Article by Manuela Royo Letelier, lawyer and expert in environmental and international law. PhD in Law from the University of Talca (Chile), ecofeminist and environmental activist, national spokesperson for the Movement for the Defence of Access to Water, Land and the Environment (Modatima) between 2022-2023. This article is part of the book ‘Ecology and Empowerment’ published by the French network for decentralised cooperation and international solidarity F3E in its Challenges collection. The whole book can be downloaded here.

Life is dependent on water.

The latter constitutes around 80% of most living organisms, and the vast majority of metabolic processes within and between these organisms rely on it. Humans are composed primarily of water, which makes up 60% of a human body and 65% of its mass; for newborns this figure can be as high as 70% to 80%.

Other forms of life on earth also need water to survive. Indeed, the earliest forms of life evolved in water. It covers over 70% of the planet’s surface, in oceans, lakes, and rivers, but also in the air and the earth. It is vital for regulating the world’s climate and biodiversity.

Water is essential for life. There is no substitute for the survival and reproduction of all forms of life, and as such, it constitutes a basic human right, humanity’s and nature’s common heritage.

However, today we face a major crisis due to the deterioration of freshwater sources and in some cases, an irreversible water crisis, water scarcity and climate change. This situation has revived and focused international analysis on the importance of water for life, which in the Chilean case has been exacerbated due to privatisation and unequal access to this vital resource.

The neoliberal reforms implemented in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s led in economic and social terms to a new way of approaching societal development, with a complete shift towards the free market, privatisation, the commodification of social rights, and plundering of the natural commons ¹.

In Chile there are 1,251 rivers, 15,000 lakes and lagoons, and 24,114 glaciers, comprising 80% of the glacial area of the southern Andes. However, the abundance of water sources is not synonymous with its free and fair distribution. On the contrary, the reality of Chile’s water situation is highly alarming: we are the only country in which water is privatised at a constitutional level, as a legacy of the dictatorship that endures day on day as part of the extractivist model under which we live.

In this context, MODATIMA’s struggle has focused on condemning and spotlighting the conflicts over human access to water, and on safeguarding it as a vital element for life.

It is not drought, it is looting

The movement for the protection of water was established in the province of Petorca in 2010. As a result of water being monopolised in the hands of the few, the surrounding hillsides which flourish with avocado trees contrast sharply with the lack of access to water for farming families and communities. This region is infamous as an environmental sacrifice zone, characterised by the consumption of thousands of litres of water in pools to irrigate large areas of avocado monoculture, in contrast to the lack of drinking and subsistence water supplies for the communities and the rivers, which have dried up²

What is happening in Petorca is not an isolated incident: 70% of water in Chile is consumed by agro-exporters and mining companies, that are not willing to regulate their business model to one that is fair to neighbouring communities and the environment. In the 2019-2020 season, Chile produced 168,000 tonnes of avocados, of which 28% were consumed domestically and 72% were exported, mainly to Europe, the United States, China and Argentina. By all odds, what we export is water.

Currently, most of the country’s river basins are overexploited, especially in northern and central Chile. The river basins in seven regions are over-allocated by the General Water Department, which means that more water rights have been granted than water actually available in the aquifers. For over ten years, and particularly in the last five, droughts have had severe consequences on multiple sectors, accentuated further through hoarding and the unscrupulous theft of water from river basins.

In recent years, 184 municipalities in the country have been living under a water shortage decree, 400,000 families have received water supplies by tanker, and in some cases, schools have been closed due to a lack of drinking water. Currently, 84% of water consumption rights lie in the hands of mining and agro-export companies, irreversibly affecting our national sovereignty over an asset considered strategic for national security and which, above all else, is a fundamental human right.

The current private model of water ownership in Chile promotes concentration in the hands of the few, and does not recognise the democratic and inclusive participation of different stakeholders living in the river basin. Nor does it promote community or public management systems, such as those implemented by rural drinking water Committees, as well as the indigenous peoples and municipalities that have been managing the misnamed ‘water emergency’ for decades, in order to provide water and sanitation access to hundreds of thousands of families. The permanent declaration of water scarcity zones has prevented the safeguarding of ecological flows and favoured the maintenance of water uses that existed in times of greater availability, so that its successive application promotes structural conditions of overuse and the degradation of ecosystems³. At the same time, the Chilean water privatisation model only grants decision-making over hydraulic works and their management to waterway management boards and advisory boards (bodies made up of water rights owners), to the detriment of sustainable and participatory drainage basin management.

Despite a Water Code reform in 2021, the water market continues to be maintained as a mechanism for the private reallocation of this good, perpetuating the concentration of water rights in the hands of certain productive sectors, speculation, and the exclusion of less competitive and non-profit sectors. There is a complete lack of protection for ecological flows with ecosystemic criteria that guarantee the protection of biodiversity and the sustainability of river basins. The ancestral rights that indigenous communities hold over the river basins they have traditionally inhabited and used have been completely overlooked.

In this scenario, the water movement continues to grow and is today taking on new challenges in the struggle to protect water as a natural, unclaimable common good to sustain life in a context of profound crisis and inequality.

Movement for the protection of water: experiences and challenges

Understanding water outside the logic of property implies venturing down paths that challenge consensuses built over centuries. It means developing the capacity to forge community, to see the water commons as a perspective of meaning for life, and together to navigate a way out of the climate crisis towards the necessary de-privatisation of water, and its recognition as an essential good for the cycles of nature and human life⁴.

Along these lines, the Movement to Protect Access to Water, Land, and the Environment is growing and taking root nationwide in regions where water and land protection require a social and political approach. An array of possible strategies exists. To speak out against water pillaging, we began a national tour to explain how the water market model works and its consequences; we organised regional debates with social and environmental organisations to highlight the importance of ecological struggles within every transformative political project.

Given the current climate, and the structural and political nature of the water problem and the socio-ecological crisis, in 2017 we took the collective decision to form a national movement. During the first few years, the challenge was to raise the movement’s profile and to provide training. Through action, training, advocacy, and acts of resistance, the movement grew. Step by step, we have managed to bring people from different regions into the movement, which has expanded nationwide, thanks to voluntary, self-managed action to protect water and local areas. We have also led initiatives and mobilisation against water grabbing and investment projects that affect the water cycle in different phases of glaciers, wetlands, aquifers, and rivers.

Chile’s recent history has had a profound impact on us. We took part in the 2019 social movements, and successfully integrated the 2022 Chilean constitutional process, during which we put forward proposals such as the nationalization of water as part of local planning and the recognition of the rights of nature, among other founding proposals of Chile’s new Ecological Constitution.⁵

At the same time, thanks to the water movement, our former national spokesperson, Rodrigo Mundaca, became the governor of the second largest region in the country. The regional government of Valparaíso has established a policy to support local, integrated watershed management as part of a regional plan for water democracy. Public spending has been channelled towards improving infrastructure and equipment, especially rural community drinking water organisations, and public resources redirected to ensure access to water as a human right in the region.

In relation to community management, we have been involved in supporting rural drinking water cooperatives. Such committees and cooperatives were set up in Chile in the 1960s as community initiatives to solve the problem of human access to water in rural areas. They subsist to this day, addressing the considerable demand for water in rural areas, many of which do not benefit from state provision and are bereft of public drinking water systems.⁶

Women protecting water

The ingrained relationship between the subordination of women and the destruction of nature is a commonality among ecofeminist schools of thought, whose validity is embodied in praxis. It is a theory and at the same time a political and social movement that criticises exploitation methods and environmental domination by a capitalist system that pays no heed to human life and nature’s limits. Overcoming ecosystemic limits has meant imposing a model that undermines the material bases that sustain life. This drive towards destruction and subjugation primarily affects women, as clearly demonstrated by the impact of climate change on nature and on the lives of those who inhabit it.

Over the course of this struggle, women have played a fundamental role, mainly in building a collective narrative and practice that challenge prevailing logic and pave the way to build a programme that establishes water as a common good and a human right. By integrating feminism into environmental issues, we recognise that the oppression that we experience as women also affects local areas. For water autonomy and bodily autonomy!

The experience of the Modatima women of Petorca has shown us how the progressive denaturalisation of the hydro-social cycle generates damage, but also resistance and organisation. The Mujeres Modatima women’s movement has drawn attention to the situation of women environmentalists and the permanent threat to their lives.

In 2022, four women from the organisation were elected to the Constitutional Council, and during this process, action was undertaken to raise the profile of ecofeminism on the front line of social struggles against extractivism. In the words of Carolina Vilches, spokesperson for the movement: “The body, our primary dominion, has been socially neglected, objectified, and devoid of protection through public policies in our country, and in a large part of the continent. We bear witness every day to this shortcoming in rural areas and among the most excluded women. From an eco-feminist perspective, we maintain that the realities of the places we inhabit reflect that ‘patriarchy does to our bodies what the extractivist economy does to our regions’. In Petorca, there has been no water for over a decade; food and water are fundamental needs and without water we have no food. That is why we resist as a community, demonstrating that cooperation is the way to solve collective problems. As such we have managed to supply homes to women who still live in plundered Petorca because, without water there is no food, and without food there is no feminism”.⁷

This process of growth and politicisation is related to recognising other ways of understanding water, which criticise the instrumental rationality that dominates current forms of appropriating this essential element, as part of processes of accumulation by dispossession that we see in Chile and globally, which expose us as women, and also call us to act:

“Resisting the extractivist advance is not an option, it is our duty. As organised and responsible women, we take the attitude that it is not possible to stand by and watch while we perish. It is our duty to the land, to water, to our own existence to change course, it is a call to love ourselves more, because without water everything simply dries up: gardens, throats, skin, and life stagnates…. without water, life is no more”.⁸

Until water is returned to communities and territories

The struggle to reclaim water is a complex and extremely challenging journey. Yet, as long as water, a human right and an essential part of nature’s cycles, remains privatised, the water movement, and those who fight to uphold dignified life, will continue enacting strategies to recover water, in the firm belief that by combining multiple strategies we can restore, rehabilitate, protect and preserve natural and cultural ecosystems.

As a movement we believe in taking back and strengthening community water management, in protecting nature and natural commons, in the right to access land, and in protecting nature. We believe in building a militant social fabric, connected across regions, so that we can play an active part in socio-environmental conflicts and take action with communities to influence institutional transformations in order to address our collective demands.

Social movements are constantly questioning and challenging the flaws created by capitalism and governments that have distanced themselves from the people. But we also put forward alternatives, solutions, new organisational models, and community-based economic and political management systems, and their relationship with the environment.

We are aware of the recent relative success of fascist narratives, yet choose to focus on winning the long-term strategic discourse, so that we can prescribe a programme of alternative social and political movements, and keep challenging institutionality when assuming positions of popular representation. This is the key to improving the quality of our democracies and ensuring our rights, by building from the trenches of water protection, a fair, dignified life in harmony with nature.

The water movement will continue, because we believe in the universal ethics of water as an ecological necessity, as opposed to the corporate culture of privatisation, greed and hoarding. Water belongs to everyone, it is a minimum requirement for a dignified existence, because without water our eyes, our throats and our land dry up, our lives perish. We are a riverbed in rebellion, and we will continue to fight until the last drop of stolen water is recovered.

Water struggles in Chile

Life is dependent on water.

It is not drought, it is looting

Movement for the protection of water: experiences and challenges

Women protecting water

Until water is returned to communities and territories

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