It’s not a drought, it’s a looting

SANTIAGO, Chile - In December, Chile elected Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student organizer and socialist as president. Chile, often called the “Switzerland of South America,” has been a bastion of neoliberal policies for the last 30 years. To understand the change, one need only look at Petorca, a rural province 200 kilometers north of the capital Santiago where over 60% of the population voted in support of the new president.

As the presidential campaign came to a close, school bells were ringing in summer vacation for millions of kids across Chile. But for the students at Escuela 30 Fernando Garcia Oldini in Hierro Viejo, a rural town in the Petorca region, the hallways had already been empty for almost a month.  

On November 11th, the Rural Water Cooperative of Hierro Viejo (Cooperativo de Agua Potable de Hierro Viejo) notified Escuela 30 they would be rationing water and the building could expect water shutoffs from noon to six daily. 

Without water, Director Nico Quiroz had no choice but to shutter the building and move instruction back online. “It’s incredibly sad,” he said in Spanish, “but we also understand that there is a structural issue; a more fundamental issue that has to do with water grabbing in our province.”

While climate-fueled drought has ravaged South America for the past decade, Chilean water shortages have been exacerbated by a second crisis - water privatization. In Chile, water in rivers, streams, and even subterranean aquifers is considered property to be bought, sold, or traded. The bidder with the deepest pockets can drill the deepest wells and draw the most water - often in perpetuity. 

In Petorca, it’s the avocado growers who own the rights to the region's water. Their irrigation lines, crisscrossing their lush orchards, run non-stop to feed their Europe-bound crops. Meanwhile taps in nearby homes and schools run dry.  

Miguel Carmona, a recently-elected member of the Valparaiso regional council, has seen this all before. Before returning home to Petorca to work in public service, Carmona spent a decade working the open pit copper mines in the Chilean north. Chile is the world’s largest exporter of copper, another water intensive industry, 

Over time, he remembers seeing the color of the sand change as the region, famous for its lakes filled with bright pink flamingos, slowly turned into barren, salty flats. “Look at satellite photographs from 10, 20 years ago. You see lakes” he said, speaking of the Antofagasta region where he worked. “Today, you see nothing.” 

That’s a problem with the model of government itself, says Barbara Astudillo, a water-rights advocate in Petorca with the group Territorios Colectivos. “Our state is the problem and the constitution must be changed.” 

In 1980, dictator Augusto Pinochet established the market-based National Water Code as the law of the land. Chile’s GDP skyrocketed in the years that followed, but not without creating rapid and extreme inequalities in the process. Democracy slowly returned in 1990, but the inequality remained. In the decades since, Chileans across the country have regularly protested the country’s free-market policies - notably in 2006 and 2011. Recently, however, their message was finally heard. 

In October 2019, millions of protestors poured into the streets across the country and demanded an end to the lingering dictatorship-era constitution. Some carried signs reading “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years,” a reference to the 30 peso transit hikes that sparked protests, and “It’s not a drought, it’s a looting” a Spanish play on words referencing the water crisis. 

By November, President Sebastian Piñera, an independent who caucuses with the center-right Chile Vamos party, was forced to call a national referendum to rewrite the constitution. The following October the measure passed with 78% of the vote and in June 2021 a popularly elected delegation of 155 men and women were sworn in to draft a new document.

Rectifying the damages brought on by the National Water Code is central to many delegates, including Carolina Vilches, a water-rights activist from nearby Valparaiso. Speaking in front of the convention, Vilches pledged to fight to save her home, a home “where avocados have more rights than thousands of families who don’t have water to fill their teapot…” she says. 

In early December, the first initiative to include water as a human right in the new constitution was presented to the convention - and Vilches was there to sign it. Change on the constitutional level is important, but know this document is for the future. Not the past or present. And right now, millions without water can’t afford to wait. 

Back in Petorca, dust fills the air behind a truck as it lumbers through town with thousands of gallons of water onboard. With no consistent access to water in their homes, many residents rely on trucked-in water purchased by the municipal government from nearby regions.

“We’ve had the water crisis for more than 15 years,” said Barbara Astudillo, “and for 15 years it’s happened the same way in different regions across the country.” Industry buys the rights to the rivers and extracts every drop possible. Meanwhile, Astudillo and her neighbors line up for their ration from the tankers.

The water deliveries, initially seen as a temporary fix, have become a staple of life for rural residents. Astudillo doesn’t expect they will end soon - new constitution or not. “Even if the new constitution says industry must return water to the community, they aren’t going to deliver it. The water is going to have to be recovered.”

In September 2022, a draft of the new constitution will be presented to the nation for a referendum. But with classes scheduled to resume in March, Dir. Quiroz plans on spending his summer vacation trying to secure a water tank for his school. “It’s an emergency solution that is a palliative one at best and doesn’t solve the underlying problem.” But for now, it’s the only one.