UN envoy warns of crisis caused by "Chilean Chernobyl"
Saturday, May 13th 2023 - 10:50 UTC
David Boyd, the United Nations (UN) envoy for human rights and the environment, warned that Chile is facing a “frightening and interconnected environmental crisis” that is violating the rights of millions of people at the industrial complex known as the “Chilean Chernobyl.”
”I smelled the toxic fumes of industry in (the industrial complex) Ventanas and felt them in my throat. I heard the testimony of mothers, with tears in their eyes, who were afraid to send their children to school,“ said Boyd.
The UN representative gave a description of the Ventanas industrial complex, located on the central Chilean coast, in the towns of Puchuncaví and Quinteros, where more than 15 industrial facilities are located, including oil refineries, petrochemical plants, coal-fired plants, gas terminals, and copper smelters.
According to Boyd, people in the area ”suffer from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases“, and there are ”high levels of infant mortality, unacceptable levels of cancer risk in children, and a lower life expectancy.“
More:
https://en.mercopress.com/2023/05/13/un-envoy-warns-of-crisis-caused-by-chilean-chernobyl
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Older story:
Poisoned lives: five decades of pollution in Chile’s Quintero-Ventanas Bay
by Sebastián Balcazar on 4 October 2016
It’s 7 p.m. in the bay of Quintero, Valparaiso Province. With cuttlefish, hooks, coffee and food at the ready, the crew releases the moorings and sets out into the night to fish. Some boats leave with three sailors, others with four. They sail to the open sea because the bay’s biodiversity is gone.
Capturing cuttlefish (Sepiida) is hard work. In the middle of the night, with water above our ankles, we pulled mollusks into the boat. The boat is the only point of light in the ocean. There are no longer any cod, sharks, anchovies, sardines, mackerel, eel, yellowtail amberjack or hake. Cuttlefish has become the go-to species for the past two years.
“The damage is tremendous. Before, people could fish everything, but now if we ran out of cuttlefish, we would have nothing left,” Hugo Poblete, leader of the S24 fishing union in Quintero, told Mongabay.
In the past, the Quintero-Ventanas bay was very active and busy; now, only a few small stalls and shops remain. The restaurants are empty of diners and tourism has also decreased drastically. “The [oil] spills were the final nail in the coffin,” Poblete says.
More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2016/10/poisoned-lives-five-decades-of-pollution-in-chiles-quintero-ventanas-bay/
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