Chile denounces mining company that contaminated Patagonia with 40,000 liters of diesel | Society

The navy began this weekend an administrative summary administrative investigation to investigate the causes of the spill. Meanwhile, the Superintendency of the Environment – a decentralized public service, but closely monitored by the executive – will help to investigate the facts, but has no power to punish former projects without resolution of impact on the environment, as it is the case with this group installation. CAP in Patagonia. The government has recently presented to Congress a bill that corrects this legal vacuum and gives power to the Superintendency of the Environment to prevent environmental damage, to give priority to its reparation and to punish more severely such damage. incidents.

Until now, the first information indicates that it was a human error committed by a mining operator. "A manager left an open key to fill an oil tank and overcame it," said the mayor of Magellan before his trip to the area, a fishing-only site accessible only by rail. maritime. According to Minister Schmidt, "it can not result that an action likely to cause serious damage to the environment is entrusted to a single operator".

Damage to flora and fauna has not yet been corroborated, although the Greenpeace environmental organization has warned of "devastating" consequences. "It is an extremely serious situation to think of the crystal clear waters in which this environmental emergency has occurred," said Matías Asun, director of the nationwide NGO this week -end. "We must think that the area is extremely difficult to access and that it is an area of ​​great wealth of marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins, that could be seriously affected in their habitat because of the development of mining activities in extremely delicate locations "their environmental balances".

The navy is working in the cleaning, with the barge Elicura and the policeman Marinero Fuentealba. The same company said that "established protocols for this type of operational incidents have been activated," including control and mitigation measures.

The island of Guarello is part of the ancestral territory of the indigenous Kawésqar community. Its representatives from the city of Puerto Eden detailed the characteristics of the contaminated area: "The archipelago of Madre de Dios, of which Guarello is a part, is the birthplace of our elders and is home to places of great importance for our community of canoeists, for whom the sea and its resources are constitutive of its culture. There are rock paintings of our ancestors, which are of great cultural and archaeological significance, "they said this weekend. The area is also a transit point for large cetaceans and is home to colonies of wolves and seabirds.

Representatives of the Puerto Zeba indigenous community called for more transparency in the investigation and prosecution of responsibilities, underlining the responsibility of the latest Chilean leaders: "The Guarello oil spill shows the need to provide specific instruments for the realization activities with inherent risks in areas of the Patagonian archipelago ". "We affirm that these instruments have been arbitrated for years, without governments of any sign having the political will to do so," they said in their statement, adding that the consequences of pollution were " always unpredictable ". .