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THE ATACAMA: AT THE CENTRE OF CLIMATE INJUSTICE RAMÓN MORALES BALCÁZAR Ramón Morales Balcázar is the founder of the local NGO Tantí Foundation (Seed, in the Kunza language) in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, and a member of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats. He is also an active member of Red por los Ríos Libres (Free-Flowing Rivers Network) and SCAC (Civil Society for Climate Action). He is a PhD student in Rural Development at the Metropolitan Autonomous University UAM-Xochimilco in Mexico. His thesis project is aimed at understanding the territorial impacts resulting from eco-extractivism in the context of global crisis. Translated by Andy Symington.
Despite producing only 0.25% of global greenhouse gas emissions,1 Chile is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, possessing 7 of the 9 risk factors established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The community of San Pedro de Atacama, in the north of the country and origin of about 25% of the world’s lithium, fulfils four of these: arid or semi-arid areas; prone to natural disasters; areas liable to drought and desertification; and areas with mountainous ecosystems. At the foot of the Andes, the community has a population of nearly 11,000, of whom more than half identify as indigenous. The Atacameño or Lickanantay people are a First Nation of agropastoral tradition; though they descend from the first human settlements in the region, they were only recognised by the state of Chile in 1993. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has identified that indigenous peoples are ‘among the first to face the direct consequences of climate change, due to their dependence upon, and close relationship, with the environment and its
resources. Climate change exacerbates the difficulties already faced by indigenous communities including political and economic marginalization, loss of land and resources, human rights violations, discrimination and unemployment.’2 According to the country’s national human rights institute INDH, Chile currently has at least 117 socio-environmental conflicts, a third of which are in indigenous territory. In San Pedro de Atacama, indigenous communities and inhabitants of the Salar de Atacama basin face the effects of climate change in conditions of vulnerability exacerbated by the absence of the state and the socio-environmental impacts of expanding mining operations. Climate change is being felt with ever-greater intensity across the sizeable Atacama Desert, where high temperatures and extreme aridity combine, paradoxically, with violent summer rains to cause deaths, flooding and waterlogging, erosion, washingaway of mining waste and huge economic losses. These torrential rains descend from the Andes destroying vegetation, vehicles, homes and infrastructure, leaving people isolated and without basic services for weeks and even months. They force the closure of tourist sites administered by local indigenous communities and destroy the irrigation canals and vegetable gardens that give life to the
