Children playing in front of the AES Gener thermoelectric plant in the Valparaiso region. The The Quintero-Puchuncavi area is one of Chile's "sacrifice zones" Getty Images / PABLO VERA / Contributor

One morning in late August 2018, Carolina Astudillo was leaving her house in Quintero, a Chilean coastal town just two hours from Santiago, when she noticed a change in the air around her. As she reached the end of the block she was already coughing heavily. She felt sick, a numbness in her limbs. “It was brutal. You almost couldn’t breathe. My throat was sore, my arms and legs felt numb,” Astudillo says.

It’s not so unusual for residents of Quintero and the surrounding villages to feel like this. Many of her neighbours suffer from respiratory illnesses like asthma. The air often tastes metallic, rather than of the sea. Even the beach looks darker than it should be – instead of shells, the sand is littered with coal spilt from incoming cargo ships. A few dead birds lie washed up just yards from where some families eat their picnics.


But this time it was worse than normal. Several chemical gases, including methyl chloroform, nitrobenzene and toluene, had leaked from the nearby oil and chemical plants that ring the town. Between September 21 and October 18 that year, 1,398 people were treated for gas poisoning in local hospitals, according to the Chilean Ministry of Health. The residents of the Quintero and Puchuncaví region had been hit by yet another pollution crisis, another industrial accident.

Just a few kilometres from where Astudillo lives with her husband and children is the centre of Chilean industrial development. It is home to some of the biggest and dirtiest industries: coal power plants, cement plants, thermal power, natural gas. From just one copper smelter in 1964, there are now around 20 different industrial facilities here, built as part of state plans to drive production. The park was meant to be the engine of economic growth to launch Chile into the ranks of “developed” countries – an idea echoed by the West German minister of Economic Cooperation, Walter Scheel, who visited Quintero Bay during the construction of the copper processing plant: “Chile is not an underdeveloped country but a nation in full swing toward development,” he said at the time. But this development has come at a cost.

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Quintero is known to residents and activists as one of Chile’s “sacrifice zones”, an area where pollution and contamination are so high, that nature and the people living there have been squeezed out for the sake of economic development. “We call Quintero the Chilean Chernobyl,” says Rodrigo Barría of Greenpeace Chile. “The environment is broken without repair. The soil is broken, the water is broken. The people are sacrificed. This is the kind of stuff that society prefers not to look at, because the people are poor.”

There are five of these so-called sacrifice zones in Chile, and for years communities have been fighting for their rights to live in a healthy environment. Groups have campaigned, mostly in vain, for tighter industry regulations, reparations, and for better health services.


For a time there was hope; last year campaigners won a historic victory when the Supreme Court confirmed the government was ultimately responsible for the environmental contamination in 2018, and that it must take concrete steps to prevent it happening again. While Chile spent most of last year preparing to host the international environment conference COP25, President Sebastian Piñera introduced a 2040 decarbonisation plan, and promised a decontamination plan for Quintero, attempting to normalise and freeze levels of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide within three years. The government claimed there would be dramatic reductions. Copper company Codelco for example, is allowed to produce 1,000 tons of particulate matter per year, but the plans would reduce that by 91 per cent to 89 tons per year.

But his promise is already fracturing. The decarbonisation plan would only close two of the oldest and least productive power plants in the Quintero area by 2024, while environmental groups criticised the proposals for not addressing the levels of arsenic or heavy metals in the region. Then all hopes for the state to present Chile as a positive example were quashed when Piñera was forced to pull out of hosting the conference after a massive social uprising broke out in the country in October 2019.

Getty Images / PABLO COZZAGLIO / Contributor

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Millions of people have since taken to the streets over deeply entrenched inequality. Protests broke out in the capital over a rise in metro fares, but exploded into nationwide unrest over standards of living – from privatisation of healthcare, indigenous rights, to the environment. Among the calls were an end to the sacrifice zones: at the time, 20 children in Quintero were reported hospitalised from suspected sulphur dioxide poisoning. “Nothing has been done, nothing has changed,” says Astudillo. “We've been abandoned.”


Katta Alonso, a 65-year-old activist who runs the group the Women of the Sacrifice Zone, lives in the neighbouring village of Las Ventanas. Her home looks over the bay, once a popular destination for summer holidays. She still remembers life before the industries came in. “The quality of life was marvellous. The community lived off the ocean, the land and tourism. There were white sand dunes, wetlands with nature and birds,” she says. “At the beginning it was disguised as an opportunity for work and progress. People bought into it. But eventually people started noticing this wasn’t true.”

Residents became aware of irregularities just a few years after the facilities opened. In the late 60s there were reports of cattle and horses dying, with land becoming increasingly infertile. Today people recount stories that have become almost mythological – like the “green men” who worked in the copper refinery and later died of cancer. Their organs reportedly had green pigmentations due to contamination. In 2013, the bodies of four workers were exhumed; heavy metals like arsenic and mercury were detected in their bones.

Now, the impact is hard to ignore. The local fishing industry has been virtually wiped out because the stock and ocean are too contaminated. High levels of arsenic have been reported in a number of species. In 2016, for example, a species of crab known as Jaiba Peluda was found to have arsenic levels of 57.58mg/kg, far above permitted levels of 2mg/kg.

Locals continue to face a daily battle with the air they breathe. Allergies are widespread. Sometimes school children can’t spend their lunch breaks outside in the playground because the pollution levels are too high.

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There are also frequent industrial accidents, including three major oil spills affecting the bay in the last six years. The largest in 2014 when 37,000 litres of oil were dumped into the ocean after two tankers lost connection. In 2011, more than 40 children fell ill after a chemical leak linked to a copper refinery causing nausea, vomiting and fainting. An investigation found high levels of lead and arsenic in the school, located 500 metres from a state-owned copper refinery, Codelco, and thermoelectric facility.

Coal continues to wash up on the beach as it spills during the transfer from ships to the thermoelectric plants. In 2018 Alonso documented 146 days when coal had been found on the beach. By October 2019 it was 170 days. “It affects all parts of your life – problems with mental health, there are people with learning disabilities, and there are physical consequences like, for example, you can’t finish school because your body or mind can't take it,” Astudillo says.

“Our rights to life aren’t recognised,” adds Maria Araya, president of the advisory council of the local hospital. “The kids are vulnerable, they’re not able to do normal things. They can’t breathe outside sometimes, or can’t go to school and or do exercise. Every day we're living we're sacrificing our kids. The percentage of people who are sick with asthma, cancer, or have special needs, it's double the number of a similar sized commune.”

A recent report from Santiago’s Universidad Catolica found that living in a sacrifice zone is linked to greater risk of illness and premature death. And despite the mountain of evidence over the years – from cancer rates to the destruction of biodiversity – Florencia Ortúzar from the InterAmerican Association for Environmental Defense (Aida), says the companies continue to operate this way because of lax regulations. For example, the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum exposure to sulphur dioxide is 20 ug/m3 in a day, but Chile’s is 250 ug/m3.

“At the end of the day, industry is being favoured over human health,” says Ortúzar, noting that many of the “important” industries for Chile’s economy are based in Quintero-Puchuncavi, including four coal-powered thermal plants. Despite having major reserves of solar power and green energy, Chile’s race to development and economic growth has been driven through these industries. Chile was the first South American country to join the OECD, and has had the fastest-growing economy in the region.

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She adds there are so many industries in one area that they don’t know the source of pollution “and no one knows who is not complying. It’s like a black hole.” Last October Chilean prosecutors pressed charges against six executives of state energy company ENAP in relation to the pollution crisis in 2018. But Cristian Muga, an attorney who represents ENAP workers, told Reuters: “It’s not fair to hold them responsible for a situation that has been going on for years and that is the result of many activities taking place on the bay.”

Getty Images / PABLO VERA / Contributor

In part, the communities have been too weak to fight back against the economic power. “The sacrifice zones only happen to vulnerable communities. They don't have any capacity to fight or to flee, they just have to stay there,” Ortúzar adds.

Chile is still extremely reliant on these industries. Codelco is responsible for 11 per cent of the world's copper. China is one of the biggest importers of Chilean copper, and around 60 per cent of total global copper demand is for electrics; it’s in our household wiring, our plumbing

Forty per cent of the energy produced and consumed in Chile comes from burning coal, and the 28 thermoelectric plants that generate this energy are located in five locations across the country – in the sacrifice zones. “The energy of the whole country depends on these terrible sacrifice zones where very few people live that don’t have any capacity to fight back, they are poor, vulnerable. There is no way they are going to stop these plants that are keeping the country alive,” says Ortúzar.

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But it’s not an issue isolated to this small part of the Chilean coast; many of the businesses in Quintero-Puchuncaví are foreign-owned: Aes Gener, which owns the Ventanas thermoelectric complex, is a subsidiary of American company Aes. Enel, which owns a thermoelectric plant, is Italian. The coal that ends up washing on the shores is imported from Colombia, Australia and the US.

People living thousands of miles away are bearing the brunt of larger environmental footprints. Per capita carbon emissions in Chile are currently five metric tons, less than a third of those for the United States. “It is a global issue. These are foreign companies destroying lives. Many of these companies have announced their ‘greenness’ internationally but they have their little sins here.” says Ortúzar.

Quintero’s residents have been facing this long and complicated battle for years, but in some ways their needs are simple. “It’s not realistic to think that the whole industrial park will close – there’s too much involved. What we want is better ventilation, that the companies reinvest their money into making improvements to their facilities or machinery, and to invest in the town,” say Astudillo.

They hope they can use the momentum of the social uprising and protests to highlight their plight. But it’s hard to know what justice will really look like when the stakes are so high. “The state’s negligence is the main reason for all this,” says Araya. “We are a sick population because the whole environment is sick: the air, land, water.”

Araya’s daughter died of cancer eight years ago at the age of 21. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and died after what Araya says was just a 27-day-long illness. Now Araya focuses her fight on health services, campaigning to bring in specialists to the hospitals, ensuring families can get all the information and the right doctors they need when people get sick.

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Despite her activism, she still struggles with the idea that her daughter’s cancer may have been related to contamination in Quintero. “I would prefer to think that she was an exceptional case. I realise there are many other cases that have developed similar types of cancer, so it would make sense, but,” she pauses, “it is fuel for the fight.”

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