Bloomberg Businessweek December 23, 201939THEBOTTOMLINE InChile,anextendeddroughtanddisputes
over access to water helped crystallize support for a rewrite of the
Pinochet-era constitution.It finally shattered this year, which happens to
have been one of the most arid on record. Higher
temperatures and record-low river flows forced
farmers to abandon crops and leave cattle to die.
Taps in dozens of villages ran dry, leaving resi-
dents dependent on trucked-in water. “The mete-
orologists say it rained 8 or 9 millimeters, but we
haven’t seen any of it,” says Pascual Varas, who
lives in Chincolco, a village in the Petorca valley
about 200 kilometers (127 miles) north of Santiago.
A year ago, he had 76 cows and horses; only 30
remain, and he expects to lose more over the
South American summer.
Chile isn’t the only place where a warming
planet has contributed to political strife and social
unrest. Just a year ago, French President Emmanuel
Macron’s plan to increase fuel taxes to fight climate
change set off protests that paralyzed Paris and
other French cities for months. In Syria crop fail-
ures that drove up the price of bread helped trig-
ger a civil war that’s killed hundreds of thousands.
“The environmental and the social crisis that we
are living in Chile, Latin America, and the entire
world are two sides of the same coin,” says Chilean
Minister for the Environment Carolina Schmidt.
From 2010 to 2018, the central region of Chile
suffered what scientists call a “megadrought.”
Among its casualties was the Laguna de Aculeo,
a body of water south of Santiago that was once
a popular site for water sports. From 2010 to 2017
annual rainfall in the area decreased by half, while
water use by farmers and residents in the nearby
city of Paine has continued to climb. Aculeo offi-
cially ceased to exist as a lake in 2018.
As the nation turned ever drier, citizens became
angrier. “Over the past 10 years in Chile, we have
seen small explosions that pointed to these under-
lying tensions,” says Anahi Urquiza, an environ-
ment and anthropology professor at the University
of Chile. Among them was a fight for water in
the Petorca valley where, for the past few years,
small landholders and cattle ranchers have been
accusing growers of avocados, a water-intense
crop, of pumping more than allowed from rivers
and canals and of digging illegal wells under riv-
erbeds. “Farmers couldn’t understand how their
fields were drying up while avocado growers were
expanding up the mountains in places where only
cactus grow,” says Rodrigo Faundez, a spokesman
for Modatima, a local advocacy organization repre-
senting ranchers and small farmers. “Our demand
is very simple: We ask the state to stop holding the
right to private property above human rights.”
ProtestsinPetorcahaveintensifiedinthepast
twoyears.Atonepoint,farmersblockeda roadlink-
ingtheprovince’stwomaintownswithburning cow
carcasses. Frustrated residents, who now depend
on water that’s trucked in, also took to the streets.
Demonstrators’ demands for a more equitable
distribution of water resonated widely in a coun-
try afflicted by growing income inequality. Chile’s
two biggest cities, Santiago and Valparaiso, were
the scene of street protests that in several instances
turned violent. The eruptions prompted the admin-
istration of President Sebastian Piñera to cancel a
meetingoftheAsia-PacificEconomicCooperation
foruminmid-November.Thegovernmentalso
pulledoutashostoftheUnitedNations-sponsored
COP25climatetalks,whichmovedtoMadrid.
A broadswathofChileanshasralliedbehindthe
ideathatthecountry’sPinochet-eraconstitution—a
document that enshrines a neoliberal economic
model—must be scrapped. A Nov. 22 survey by poll-
ster Cadem measured support for that idea at 85%.
Lawmakers have come up with two mechanisms
to draft a new charter, and citizens will choose
between the two in a plebiscite in April.
“For the first time in 30 years, we have the pos-
sibility to redefine the rules of the game,” says
Urquiza, the professor, who’s hopeful some good
will come from the process. “This is a country
combining a great exposure to climate risks with
an incredibly deteriorated environment and lit-
tle capacity to manage its territory. Altogether,
it’s a time bomb.” �Laura Millan Lombraña and
Sebastian Boyd“We ask the
state to stop
holding the
right to private
property
above human
rights”