From privatization to communal water management in Chile

The Kai Kai Vilú serpent is the protector of water within the Mapuche cosmovision, original art © PazConNadie.

Opinion • Francisca Fernández Droguett • July 12, 2024 • Leer en castellano

One of the key demands of the movement to de-privatize water in Chile is that water should be recognized as a human right, which requires infrastructure that ensures clean water and access to it. In addition, we are organizing for the rights of nature and working toward the defense and restoration of hydrological systems not only for human consumption but also so water can flow freely. 

It is from this perspective that networks such as the Movement for Water and Territories (MAT), of which I am a part and which links approximately one hundred social and territorial organizations in the territory called Chile, have sought to de-privatize water and decolonize our understanding of nature. We are pushing for an ecological transition that embraces social, climate and water justice and that includes the defense of rivers, lakes, lagoons, wetlands, salt flats, glaciers and other bodies of water.

Between October 2019 and January 2020, the MAT organized more than 60 meetings (assemblies) for water throughout the country in an effort to lay the foundation for the construction of community-based water systems. The Decalogue for Water Rights and Community Management, which recognizes water as an inalienable common good and a bearer of rights, came out of this process.

The Decalogue also calls for the protection and restoration of all bodies of water in ecosystems and communities and demands plurinational, local and sustainable management systems organized by watersheds and sub-watershed, prioritizing ancestral use. It emphasizes that water is integral to food sovereignty, local land-based economies and popular self-determination.

Pinochet’s laws and water privatization

Chile’s Political Constitution was adopted in the 1980s, and it establishes water in all of its forms as a national good for public use, while also allowing private ownership of it. This was enshrined in the 1981 Water Code, adopted during the civil-military-business dictatorship. Chile’s Water Code created a water market and made water a tradable commodity that can be bought, sold, leased and even mortgaged. 

Private ownership of water is made possible through the sale of usage rights. The government grants these rights free of charge and in perpetuity to private parties linked to extractivist industries, such as mining, agribusiness and the forestry industry. Today there are landowners who lack water and others who monopolize water rights without owning land. 

Chile has experienced more than 42 years of privatization and commodification of water, education, housing and health. The intensification of extractivism and the climate crisis have fostered land and water dispossession, generating false solutions to environmental problems that rest on market-oriented principles.  

In Chile and elsewhere, profits continue to be promoted over the sustainability of life, favoring an energy transition in the global north in countries with the highest levels of per capita income. In the global south, this means new wind and solar energy complexes, the exploitation of green hydrogen, and the imposition of so-called solutions based on natural resources. These measures exacerbate the devastation of ecosystems, territories and nature. 

The communal management of water requires the repeal of Chile’s 1981 Water Code, which is at the root of the current water scarcity crisis, stemming from the monopolization and theft of water by local and transnational companies. This is why we speak of a hydro-politics of dispossession.

The horizon of the constituent assembly, closed

A constituent assembly was one of the demands that emerged out of the 2019 uprising in Chile. At that time we hoped it could enable the creation of a new and transformative regulatory regime for water management. Socio-environmental movements, including members of MAT, pushed for a constituent assembly to end the legal framework that led to the privatization of the natural commons. 

Although an assembly did not become a reality, a Constitutional Convention was convened in which local territorial representatives and social movements could serve as convention members if they received enough votes via popular election. An environmental bloc was formed that brought the demands mentioned above to the table. 

The first Constitutional Convention occurred between July 2021 and August 2022. It was at this time that the MAT, the Coordination of Territories in Defense of Glaciers and the Movement in Defense of Access to Water, Land and Environmental Protection presented popular initiative number 40230, which was called "For Water and the Rights of Nature and Glaciers."

Of the 388 articles in the proposed law, 74 referred to nature. The drafting of this law represented one of the greatest socio-environmental achievements of the last decades, at the institutional level. But more than 60 percent of voters rejected the proposed constitution in a plebiscite on September 4, 2022, while just over 38 percent of voters approved it in a process in which voting was mandatory.

Subsequently, the second Constitutional Convention was called, but this time only political parties participated, with a strong presence of the right and ultra-right wing. The proposed constitutional text of the second Convention was rejected on December 17, 2023. This is why the 1980 Constitution—and therefore, the 1981 Water Code—remain in effect today.

The current dispute

President Gabriel Boric's administration claims to be progressive, but it has approved a series of ecocidal projects including the expansion of the mines of the Los Bronces Integrado mining company, owned by Anglo American, and the Alto Maipo hydroelectric project, owned by AES GENER, a corporation based in the United States. 

The government has signed two free trade agreements since Boric took office. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership entered into force in February 2023, and the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union, which was signed in December of last year. The latter incentivizes an energy transition based on the exploitation of territories for the production of lithium, green hydrogen, and new hydroelectric projects. 

Faced with these threats, territorial and socio-environmental movements in Chile are building and consolidating alternatives to the neoliberal and eco-capitalist advance. 

We continue to fight for the communal management of water, including planting and harvesting rainwater in the subsoil for later use, an ancestral technique employed by various Indigenous nations. We are fighting for water management to be carried out on a watershed and subwatershed level, ensuring collective participation in the production and distribution of drinking water and in sewage collection and treatment. These proposals lead toward self-determination and put life in the center, showing a way out of the ecological and climate crisis.

It is no coincidence that those who defend water and territories are repressed and criminalized in Abya Yala and worldwide. A structural critique frames our activism and our ways of life suggest possible horizons for thinking beyond capitalism.