Chile is putting at risk its invaluable natural heritage and resources with the expansion of its hydroelectric capability with thinking of the long-term.

Below is an article written by Benjamin Witte and published by the Patagonia Times:

Four of Chile’s most influential senators are hoping Congress will soon pass a non-binding resolution defending the country’s right to develop hydroelectric projects. The motion – presented last week [Week 19, 2008] by Senate President Adolfo Zaldivar, an independent, National Renovation Sens. Andrés Allamand and Antonio Horvath, and Christian Democratic Sen. Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle – is widely interpreted as supporting the controversial HidroAysén dam project.

The resolution recognizes the importance of hydroelectric generation for Chile’s “progress.” It also criticizes what the senators claim to be unwanted interference by foreign environmental interests. The Senate is expected to vote on the issue sometime later this week.

“There is an intense publicity campaign both in Chile and abroad to block development in the country of hydroelectric generation projects,” the resolution reads. That campaign, the document goes on to say, “is organized by outside organizations and foreign individuals whose explicit goal is to interfere in the national energy policy.”

The resolution defends the Chilean government’s ongoing efforts to diversify the country’s electricity matrix and invest in renewable sources of energy. Diversification should include continued development of the country’s vast hydroelectric potential, the senators insist.

“Hydroelectric energy is a competitive, low-impact alternative (to fossil fuel-based electricity) that can be taken advantage of in the short and medium term,” the document reads.

The non-binding resolution appears to defend the embattled HidroAysén dam project, slated for far southern Chile’s Region XI (Aysén). HidroAysén is a joint entity created by Spanish-Italian electricity giant Endesa and Colbún, a Chilean company. Together the powerful utilities plan to build five dams – two along the Baker River and three along the Pascua – that combined would represent some 2,750 MW of potential electricity.

The motion is also seen as a direct attack on high-profile U.S. environmentalists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Douglas Tompkins, known critics of HidroAysén’s estimated US$3 billion plan. The project, say Tompkins, Kennedy Jr. and other members of the so-called Patagonia sin Represas (Patagonia without Dams) campaign, will devastate the pristine Baker and Pascua Rivers.

Even more worrisome, say critics of the project, is a proposed 2,300-kilometer transmission line that would be needed to carry the electricity from Region XI to energy hungry central Chile. The power line, they say, would cut through countless acres of both protected and unprotected wilderness area and pave the way for future industrial development in the region.

“This is a mega-monster project,” Tompkins told the Patagonia Times earlier this year. “They’re talking about running these friggin’ power lines all the way up to Santiago and they’re going to disfigure the landscapes between here and there. And they’re winding all over. You should see a copy of the proposed (route). It’s a spaghetti type of thing.”

The “pro-dam” resolution is being hotly contested by HidroAysén’s many critics, who consider it hypocritical that Sens. Horvath, Zaldivar, Allamand and Frei object so strongly to the U.S. environmental lobby yet apparently welcome the presence of Endesa and other foreign companies.

In a public declaration issued this past Sunday, a group of 40 different environmental, Mapuche and other citizen groups lambasted Sens. Horvath and Zaldivar (who represent Region XI) for turning a “deaf ear” to their constituents.

“It’s paradoxical,” the groups went on to say, “that people who accept the fact that our water – a strategic and national asset that’s used by everyone – is concentrated in the hands of private multinational electric companies would criticize those Chileans and foreigners who, in an effort to protect the ecosystems on which present and future Chileans will depend, want (the water) to be returned to Chilean hands.”

Before moving ahead with the polemical dam project, HidroAysén must first gain approval from the government’s National Environmental Commission (CONAMA). The company, which hopes to begin construction before the end of the decade, says it will hand CONAMA a requisite environmental impact report later this year [2008].