish among the rocks along the coast.

“Fishing was profitable here. We were doing well and making money,” he said.

He added that people are well-organized in the area. “At one time we were the largest producer” of seafood and fish for central Chile, “because we had management and harvesting areas. But they had to close because of the pollution,” he said, describing the poverty that befell the local fishers in the late 1980s.

Then the health authorities found copper, cadmium and arsenic in the local seafood and banned its harvest. As a result, the small fishermen’s bay where they keep their boats and sell part of their catch lost their customers.

The crisis forced him to move to the south where he worked for 15 years as a professional diver in a salmon company.

Carlos Vega, a fisherman, diver and trade union leader, and Kata Alonso, spokeswoman for Women of Sacrifice Zones in Resistance, pose for a photo in the bay of Quintero, during the celebrations in that town and in neighboring Puchuncaví for the announcement of the definitive closure of the Ventanas Smelter of the state-owned Codelco copper company, whose polluting emissions have damaged the local environment and made local residents sick for decades. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Today, back in Quintero, with two sons who are engineers and a daughter who is a teacher, he continues to dive, albeit sporadically. He participates along with 27 fishermen in the management area granted to the north of the sacrifice zone, where they extract shellfish quotas two or three times a year.

“The social fabric was broken down here, that is the hardest thing that has happened to us,” said Vega.

Codelco is not the only polluter

Codelco is the main exporter in Chile, a long narrow country of 19.1 million people sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains where the big mines are located. In 2021 it produced 1.7 million tons of copper and its pre-tax income totaled nearly 7.4 billion dollars.

“Chile is the leading global copper producer and the world is going to become more electric every day,” said Pacheco. “And copper is the conductor par excellence, there is no substitute. We have to be ready for copper to be increasingly in demand in this energy transition.”

The president of Codelco emphasized that the wealth does not lie in exporting concentrate, which has 26 percent copper, but anodes with 99 percent purity, “and for that we need a smelter and a refinery.”

Young residents of Quintero and Puchuncaví came out in a drum line to celebrate the closure of the Ventanas Smelter and participate in a Festival for Life which lasted eight hours and was joined by a hundred local and national artists. Thousands of people gathered in the square which is on the edge of Quintero on Saturday, Jun. 25. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

But the smelter, he explained, must be modern and not like Ventanas, which only captures 95 percent of the gases released. In the last three years, Codelco has lost 50 million dollars in the Ventanas smelter, which has a production scale of 420,000 tons. A modern Flash furnace produces 1.5 million tons and captures 99.8 percent of the gases.

The Ventanas Smelter employs 348 people and another 400 in associated companies. Half of them do not live in the area but in Viña del Mar, Villa Alemana or Quilpué, towns that are also in the region of Valparaíso, but are located far from the pollution.

The smelter is part of an industrial cluster that includes 16 companies.

After the latest health crisis, the authorities decreed contingency plans in plants and maritime terminals of six companies for emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and applied an Atmospheric Prevention and Decontamination Plan.

Four coal-fired thermoelectric plants also pollute the area, one of which was definitively closed in December 2020 and another that was to be closed last May, although the measure was postponed.

According to environmentalist Larraín, when the smelter and the four thermoelectric plants are closed “better standards can be achieved, at least with respect to sulfur dioxide and heavy metals,” in Quintero and Puchuncaví.

View from the road of the Ventanas Smelter, in central Chile, which has been temporarily shut down since Jun. 9 and whose antiquated facilities will be permanently closed in a maximum of five years. They are adjacent to populated areas that have been turned into so-called “sacrifice zones” where local residents periodically suffer environmental and health emergencies due to sulfur dioxide fumes. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The plan to continue decontaminating

Other pollutants are VOCs linked to the refineries of the state-owned oil company Empresa Nacional de Petróleo (Enap) and the private company Gasmar.

Kata Alonso, spokeswoman for the Mujeres en Zona de Sacrificio en Resistencia (Women in Sacrifice Zone in Resistance) collective, told IPS that “the prevention plan is good so that people don’t continue to be poisoned, so that they can breathe better, and so that the companies that pollute can close their doors, instead of the schools.

“There are companies that were built before the environmental law was passed that have not taken health measures. So what we are asking is for each company to be evaluated, and those that do not comply with the regulations must leave,” she said.

The repeated crises occur despite the fact that Chile’s environmental standards are below those of the World Health Organization (WHO).

For level 10 particulate matter, the mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets in the air, the ceiling in Chile is 150 milligrams per cubic meter (m3) and the WHO ceiling is 50.

For particulate matter 2.5 (fine inhalable particles), in Chile the limit is 50 milligrams per m3, while the WHO guideline is 25. And the Chilean ceiling for sulfur dioxide is 250 milligrams per m3 compared to the WHO’s limit of 20.

Three years ago, the Chilean Pediatric Society and the Chilean Medical Association requested that Chile raise its emission standards to WHO levels.

Part of the audience at the Festival for Life, which celebrated the closure of a copper smelter, that along with 15 other industrial plants turned the municipalities of Quintero and Puchuncaví into “sacrifice zones” in central Chile. Performances by musicians and other artists from around the country were interspersed with messages calling for a life free of pollution in the area. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Alonso the activist said that “my two neighbors died of cancer, whoever you ask in Puchuncaví has relatives who died of cancer. Today people are dying younger, breast and uterine cancer have increased in young women, and there are so many miscarriages.

“The statistic we have is that one in four children in Puchuncaví are born with severe neurological problems, down syndrome, autism. Here in Quintero there are two special education schools and many children with learning disabilities,” she said.

Larraín called for “government support for those who have been affected by irreversible diseases, asthma, lung cancer and others that have been proven to be caused by coal combustion and heavy metals.”

The Catholic University conducted a study using data on hospitalizations and mortality in Tocopilla, Mejillones, Huasco, Quintero and Puchuncaví.

“The rates for cardiovascular disease associated with industrial processes are clear. In some cases they are 900 percent higher. Calling them sacrifice zones is real, it refers to impacts that are occurring today,” said Larraín.

The environmentalist said it would be difficult to revive Quintero Bay “because it has a gigantic layer of coal at the bottom, dead phyto and zooplankton because water is used for cooling in industrial processes and is dumped back out with antialgaecides that kill marine life.”

She believes, however, that “over the years, the capacity for regeneration is possible, even in agriculture that has been lost due to sulfur dioxide emissions. There may also be a recovery in fishing and tourism.”

But Larraín demanded “a just transition that restores healthy levels and regenerates ecosystems so that local communities can sustain their economy in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment.”

Children at the San José Obrero School use the primary school's computer lab. At their homes in the municipality of Peñalolén, to the east of Santiago de Chile, many do not have computers because 90 percent of them come from poor families. CREDIT: Courtesy of San José Obrero

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jul 1 2022 (IPS)

A Chilean government plan seeks to ensure connectivity in remote areas, in a first step to address a deep digital divide among the country’s inhabitants that includes a lack of access to technology and digital education deficits, exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, during the social isolation at the height of the pandemic, 76 percent of children in higher income segments had their own computer, laptop or tablet and 23 percent had access to a shared one.

But in the lowest income segments, only 45 percent of children had their own computer or laptop, while 16 percent had none. The rest managed to get access to a shared computer or tablet.

There are also notable differences according to the type and location of schools.

One school that illustrates the gap

“People here don’t have computers, although it may seem strange,” said Cecilia Pérez, principal of the San José Obrero School in Peñalolén. “Computers are just a dream for many. Nor do they have their own connection, or wi-fi. They have cell phones with prepaid minutes or very cheap plans that do not give them a good enough connection to support a lesson.”

In a conversation with IPS at the school, she said “this is a disadvantage that has nothing to do with the children’s desire to study, their intelligence, or their worried families. It is something external that is difficult to solve.”

To illustrate, Pérez said that “if homework is posted on the platform, it is very hard for children to read it and do it from their cell phones.”

Her school is in a poor neighborhood located at the end of Las Parcelas Avenue, in the Andes foothills of Santiago, the capital. Most of the first to eighth grade students come to school on foot.

At the San José Obrero School in the municipality of Peñalolén, in the foothills surrounding the Chilean capital, 90 percent of the students come from poor families, with parents who work as street vendors, cleaners or similar trades. Parental support for homework is almost non-existent, says the principal of the primary school, Cecilia Pérez. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

This public primary school in the municipality of Peñalolén, which serves 427 students, is an example of the connectivity problems faced by students in the most deprived urban and rural areas.

In this South American country of 19 million people, there are 3.6 million primary and secondary students. Two million students are enrolled in the first to eighth grades (six to 13 years of age) and the rest are in secondary school (13 to 17 years of age).

Of the total number of students, 53 percent study in state-subsidized private schools, 40 percent in municipal schools and seven percent in private schools.

“We have third grade students today who started first grade in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when they had to learn to read and write. These children had only gone to kindergarten and are now coming to class in the third grade with a very significant delay,” she said, referring to the effects of distance learning during the pandemic.

Because of this, Pérez said, “we had to set priorities in the curriculum and reinforce language and math which are super important to continue learning.”

She added that another serious problem is that many of their students experience situations of domestic violence. “Their emotional and social support is the school, and when they couldn’t be with their classmates, they lost two years of socializing,” she said.

“We have children between the fifth and eighth grades who have experienced a lot of violence, a lot of individualism, a lot of sexualization that never happened before. Partly because there is no parental control over cell phones at home,” she said.

An additional problem is connectivity because in Peñalolén “there are many hills and in some parts the internet does not work. There are families who returned the ‘router’ (a device that receives and sends data on computer networks) that we lent them because the signal does not reach their homes.”

Older children at the San José Obrero School in the municipality of Peñalolén, near Santiago de Chile, stay two hours longer at the school, doing sports and other activities as part of their education. In this way they avoid excessive leisure time and a lack of supervision at home, which can be dangerous for them. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Tackling inequality

The deep digital divide among Chileans is aggravated by the difficulties in accessing the internet in isolated villages, rural localities and also in poor urban neighborhoods where telecommunication companies do not provide service or where criminals steal the cables.

“Inequality in our country is also manifested in internet access,” said leftist President Gabriel Boric, in office since March. “Thousands of students were unable to exercise their right to education during the pandemic due to a lack of connectivity.”

To address this situation, he said in a recent communiqué, “our Zero Digital Divide Plan will ensure, by 2025, that all the country’s inhabitants have access to connectivity.”

“This requires a sustained effort to continue with current initiatives such as the Internet as a Basic Service Bill and the generation of new projects that will allow us to reach isolated and rural areas,” he said.

As an example, Boric mentioned the town of Porvenir, which a month ago became the southernmost part of this long narrow South American country with access to the 5G network.

The 36-year-old president won the elections in the wake of the huge 2019 protests, in which one of the demands was to end the social inequality gap, one of the largest in the world according to international organizations, and where more equitable access to education was one of the main points.

Paulina Romero, a first-year chemistry and pharmacy university student, became a symbol of the digital divide that Boric seeks to eliminate, when two years ago images of her climbing onto the roof of her house in the small community of San Ramón, in the southern region of La Araucanía, in a dangerous attempt to find a signal to be able to do her assigned homework, went viral.

A colorful mural decorates the staircase leading to the second story of classrooms at the primary school in Peñalolén, located in the snowy Andes foothills seen here in the background in the middle of Chile’s southern hemisphere winter. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Plans to close the gap

Claudio Araya, undersecretary of telecommunications, told IPS that all efforts are focused on improving connectivity.

“A bill was approved in Congress a month ago that guarantees internet access for students,” he said. He pointed out that in part this access already exists but it is not operational for schoolchildren, because “many students in areas with coverage had problems with distance learning because their families could not afford cell phone plans.”

Araya added that a project is being implemented to ensure that all public schools, whether run by municipalities or the State, as well as subsidized private schools, have coverage for remote areas and connection speed.

“One part of the project is being completed now, by August, for 8,300 schools, a second part with 500 more by March 2023, and a third with a call for bids before 2023, which will cover just over a thousand schools,” he explained.

His office has also allocated resources for a new project, called “last mile”, which seeks to bring connectivity to isolated or rural areas. “We have already invested some 200 million dollars and we are contemplating an additional 150 million dollars to provide service coverage to the communities,” he said.

There are 40 computers available at the San José Obrero School for the children to search for information and complete their learning in various subjects under the supervision of the teacher in charge. But there is no possibility of laptops that they can take to their homes, where most of them have no computers. CREDIT: Courtesy of the San José Obrero School

Another school stumbling over connectivity issues

Connectivity is the main problem for the 73 students at the school in the small town of Samo Alto, in the Andes foothills area of the municipality of Rio Hurtado, 440 kilometers north of Santiago.

“We are educating 21st century children with 20th century resources and technology,” Omar Santander, principal of the primary school, told IPS by telephone.

“The connection to the global world does not exist. You turn on a computer, log on to the network and all the other computers disconnect. It is impossible to work online. We have computers and tablets, but there they are, and they can only be used with resources and programs downloaded ad hoc,” he said.

The students cannot communicate and “these are gaps that keep us from providing greater opportunities,” he said.

“The lack of computers is the smaller problem. We have achieved internet efficiency and we have the equipment. The big problem is connectivity,” Santander stressed, adding that an antenna they made to capture the signal was not enough.

He said that “last year when we held hybrid classes, half at home and half at school, one day we tried to connect and it was a terrible disappointment.

“There is a wealth of information, of pedagogical resources available to students that unfortunately we don’t have access to,” Santander complained.

The principal explained that “everything that has to do with access to resources that enrich reading, writing, calculus and mathematics is there and we cannot make use of it.”

From the San José Obrero School, Santiago de Chile can be seen in the background, under a cloudy sunset after a recent rain on the first day of the southern hemisphere winter in Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

More than internet access

Luciano Ahumada, head of the School of Informatics and Telecommunications at the Diego Portales University, said that “reducing the digital divide goes far beyond having an internet plan.”

“It also involves promoting the use and daily impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to maximize people’s well-being. It is a much more complex and time-consuming challenge than access,” he told IPS.

In his view, “we must work on access, but also on economic, ethnic and gender barriers and establish a framework concept of cybersecurity or basic concepts in the population to live in a healthy way in this new world.

“There is an economic gap, an age gap, an ethnic gap, which in different countries has become very evident,” he said.

Ahumada said that “access is just the starting-point. It is a good initiative, necessary to massify internet access, but we must think about massification of high-speed connections because with networks of the past we cannot carry out actions of the future and establish the basis for an information society.”

At the Haru Oni demonstration plant where the ecological fuel based on green hydrogen will be produced, the wind turbine that will provide wind energy to the project promoted by the HIF Global group in the southern Chilean region of Magallanes has been installed. CREDIT: HIF Global

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jun 13 2022 (IPS)

Patagonia’s strong winds are driving projects that will place Magallanes, in the extreme south of Chile, in a privileged position to produce and export green hydrogen and help the country move towards carbon neutrality.

The projects underway aim to produce green fuel to replace gasoline in any vehicle, competing with the efficiency of electromobility. Another goal is to produce green ammonia to replace, for example, the 350,000 tons of gray ammonia that Chile imports for the large copper mines in the north of the country.

President Gabriel Boric said on Jul. 8 at the IV Business Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California, that Chile “is going to bet heavily on green hydrogen, both the State and the private sector.”

He encouraged U.S. businesspeople to invest in Chile while “linking production chains and raising environmental standards.”

“In the Patagonian region alone, if we do things right, the potential is enough to supply 13 percent of the world’s demand for green hydrogen,” said Boric, a native of Punta Arenas, the capital of the Magallanes region, popularly known as Chile’s Patagonia.

Julio Maturana, undersecretary of energy, told IPS that it is essential that green hydrogen be developed in harmony with Chile’s territories and ecosystems.

“We will push for hydrogen to be at the base of the creation of industry, and for Chile to participate in the entire value chain, including technological innovation,” he said.

Maturana said that the government is promoting studies to identify the greatest comparative advantages, “pushing for more sustainable mining, green fertilizers, green steel, zero-emission maritime and aviation fuels, or manufacturing processes so that Chile can add value not only with its winds in Magallanes and the desert sun, but also with its workers, universities and industry.”

According to the undersecretary, when the National Green Hydrogen Strategy was launched two years ago, there were 20 projects submitted – a number that has since risen threefold.

“There are more than 15 projects that have set their operational start date for green hydrogen production on an industrial scale before 2030,” he said, projecting “about 3.7 gigawatts (GW) of electrolysis operating by 2025 and 35 GW of electrolysis operating by 2030.”

In the extreme south of Chile, members of the Environmental Studies Group from the University of Magallanes carry out field work in Bahía Posesión to gather data for the environmental impact study for the H2 Magallanes project of the French group Total Eren. CREDIT: Erika Mutschke/University of Magallanes

Characteristics of the green hydrogen boom

Green hydrogen is obtained by electrolysis using only electrical energy from clean, renewable sources such as wind or sun.

Electrolysis involves using electricity to split the water molecule, consisting of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, H2O.

Of all the hydrogen produced in the world today, 95 percent is gray hydrogen obtained using natural gas, oil or coal, which causes the emission of large quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), a major driver of global warming.

The use of electricity represents almost 70 percent of the cost of producing green hydrogen, which is why Chile is in a privileged location due to its enormous solar radiation potential in the northern Atacama Desert and the strong winds in the southern Patagonia region.

Magallanes is exceptionally windy because of the clash of high pressure systems caused by the Pacific anticyclone, which runs from Ecuador to Patagonia, and the low pressures and cold air masses originating from the polar front coming from Antarctica.

In 2019 Chile’s energy mix included 44 percent renewables. It is estimated that by 2030 renewables will make up 70 percent of the mix and that by 2050 the proportion will climb to 95 percent, as part of an energy transition that in addition to decarbonizing energy aims to free the country from costly hydrocarbon imports.

Producing a kilogram of green hydrogen today costs six dollars, but Undersecretary Maturana said that “Chile has the technical conditions to achieve production costs of less than a dollar per kilo.”

This would be important for bringing the cost of green hydrogen closer to that of fossil fuels, while now it is four times more expensive.

“To bring the price down, a series of measures will be required to provide certainty, access to financing and the promotion of a market or critical mass of local demand,” said the undersecretary.

Wind towers near Punta Arenas, capital of the Magallanes region, one of the best areas in the world for producing wind energy because a turbine can operate for more than 5,000 hours a year, according to Daniele Consoli of Enel Green Power, which is promoting the Haru Oni green hydrogen project in Chile’s southern Patagonia region. CREDIT: Ministry of Energy

Two flagship projects move ahead

A wind turbine has already been installed in Magallanes, part of an assembly platform built north of Punta Arenas at the Haru Oni demonstration plant.

The project, the first phase of which involves an investment of 51 million dollars, is being promoted by the international consortium HIF Global which, in parallel, will build a plant to produce green hydrogen that will then be treated to produce green gasoline.

“Little by little our project is taking shape and this turbine is a fundamental part of it,” said Clara Bowman, general manager of HIF Global, a company with 80 percent Chilean capital as well as the participation of German and U.S. firms.

“In parallel, in various places around the world, such as China, Germany and the United States, the equipment that will allow us to produce carbon-neutral eFuel is already being manufactured. We are working to start operations during the second half of this year,” explained the manager of the company, whose name is the abbreviation of Highly Innovative Fuels.

The French company Total Eren is developing the H2 Magallanes Project in the municipality of San Gregorio, near Punta Arenas, which will have up to 10 GW of installed wind power capacity and up to eight GW of electrolysis capacity, in addition to a desalination plant and an ammonia (NH3) production plant.

“The timeframe puts the start of the construction phase in 2025, and it is projected that by 2027 the first green hydrogen units could be operating,” said Macarena Toledo, environmental and social director of the H2 Magallanes Project.

The estimated investment is 20 billion dollars, she told IPS.

The Environmental Studies Group at the University of Magallanes is preparing the project’s environmental impact study, which includes variables of soil, water, fauna, flora, relief and strategies to inform the community about wind turbines and green hydrogen.

Claudio Gómez, dean of engineering at the university, told IPS that green hydrogen has unleashed “an explosive process that involves a revolution in the education of engineers, who must have a new kind of training to face new challenges.”

A sign reads “Welcome to the municipality of San Gregorio” in the extreme south of Chile, where the H2 Magallanes project is conducting environmental impact studies before starting construction of its project, the initial phase of which is scheduled for 2025. CREDIT: Total Eren

A cleaner future, not just on paper

The carbon-neutral fuel produced by Haru Oni will be tested in vehicles of the German brand Porsche, which is part of the consortium. The projection is that seven million cars will have green hydrogen cells by 2030 in China, Japan, the United States and South Korea.

The big goal is for green hydrogen to be incorporated into large trucks and machinery in mining, industrial sectors such as steel mills, refineries, fertilizer and ceramics factories, and ships and airplanes.

On Jun. 6, a group of companies launched a project to make Pudahuel International Airport, which serves the capital city of Santiago, the first in Latin America to use green hydrogen.

The group, which includes the company that manages the airport, will evaluate the development of a hydrogen ecosystem, including production and fueling infrastructure to serve the airport complex’s ground operations, as well as aircraft in the future.

An additional key advantage of green hydrogen is that its molecule has a high energy density per unit mass: it is three times higher than that of gasoline and 120 times higher than that of lithium batteries.

In Bahía Posesión in Patagonia, the Environmental Studies Group from the University of Magallanes carries out work for the environmental impact study for the H2 Magallanes project, one of the initiatives that aims to exploit the wind energy potential of Chile’s southern Patagonia region for the production of green hydrogen. CREDIT: Erika Mutschke/University of Magallanes

The key role of the State

Undersecretary Maturana stressed that the Boric administration, in office since March, wants the state-owned National Petroleum Company (Enap) and Copper Corporation (Codelco) to play an important role in the production of green hydrogen.

“We want Enap to play a role not only as an infrastructure facilitator, but also as a producer of green hydrogen to accelerate the development of our local and export industry. We expect it to take a leading role in projects given its experience in energy infrastructure,” he said.

And with regard to Codelco, he said it can play an important role in promoting the energy transition from the mining industry, testing and studying low-emission technologies in its operations.

“Public, private, academic and civil society collaboration will be key to expanding this industry,” he said.

Maturana ruled out problems with water use, indicating that the projects presented would include desalination and/or water reuse.

“The cost of water in the production of green hydrogen represents less than one percent, so raising the cost of water to meet sustainable standards would not have a high impact on the final price of energy,” he explained.

Lacombe (right), from Haiti, and Ricaela, a Dominican who recently arrived in Chile, pose at the stall where they work for a Chilean entrepreneur at a popular outdoor Sunday market in Arrieta, in Peñalolén, in eastern Santiago. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, May 16 2022 (IPS)

The pressure of the influx of migrants, especially Venezuelans, has reached a critical level in northern Chile, and is felt as far as the capital itself, forcing the government that took office in March to create a special interministerial group this month to propose solutions that respect their human rights.

The first problem is that the number of undocumented migrants is unknown, since in recent years thousands have entered the country unregistered, especially through Colchane, a small town in the Andes highlands in the northeast bordering Bolivia.

Jorgelis, a 23-year-old Venezuelan woman, crossed the border into Chile there last December.

“It was the longest 11 days of my entire life,” she told IPS, her face darkening as she remembered the journey from Caracas to Colchane.

Today she sells fruit at a stand on Santiago’s main avenue, Alameda, on the corner of Santa Lucía street outside the subway station, just five blocks from La Moneda palace, seat of the presidency, where leftist President Gabriel Boric, 36, has been governing since Mar. 11.

Jorgelis’ 33-year-old cousin Engelin arrived two months ago “after a 10-day journey that at one point took us though the middle of the desert.

“I left behind two daughters in Venezuela, 15 and five years old,” she said. “That is a very strong pain in my heart.” And she complained about the cold, pointing out that in tropical Caracas the temperature only drops – and much less than in Chile – in December and January.

Engelin lives in a Haitian camp in the municipality of Maipú, on the west side of Santiago, and sells fruit at a stand outside the Metro República subway stop, also on Alameda avenue.

Dubarly Lorvandal, 23, arrived from Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, when he was 18 years old, after studying in high school. He does not have a visa and works at a vegetable stand in an open-air market in Arrieta, in eastern Santiago.

Relaxed entrance policies that were introduced in 2010 and later eliminated turned Chile into a popular destination for Haitians fleeing a cocktail of natural and economic tragedies.

“I worked at the beginning for a month laying cables, but now I’m a papero (potato seller). Everyone loves me at this market,” he says with a smile.

Lacombe also came from Haiti six years ago and works alongside Ricaela, who arrived six months ago from the Dominican Republic. The two undocumented migrants sell vegetables at a stand in the Arrieta market. Lacombe says he is happy.

Jorgelis, Engelin, Dubarly, Lacombe and Ricaela are all part of the long line of at least half a million people waiting to regularize their legal status in Chile, a long narrow country of 19.4 million inhabitants that stretches between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

According to the latest official figures on migration in Chile, from 2020, there were 1,462,103 foreign nationals in the country, including 448,138 migrants from Venezuela, which since 2013 has experienced a massive exodus of more than six million people, a good part of whom are scattered throughout neighboring Latin American countries.

But these statistics do not include migrants who remain undocumented and whose real number the organizations working with immigrants prefer not to divulge.

Venezuelan immigrants Edgar. Engelin and Jorgelis sell fruit at a street stall on Alameda Avenue, near the La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

A shaky ship

“Over the last three years, 90 percent of people entering have come through unauthorized crossings,” said Macarena Rodríguez, chair of the board of directors of the Catholic Jesuit Migrant Service.

“Since 2020 the border has been closed, and before that the government required a visa (acquired in their countries of origin) for Haitians and Venezuelans. When you restrict regular entry, irregular entry increases,” Rodríguez, the head of one of the country’s main immigrant-serving organizations, told IPS.

“There is a huge number of people who are not counted, who have no papers and cannot work (legally). And their children have irregular migratory status. And they pay five times more in rent (on average) for precarious housing,” she said, listing some of the problems faced by undocumented migrants.

Luis Eduardo Thayer, who took office in March as director of the National Migration Service, is part of the new Interministerial Commission expanded to include civil organizations, created on May 6 by the government to seek solutions to a growing social problem that has given rise to expressions of xenophobia.

President Boric stated that the solution must include other countries of origin or transit of migrants, although there are no details yet as to what this eventual participation would look like.

The commission seeks to “address with a sense of urgency and responsibility the challenges and opportunities posed by migration in different territories,” said Minister of the Interior and Public Security Izkia Siches.

The new authorities do not want a repeat of the measures taken by the government of Boric’s right-wing predecessor Sebastián Piñera, which loaded dozens of migrants dressed head-to-toe in white sanitary protective gear onto airplanes and deported them. The widely published photos were aimed at dissuading migrants from coming to Chile and at reassuring worried Chileans.

Thayer said the National Migration Service “is a ship that is now in the process of stabilization and we are taking the necessary internal measures so that we can fulfill our mandate.”

“Today we have almost 500,000 pending applications for visas, renewals, definitive stays, refugee applications and naturalizations,” he said.

The head of migration proposed moving towards “a rational migration policy.”

Workers at the Chevery Bakan, a Venezuelan restaurant in the La Reina district in Santiago, Chile that employs nine Venezuelan immigrants, six of whom have visas. “We all do everything, working in the kitchen or serving customers. And I work hard, I haven’t had a vacation for three years,” says Yulkidiz Pernia, the Venezuelan owner. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Pressure cooker

According to Rodríguez, in Chile “today we have a pressure cooker with many people having to take informal jobs or even to rent an identity to sign up for an application and be able to work.

“This situation must be urgently addressed,” she said. “That means recognizing them, identifying them, documenting them, issuing visas, prioritizing the situation of children and pregnant women and thus try to put things in order.”

She also cited “the impact on the communities where these people arrive, where the impression is socially complex. They are described as criminals, generating among the local population the sensation that migration is bad.”

Yulkidiz Pernia, 38, a publicist from Caracas, comes from a different generation of migrants, as she arrived six years ago with her son and got a visa without any problems, “although it took seven months.”

Today she has a restaurant that serves Venezuelan food, Chevery Bakan, which employs nine other Venezuelans, six of whom have legal documents.

“I have not done badly. I miss the rest of my family, uncles and aunts. Several of them have died and we couldn’t be there,” Yulkidiz said. “In Chile I have found a warm welcome. The cases of xenophobia are isolated.”

But the study “Immigrants and Work in Chile”, by the National Center for Migration Studies at the University of Talca, found that 51.1 percent of the migrants surveyed said that being a foreigner has had a negative influence on their labor integration in Chile and 51.4 percent said that at work many people have stereotypes about them and treat them accordingly.

Dubarly, a Haitian immigrant, lives alone, but he gets together with cousins and other Haitian friends to eat because “it’s hard to get home and have to do everything yourself.” At the food market in Santiago, Chile where he works, he is happy because he feels loved and enjoys working as a vendor. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Colchane is no longer Colchane

Colchane, a town with only 1,500 permanent residents, is the gateway for irregular migration from Bolivia, a preferred transit route after arrival through the airports was closed. The town’s mayor, Javier García Choque, fears that the culture of the Aymara indigenous people, the main native group in the area, will disappear due to the exodus of local inhabitants after the massive influx of foreigners.

“Migrants provide data on their identity, but there is no mechanism for verifying whether they are who they say they are,” the mayor said on a visit to Santiago.

According to García Choque “many migrants come with family members, with terminally ill people. They come in search of opportunities. But some people are violent and destroy public spaces or occupy private homes, which has led many to build fences around their yards, which are not typical of Aymara culture.”

“The Aymara people are disappearing, they are vulnerable and we cling to our cultural identity to preserve it. This migratory phenomenon has been disproportionate in quantity and violence,” he said, demanding greater security in his municipality.

“The government’s effort to respect the human rights of migrants is necessary, but it is also important to respect the rights of indigenous peoples,” said the mayor.

Patricia Rojas, of the Venezuelan Association in Chile, admits that migration management under the restrictive law imposed by Piñera “has had a negative impact on peaceful coexistence, especially in the cities and northern regions.

“We all have to make an effort to reverse this, so that the public perception of migration is not the negative one we are currently experiencing, because this will not benefit Chilean society in any way,” she said.

Jaime Tocornal, vicar of the Catholic Social Pastoral in Santiago, told IPS that in Colchane “these poor people arrive hungry and cold, completely disoriented. At an altitude of 3,600 meters they arrive with altitude sickness and hope to cross the border and get to Santiago, only to realize that they still have 1,500 kilometers to go.”

“The situation is dramatic. The landscape is wonderful, like in the rest of the highlands, full of volcanoes and running water up in the mountains. But the water, which might be very beautiful, creates mud that sticks to the shoes of people crossing the streams and they slip and fall when they try to drink the water,” he said.

Twenty-seven people died this year, seven of them between January and March 2022, in their attempt to enter Chile, according to figures from the Chilean office of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Archbishopric of Santiago.

The documentary “Hope Without Borders” says the dead could number in the hundreds in recent years, and “many bodies have been abandoned in different desert or wooded areas crossed by migrants coming from Venezuela to Chile,” often at least partially on foot.

García Choque said that despite the state of emergency decreed by Piñera to bring in the military to control the northern border zone, “the flow of migrants did not cease.”

“It changed the way they came in, but it forced the migrants into situations where it was more complex to rescue them: the coyotes (human traffickers) moved them to remote areas, which put their lives and health at risk,” he said.

If the desalination plants win the bet, Chile's water delivery trucks, with their unpredictable schedules and high operating costs, will become a thing of the past. The photo shows the small cove of Chigualoco, in northern Chile, with a few fishing boats and the ground covered with black seaweed (Lessonia spicata), macroalgae that the fishermen dry in the sun. The seaweed is not extracted from the small coastal rocks because it is the food for prized mollusks whose harvesting season ends in June. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
LOS VILOS, Chile , Mar 24 2022 (IPS)

The Pacific Ocean could quench the thirst caused by 10 years of drought in Chile, but the operation of desalination plants of various sizes has a long way to go to become sustainable and to serve society as a whole rather than just corporations.

Some twenty of these plants are already in operation providing desalinated water to small fishing communities, another three to the inhabitants of various municipalities and eight more to large mining companies, all but one of which are concentrated in Chile’s arid North.

The extensive development and availability of solar and wind energy has lowered the operating cost of desalinating and purifying seawater, which offers hope for a stable supply of water in this Southern Cone country with 4,270 kilometers of coastline.

This year, 184 municipalities are under a water shortage decree, 53 percent of the total, affecting 8.2 of the 19.4 million inhabitants of this long narrow country that runs along the western side of southern South America, between the Pacific coast and the Andes mountains.

Three years ago an analysis published in Radiografía del Agua: Brecha y Riesgo Hídrico de Chile (Radiography of Water: Water Gap and Risk in Chile) warned that “freshwater reserves in the basins are shrinking.”

“Seventy-two percent of the data shows that the water level in aquifers is decreasing at a statistically significant rate and all the glaciers studied so far, which are less than one percent of the existing ones, have reduced their areal and/or frontal surface from 2000 onwards, with only one exception (the El Rincón glacier, located on the outskirts of Santiago),” the report states.

Roberto Collao (left), president of the Chigualoco fishermen’s union, and Miguel Barraza, secretary of the organization, stand next to one of the drums that hold desalinated water and next to the plant’s operating hut, located in this small fishing village in the arid north of Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Relief for artisanal fishers

Roberto Collao, president of the fishermen’s union of Chigualoco, a small cove 240 km north of Santiago in the municipality of Los Vilos, told IPS how this technical data translates into reality and how a desalination plant came to their aid.

“We had no drinking water. We brought it from our homes in Los Vilos, 20 minutes from here. The water trucks came every 15 days and a lot of people come here in summer,” he explained in the fishermen’s cove, the local name given to the small inlets that abound along the Chilean coast.

Sitting next to the association’s boats, on a beach full of seaweed laid out to dry, he proudly said that “we are now taking 5,000 liters a day out of the sea and turning it into freshwater for consumption, for washing our diving suits and for cleaning our catch.”

In the recently concluded fishing season, the 30 artisanal fishermen of Chigualoco, who have three managed fishing areas, caught 100,000 Chilean abalones (Concholepas concholepas), a highly prized mollusk or large edible sea snail native to the coasts of Chile and its neighbor to the north, Peru.

Similar small desalination plants were installed in the northern region of Coquimbo where the town is located, financed with public funds.

One of them is in Maitencillo, across from Canela, the municipality with the highest poverty rate in Chile.

But it has not been working for four months because “the pump that extracted the salt water broke down, there were problems with the filters,” Herjan Torreblanca, president of the Caleta Maitencillo union, told IPS on a tour of towns with desalination plants in the region.

“The water we got was so fresh, like bottled water. It produced 8,000 liters a day,” he recalled with nostalgia, expressing hope that the plant would be fixed soon.

Photo of a pipe that carries seawater to the desalination plant installed in the Chigualoco cove, where an association of 30 fishermen operates. The plant’s annual operating cost is approximately 2,500 dollars. Located in the Chilean municipality of Los Vilos, the plant mainly runs on solar power and collects water through a small pipe connected to a pump. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Looking out to sea

The year 2021 was the driest in Chile’s history, and a recurrent water deficit is predicted for the future. As a result, the public and the country’s authorities are looking mainly to the sea to provide water in the future, as well as to the glaciers of their Andean peaks.

In his first press conference for foreign correspondents on his third day in office on Mar. 14, President Gabriel Boric referred to the water crisis and announced the aim to “move forward with desalination, while also taking charge of the externalities it generates. In particular, what to do with the brine.”

“One problem is drought and another is the poor use of water resources and water rights. We have to make progress in the modernization of the area and in better use of gray water,” he added.

In fact, only less than 30 percent of Chilean agriculture uses technified irrigation, in a country whose economy is based on export agribusiness, mining, particularly copper mining, and large-scale fishing. Meanwhile, family agriculture and artisanal fishing are the most affected by the water deficit, despite their importance in labor and social terms.

In Chile, water rights are in private hands. Now water, including sea water, is the focus of debate and would be given a new definition in the new constitution, the draft of which must be completed by Jul. 4 by the members of the constitutional convention and which will be approved or rejected by voters in a September or October referendum.

Minera Escondida, the world’s largest copper-producing mine owned by the Australian-British company BHP, located at 3,200 meters above sea level, uses water piped 180 kilometers from a desalination plant on the coast to the Antofagasta region where it is located.

In late 2019, the Escondida Water Supply Expansion (EWS) was installed, “which allowed us to stop drawing water from the well and to use 100 percent seawater, a unique milestone worldwide,” explained Hada Matrás, the mine´s production manager.

Mining companies in Chile plan to increase their eight desalination plants currently in operation to 15 by 2028.

Miguel Barraza, secretary of the Chigualoco fishermen’s union, which operates the desalination plant they use in that cove in the northern Chilean municipality of Los Vilos. Now that they have water, the fishermen plan to open a restaurant and build a multipurpose building. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Of the three plants designed to supply water to municipalities, the Nueva Atacama plant, operating since December, stands out. Built with a public investment of 250 million dollars and later transferred to a private consortium, it produces 450 liters per second (L/s) and supplies the municipalities of Tierra Amarilla, Caldera, Copiapó and Chañaral, which are located around 800 kilometers north of Santiago.

But desalination will not be confined to the North, where water is most urgently needed. For the first time, a desalination plant, Nuevosur, has also been installed in the south of Chile, in Iloca, 288 kilometers from Santiago.

The investment totaled 2.5 million dollars and the plant seeks to “increase the availability of water and cover the rising demand that occurs mainly in the (southern hemisphere) summer,” the company told IPS.

“The project will be executed in two stages: during the first phase – which has already been developed – the system will allow us to treat 15 L/s and in the second phase we will reach a treatment level of 26 L/s,” said the Nuevosur spokesman.

Pros and cons of desalination

Several associations created the Chilean Desalination Association and defend the process as “an excellent solution to address the water challenges of our country, as it does not depend on hydrology.”

“It is a proven, reliable and affordable technology. This combination of factors has boosted the incorporation of desalination in various production processes and has favored the growth of this industry,” the Association states.

One crucial question is what will be done with the brine left over from the process. Environmentalists fear that large blocks of salt will be dumped in the ocean, affecting the ecosystem and species living in coastal areas.

Small desalination plants produce almost no brine, so the focus is on mining companies and water distributors.

The Pelambres copper mine, with estimated reserves of 4.9 billion tons and owned by the Luksic group and a consortium of Japanese companies, has its storage and loading terminal in the northern part of the Chilean municipality of Los Vilos. From there it extracts water for desalination and use in its operations. There are already eight mines with desalination plants and by 2028 there will be 15. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Liesbeth Van der Meer, executive director of Oceana Chile, told IPS that “desalination is one of the solutions, but there is great concern that it is seen as the only alternative.

“They are really looking to Israel and Qatar for solutions. However, the first thing Europe always focused on was water efficiency and in Chile this has not been worked on,” said the representative of the world’s largest organization dedicated to the defense of the oceans.

Van der Meer explained that the desalination plants that damage the ecosystem “are the ones that range from 500 to more than 1000 L/s, because of the suction and all the salt they throw back into the sea.”

Desalination “has many socio-environmental costs that have not been considered. If the plant is very close to a cove, for example, the brine and substances used to prevent the accumulation of biological species in pipes produce environmental damage in the bays,” she explained.

“You can’t extrapolate from Israel to Chile because our sea has other qualities with the Humboldt Current that goes from south to north bringing nutrients. And getting beyond the Humboldt Current to deposit brine is quite costly,” she said.

As an example of the impacts, Van der Meer said: “We have seen places like Mejillones (a municipality in the northern region of Antofagasta), where there is a large desalination plant, and within a range of five kilometers there are no fish or any kind of life and the water is turquoise – not because it is clean but because there is no life there.”

The environmentalist demanded a national water plan to regulate the construction of desalination plants and called for the protection of the 10 miles of territorial waters “where a large part of the wealth of fishing resources is located.”

Ricardo Cabezas, an aerospace physicist and geomatician, agreed that “legislation is needed to oblige those companies that use seawater to have a monitoring system and oceanographic studies to understand the flow of currents.”

“Temperature differences are not high when desalinating because in the reverse osmosis process there is no thermal plant,” he said.

And with respect to brine, he explained to IPS that “there are experiences at the international level where many minerals are recovered from the salt.”

According to Cabezas, “20 percent of the waste can be optimally managed if you reuse part of the brine by reprocessing it to obtain rare earths, rhenium and other common minerals.

“You can add value to salt and it becomes a raw material rather than a waste material,” he stressed.

Cabezas said that: “If we manage to solve the brine problem, we will make a qualitative leap and the main beneficiary will be the Chilean population because the crucial water problem will be solved.”

The academic pointed out that the Nueva Atacama plant, for example, managed to “attenuate the effect on the sea with diffusers that do not produce a concentration of salt at the end of the pipeline’s route, but instead spurt it out over a stretch of one kilometer.”