Chilean Fight Against US Dam Project Heats Up

Chile's Alto Maipo dam project raises a slew of environmental and human rights concerns, but it is also a hallmark of the country's privatization.

Activists join a protest against the controversial dam in San Jose del Maipo, Chile; Photo: Courtesy / CIEL

A years-long, high-stakes fight against an embattled U.S. hydroelectric dam in Chile has taken a small but important step in the campaign to halt the project that jeopardizes the water supply for some 7 million people living in and around the capital city of Santiago.

And as one corporate blunder after another continues to unmask Alto Maipo as unviable — the 40 percent partner recently walked away from the project, topping off a heap of evidence — leaders in the legal battle against the dam are hopeful that they may soon start to see results.

For Chilean organizer Marcela Mella, the urgency of the movement against Alto Maipo is clear. “What’s at stake here is reclaiming water,” she told teleSUR by phone from Washington, D.C., where she and a fellow activist traveled to put pressure on the big banks behind the project as part of the international leg of the campaign.

The story is a familiar one, echoing similar struggles that have sprung up across Latin America as affected communities fight to protect their land, resources and the environment from unwanted corporate projects.

Alto Maipo — headed by AES Gener, the local subsidiary of major U.S. power company AES Corporation and already under construction on the outskirts of Santiago — was approved in 2009 in a process rife with irregularities and a lack of transparency. Despite denying the right of affected communities to adequate consultation and botching the environmental impact assessment — including failing to account for the impact climate change and years of drought will have on the water levels that will feed the dam — the company was given the green light to begin construction.

Mella, spokesperson of the Citizen Coordinating Committee in Defense of the Cajon del Maipo, and Juan Pablo Orrego, Executive Director of Chilean organization Ecosistemas, filed formal complaints last week to the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank in the U.S. capital, urging the financial institutions to review their support in light of the grave environmental and human rights concerns swirling around the highly contentious project.

Orrego explained that while the overarching demand of the movement is for Alto Maipo to be stopped in its tracks, the complaints to major funders in Washington are aimed at getting the banks to admit they violated their own policies in approving financing for Alto Maipo.

“A calamitous project”

Alto Maipo has been a firestorm of problems from the start. Shortly after its approval, a congressional commission presented a damning report on the project, laying out a slew of environmental risks including serious threats to local water supplies, native forests and protected areas in the Cajon del Maipo, such as various nature sanctuaries and the El Morado glacial formation, which is considered a Natural Monument.

The report highlighted “irreversible degradation of the Maipo river basin” and “destruction of the sub-basins of the Volcan, Yeso and Colorado (Rivers) that feed it” as a result of the dam, putting at risk the main source of drinking water for Santiago’s 7 million residents.

It also pointed to the Cajon de Maipo’s importance as a cultural and ecological asset in the country’s tourism industry — the picturesque area welcomes some 1.6 million tourists every year — and warned of potential adverse effects as a result of Alto Maipo.

Read full article on: Tele SUR