Indigenous Views on Just Transition in Northern Patagonia
By: Just Transition Research Collaborative
Tags: Indigenous, Chile, Coal, Just Transition, Protest

September is usually a special month for the great majority of Chileans. We remember one of the darkest moments of our recent history — the 1973 coup d’état of the armed forces against President Salvador Allende that began a dictatorship that, for 16 years, was characterized by the systematic disappearance and violation of human rights of thousands of people. September 2020, however, was even more special. Since October 2019 the country has been engulfed in a serious social crisis triggered initially by a group of young students who took control of the subway train system in response to a 30 CH$ (Chilean pesos, 0.04 USD) increase in the cost of the fare. Under the slogan “it’s not 30 CH$, it’s 30 years” great masses of women, men and children marched through the streets for months stopped only by the mandatory confinement imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Photo credit: Cristian via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Throughout the last 30 years, with the return to democracy, the Chilean neoliberal development model has been based on an extractivist system that depends on the commodification and over-exploitation of nature and non renewable resources for export rather than productive purposes (see Svampa 2019). This system creates “sacrifice zones” of degradation to the extent that can only be justified under nationalist-developmentalist discourses of a productive nature that is essential to the dominant (neoliberal) economy.

In Chile, sacrifice zones linked to the 25 coal-fired thermoelectric plants currently in operation stand out in terms of impacts and political dispute as they are responsible for vast shares of greenhouse gas emissions (including 91% of total CO2) and have enormous impacts on the human rights of those who live in these territories. The Chilean energy system is characterized by privatization, a high concentration of ownership in energy generation, high dependence on imported fossil fuels, and one of the highest electricity prices in Latin America.

Within this context, and influenced mainly by international environmental commitments, in 2008 the Chilean government developed a set of regulations aimed at promoting renewable energy such as the Energy Agenda 2014 and, most recently, Energy Policy 2050. The latter reflects a commitment to the challenge of climate change by supporting a transition to a lower carbon economy. Among other targets, the goal is to reach 70% renewable sources of electricity generation and 30% reduction in the intensity of GHG emissions, by 2030.

This momentum has encouraged the proliferation of various wind power generation projects in recent years, most of them in the south of the country where the archipelago of Chiloé, a group of over 40, mostly inhabited islands, is located. Chiloé encompasses an area of more than 9,181 square kilometres and has a population of around 167,000, of which 65% belong to the Mapuche-Williche Indgenous people.

The historical and cultural syncretism between the original and Spanish populations, together with the geographical and state isolation, has constituted a kind of “world apart” where a large number of communities with a particular culture, way of life and cosmovision can still be identified (Sanazzaro et al. 2018). This translates into a complexity of cultural, social, economic and productive practices closely linked to the sea, the forest and agriculture.