La Tercera || The reality of a bad project

MR. DIRECTOR:
With the Committee of Ministers’ latest rejection of the Dominga mining-port project as a backdrop, another megaproject looms on the horizon, located in an ecosystem of great ecological value that has not been without its problems. This is the San Antonio Outer Port, which, with the extension requested in January, will complete two and a half years of suspension in its environmental processing by June of this year, when the Complementary Addendum is submitted to the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA).

Are the permits (or the misnamed permitting process) responsible for this delay? No. Are environmental organizations the ones who don’t want the project? No, either. The reality is simpler: the main opponent of this initiative is the project itself, whose Environmental Impact Study has received a historic number of technical and citizen comments, especially due to the questionable modeling of the geomorphological impacts of the breakwater on the Maipo River estuary and the wetland—declared a Nature Sanctuary by the Chilean State—that depends on it, without considering the effects of climate change.

The truth is that the San Antonio Port Authority is putting pressure on environmental institutions, forcing a project evaluation system (such as the SEIA) to transform into a project improvement system, a role for which it was not designed. In this context, it is logical for the project manager to reintroduce the project to the SEIA to project the sustainability of development in an area that is not only a port but also home to one of the most important ecosystems in the central region.

Diego Urrejola
Executive Director of the Cosmos Foundation