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ENVIRONMENT-CHILE: Ecologists Divided on Bachelet

Daniela Estrada* - Tierramérica

SANTIAGO, Jan 27 2006 (IPS) - The environmental movement in Chile has divergent expectations when it comes to the environmental policy to be implemented by President-elect Michelle Bachelet, a physician and socialist.

On Nov. 22, 2005, with the presidential campaign running full bore, Bachelet signed 10 commitments before renowned Chilean eco-leaders, including Manuel Baquedano, director of the Instituto de Ecología Política, Sara Larraín, director of the Sustainable Chile network, and Francisco Pizarro, head of the Terram Foundation.

“We are very optimistic, because the president-elect has repeated on several occasions that she will comply with what she promised, and our agreement was made publicly,” Baquedano said in a Tierramérica interview.

The environmentalist stressed that for the first time since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990, after 17 years of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, the Concertación por la Democracia, the centre-left governing coalition, has majorities in both houses of Congress, facilitating passage of eco-friendly legislation.

Although Bachelet has not issued any statement specifically against the Celco pulp mill, which is blamed for the massive die-off of black-necked swans in southern Chile, she has questioned the Pascual-Lama mining project, which seeks to remove three glaciers in the north of the country, and she is gathering proposals from environmentalists for a native forests law.

According to Baquedano, around 75 percent of the ecological movement is said to have supported that political agreeement. But Lucio Cuenca, general coordinator of OLCA, the Latin American Observatory for Environmental Conflicts, disagrees.

In Cuenca’s opinion, there is no reliable information to truly measure the support of the environmental movement for the future Bachelet administration, due to the great diversity of the non-governmental organisations in Chile dedicated to ecological issues.

Cuenca also notes that eight days before the Jan. 15 elections, in which Bachelet defeated right-wing candidate Sebastián Piñera, about 20 NGOs participated in a day of “reflection, action and mobilisation” to express their demands – “none of which had been taken up by any of the candidates.”

Among these NGOs were the Huasco Valley Defence Council, which leads the “No Pascua-Lama” campaign; the Latin American Action Network on Pesticides and Alternatives; Action for the Swans; OLCA; and the Oceana Foundation, headed by economist Marcel Claude.

Although the pledges Bachelet made are backed by the bulk of Chile’s eco-movement, a significant portion considers the promises insufficient and questions whether they will be implemented.

“If all of the promises are kept, it would be a step forward, but we believe it is not enough, given that fundamental aspects of the current development model would have to be changed, a model based on exploitation and over-exploitation of the country’s natural resources,” Cuenca commented to Tierramérica.

Standing out among the pledges is the creation of a Ministry of Environment, a vice-ministry of natural resources and biodiversity, an environmental superintendency, and a National Parks Service.

The existing National Environment Commission would become a vice-ministry of environmental management.

Bachelet, who served as health minister and defence minister under President Ricardo Lagos, also agreed to create a municipal environmental authority, sent a bill on territorial regulation to Congress, establish a national system of environmental watersheds, and expand the Environmental Fund to support educational centres and civil society organisations.

The president-elect assured that during her tenure she would not agree to opening Chile to nuclear energy or commercial transgenic crops.

Lastly, the 54-year-old socialist doctor said she would “re-orient (state) subsidies and mechanisms to promote production, and would reformulate the existing economic instruments to internalise costs and prevent environmental losses.”

Nevertheless, says the Observatory’s Cuenca, there are many reasons to doubt that the next president will comply with what she has expressed.

“The Bachelet government is presented as continuity of the Lagos administration, which in our opinion has been environmentally regressive. All the progress we had made with institutions, environmental awareness and citizen participation suffered an important reversal in these last six years,” he said.

The environmental leader pointed to the incongruence of what Bachelet has said and the statements of the current minister of mining, Alfonso Dulanto, who acknowledges negotiating with foreign companies to build nuclear power plants in the north of the country.

Cuenca also says the business community is not inclined to contribute to a sustainable development policy for Chile, “because industries like salmon, forestry and mining, which earn a lot of money but contribute very little to employment or taxes, have a great environmental impact.”

(*Daniela Estrada is an IPS contributor. Originally published Jan. 21 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)