Water is a key issue for drafters of the Chilean Constitution

Chile took another important step toward enshrining water as a human right, as the depletion of supplies increases scrutiny of one of the most privatized allocation systems in the world.

Last week, members of the convention chosen to draft the new Constitution presented a proposal to make access to water and sanitation a fundamental right, said Jaime Bassa, vice president of the 155-person Constitutional Convention.

Although the current Magna Carta, inherited from the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, lists water as a public good, it also establishes that allotments function as private property. By protecting the rights of agricultural, energy and mining companies, the system enabled Chile to become a major exporter of everything from copper to avocado to wine.

But more than a decade of drought and lax oversight have left some communities in a state of neglect, making water a key social justice issue.

Chile is the only country in the world that specifically says in its Constitution that water rights are treated as private property, said Jaime Bassa, a 44-year-old law professor at the University of Valparaíso, adding that rights can be bought and sold. as if they were shares of the company.

The article proposed by one of the 10 commissions in the Constituent Convention would see the State guaranteeing water and sanitation as an inalienable right. Additionally, it would protect watersheds during the climate crisis, Bassa said.

The proposal is in line with a bill passed in July by the Senate that includes limiting currently unlimited water rights to a maximum of 30 years and empowering regulators to suspend rights that are not being used or if supplies are at risk.

Other proposals have also been put forward, such as the right to life and assisted fertility and a reform of the judicial system. All content will likely be presented in March or April and the fully drafted document should be ready by May or June for presentation to the next president in July, Bassa said.

The water is part of a broader push in Chile to reform a model that used privatized social services to help create one of the most vibrant economies in the region, yet left many people behind. Those concerns led to an eruption of social protests in 2019 that led to the creation of the Constituent Convention.

Bassa points out that there is a Chile seen from the outside that shows all the benefits of the accumulation of wealth of the neoliberal model. But there is another that is not seen, in which a great majority of people were left behind in precarious conditions and poverty.

People should expect a new political and institutional design in the Constitution that strengthens social cohesion and enshrines fundamental rights, as seen in some European countries or Uruguay, he said.

The winner of the presidential elections on Sunday will probably call a plebiscite in August or September to approve or reject the draft Constitution.

The next president could be from the left with Gabriel Boric, from the same coalition under which Bassa was elected in May, or the conservative José Antonio Kast, an admirer of the Pinochet years. At the time, Kast campaigned against the writing of a new Constitution and has said that he could do it again if this is “bad”.

Chileans voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new constitution and then entrusted that task primarily to left-wing and independent representatives. But the sentiment seems to have changed since then. Last month, Kast won the first-round elections and, for the first time in decades, the right wing has half the Senate and almost half the lower house. That composition of Congress would limit the possibilities of any radical politics.

Bassa’s reading is that there is still an undeniable demand for more social justice, but with different points of view on how much free market or state participation the new system should have.