¿De quién es el agua? El terrible caso de Chile

Hoy reporta el New York Times uno de los terribles casos que suceden cuando el bien privado se sitúa por encima del bien común. Sucede que en Chile existe un libre mercado por al agua, con poca regulación estatal. Esto ha provocado lo inevitable, que quienes tienen más dinero puedan tener agua y quienes tienen menos dinero se queden con sed. Y el ejemplo más grotesco ha sido el de Quillagua, una ciudad al norte del país y en una de las regiones más secas de la Tierra, y donde las compañías mineras han comprado los derechos de uso del único río, contaminándolo y usando la mayor parte de su caudal, dejando a la gente de la ciudad sin agua. Si alguien quiere saber qué es el neoliberalismo en acción, el caso del uso del agua en Chile es más que poderoso. Copio del NYT:

Quillagua is among many small towns that are being swallowed up in the country’s intensifying water wars. Nowhere is the system for buying and selling water more permissive than here in Chile, experts say, where water rights are private property, not a public resource, and can be traded like commodities with little government oversight or safeguards for the environment.

Private ownership is so concentrated in some areas that a single electricity company from Spain, Endesa, has bought up 80 percent of the water rights in a huge region in the south, causing an uproar. In the north, agricultural producers are competing with mining companies to siphon off rivers and tap scarce water supplies, leaving towns like this one bone dry and withering.

“Everything, it seems, is against us,” said Bartolomé Vicentelo, 79, who once grew crops and fished for shrimp in the Loa River that fed Quillagua.

The population is about a fifth what it was less than two decades ago; so many people have left that he is one of only 120 people still here.

Some economists have hailed Chile’s water rights trading system, which was established in 1981 during the military dictatorship, as a model of free-market efficiency that allocates water to its highest economic use.

But other academics and environmentalists argue that Chile’s system is unsustainable because it promotes speculation, endangers the environment and allows smaller interests to be muscled out by powerful forces, like Chile’s mining industry.