ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 51
to have a privatized water system.6 Throughout the protests, in fact, by way of response to
increasing droughts and uneven access, one of the enduring chants heard everywhere was
“It’s not drought, it’s theft.” 7
For Rodrigo Mundaca, Agronomist and National Spokesperson of the Defense Movement for
Access to Water, Land and Environmental Protection (MODATIMA), the issue is front and
center of what it means to be Chilean, and more broadly what it means to be a human in the
21st century, in which land and resources are increasingly being divested from people:
“Ours is an extreme case: Chile has entirely privatized water, (having) prioritized extractive
industries over the rights of communities. The 1980 Constitution enshrined the private
ownership of water. This was maintained, and even deepened, following the democratic
transition, since when sanitation was also privatized. (...) Nowadays people in Chile pay the
highest rates in Latin America for drinking water, which is owned by large transnational
corporations. Overall, the Suez group, Aguas de Barcelona, Marubeni and the Ontario
teachers’ pension fund administrator from Canada control 90 per cent of the drinking water
supply.” 8
(Yes, the Ontario teachers’ pension fund administrator from Canada owns a significant
portion of the Chilean water supply.) 9
As such, limited and expensive access to drinking water in Chile is not just a theoretical
exercise, it is something felt deeply by the citizens, a fact made all the more egregious for the
population who knew that several ministers from President Sebastian Pinera’s cabinet owned
rights to water use. Among them was Antonio Walker Prieto, Minister of Agriculture at the
time, who with his family controlled the flow of “more than 29,000 liters per second,
equivalent to the continuous supply used by approximately 17 million people.”
10
Perhaps most astoundingly, Chile has been auctioning off rivers to multinational ownership
since 1981. 11 Across the country, water sources have dried up and disappeared regularly over
the last two generations, 12 generating “severe (...) socio-environmental impacts through
water pollution, the displacement of communities and the destruction of local economies.”
13
No great surprise then that some of the central chants at the nationwide awakening revolved
around water, including “Water, water, water, is a right, not a business, not a privilege” and “It
isn’t drought, it’s theft.” 14
In a way, all this had been known for decades, and felt by pockets of people around the
country, but by the end of 2019 almost the entire country knew it, and more so, they felt it
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