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I can still picture the blue body water that once belonged to the Aculeo Lake in central Chile. It was surrounded by green hills which became golden brown as it set. The Andes mountains framed the scene.
Laguna de Aculeo was one of Chile’s largest natural lagoons, located just a couple of hours drive from the capital, Santiago. Natural beauty attracted families from the area. We hired a boat, and my sister and me spent hours rowing to its centre.
It was 20 years ago. Alfonso Ortiz, an elderly farmer, stands with me today at the border that was once his land and the waters. The ground is sandblasted and the lake has been dried up.
“Where we are now you could see fish, all types of birds. The sound was so beautiful, it was a marvel,” he says. In 2018, the lagoon at Aculeo had been completely dried out. Scientists confirmed that there was no sign of life. Now, the only thing that remains is the skeletons and bones of trees and other animals.
No part of this long, thin country – from the world’s driest desert to the glaciers of Patagonia – has avoided the severe impacts of the climate crisis. Chile has been experiencing a severe drought for many years. Thousands of households have struggled to access safe drinking waters.
The disappearance of the Aculeo lagoon and others like it is not a climate issue. Researchers confirmed what many locals suspected for years: that the lake had been destroyed by man.
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“Aculeo represents what’s going on in all of Chile,” says Pablo Garcia-Chevesich, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and University of Arizona. He co-authored the report which found the lake’s disappearance was due to “anthropogenic factors” such as river deviations and aquifer pumping which, combined with below average rainfall, had a “severe impact” on the lagoon.
He said: “Most of the time the problem is human consumption rather than climate change.”
Chile is the only country to explicitly protect water as private property at the constitutional level. In the 1980s, Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian government enacted the Water Code so the state could allocate water rights to individuals and private companies free of charge, thereby creating a market where water could be bought and sold. Chile now has entirely private water, and extractive industries continue to be prioritised over the rights of communities’ access to water.
In the decades since the dictatorship enshrined the privatisation of water and other social rights, 80 per cent of the country’s water sources have been overexploited, damaging communities and in some cases permanently destroying the surrounding ecosystems.
The lagoon of Aculeo had been able to withstand droughts for thousands upon thousands of years. However, major water-intensive agricultural industries like avocado and cherry producers have moved in. These industries have diverted rivers and pumped groundwater out of aquifers. In the meantime, more summer homes were built. The owners exploited groundwater to water their swimming pools and keep their lawns green.
“The state gave these water rights out of ignorance. They didn’t include climate change, and they didn’t include the consequences on the ecology or the social consequences of what they were doing,” adds Garcia-Chevesich.
“Of course we have climate change, of course we have drought. But the way this problem is affecting the environment and people is due to the management model,” says Greenpeace Chile’s campaigns coordinator, Estefania Gonzalez.
Chile lies between the length of the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean, so “even in the most drought-stricken places of the country there is water”, she says. “But the problem is that water is used for big industries without any limit and without any care about the water cycle and the communities.”
Ortiz has been a small-scale farmer in Aculeo his entire life. As the water has dried he’s witnessed his animals die from thirst. He is now struggling to get water for himself, so he buys water tanks that are transported into the village.
It’s a situation playing out across the country. Petorca is a town in central Chile that is home to the booming avocado industry. The water scarcity has reached such an extreme level that families can only drink 50 litres of water per day from trucks delivered twice weekly.
The battle over water rights has long been fought across the country, coming to a head in the violent protests against Chile’s neoliberal model and rising inequality in 2019, which saw thousands of demonstrators wounded and at least 30 killed. There was a window of opportunity in the midst of all the destruction.
After a historic referendum in 2021, elected Chileans are now in the process of rewriting the country’s dictatorship-era constitution. The new document, which Gabriel Boric, a leftist president, has pledged to protect water rights as well as ecosystems and is deemed a moment of change by communities.
“We hope that we can change the legal nature of water to ensure human access to water and sanitation,” says Carolina Vilches Fuenzalida, a constitutional assembly member and environmental activist. “We wish to end the ownership, sale and hoarding of water that’s led us to depend on a cistern truck and taken away access to a decent life.”
