The Counter | Column “Outer Port of San Antonio”

Mr. Director:

The San Antonio Port Authority submitted the Extraordinary Addendum to the Outer Port project, representing the third attempt to adjust a flagship initiative that, since its inception, has shown substantial deficiencies in identifying and assessing significant impacts on the ecosystem of the Maipo River estuary and Llolleo lagoons.

Given this situation, we must ask ourselves: are we correctly interpreting the role of the Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA)? An assessment system should analyze projects and determine whether or not they comply with regulations, not become a redesign workshop. If each addendum acts as a patch that corrects what should have been resolved in the initial stage to reach the minimum standard, the problem ceases to be environmental and becomes structural.

Furthermore, this dynamic influences the perception that it is the system (SEIA), the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA) or the communities that generate delays, when the responsibility for presenting projects with baselines that correctly identify the impacts and their mitigation measures, falls on the owners.

The truth is that flaws in project design don’t disappear; they simply persist over time and become social, environmental, and fiscal costs ultimately borne by communities and the state itself. Rather than simply adding more and more pages to the project, the best mitigation strategy is to present sound projects from the outset and not rely on the system to improve them.

Diego Urrejola,

executive director of the Cosmos Foundation

See column in El Mostrador