The fight to protect Bosque Panul continues
Marches, occupations, campaigns, endless meetings: a great social mobilization that bore fruit in January 2012, when the real estate mega-project in Bosque Panul was rejected on environmental grounds.
More than 5 years have passed since that "victory," and the forest and the Santiago precordillera remain completely unprotected.
The real problem: private property versus environmental protection.
Imagine we owned a piece of land. If we did, we could do whatever we wanted with it. Fill it with rubbish, or remove all the vegetation overnight, and at most pay fines. Or even build whatever we pleased — buildings, streets, and shopping centers.
If on top of this precarious situation we add that Bosque Panul is a recreational space for millions of people and has no official protection or control whatsoever; that there are more than 20 access points to the area; and that various uses take place, often without calculating their real impact (such as bonfires that cause forest fires, cycling competitions that cause erosion, parties, lucrative events, or pets that drive away native wildlife) — the situation is truly dire, as the forest deteriorates day by day.
The Santiago precordillera as a whole fares no better than Bosque Panul. It seems the State will not protect this territory, waiting instead for the goodwill of its owners.
Let us look at the municipality of La Florida. Most of its owners are real estate companies: Gesterra (now Sixterra) and ENACO. In other words, they are not exactly conservationists.
Why a Park in the precordillera and Bosque Panul?
The precordillera and Bosque Panul help clean and cool the entire Santiago basin. Their evergreen forests absorb rainwater and stop landslides coming from the high mountains. In one of the cities with the worst pollution records, extreme traffic congestion, and minimal green space, also badly distributed, we certainly need more forests, more parks, and better public transport — not more highways, nor more homes or cars that increase congestion and smog.
For this we need to create a Community Public Park in Panul, with the objective of conserving the nature of this forest and the entire precordillera, so we can continue to receive its benefits — not an open space where anything goes and there is no control whatsoever, as it is now.
And will the State protect the precordillera and Panul?
The Nueva Mayoría government, through Intendant Claudio Orrego, committed three years ago to creating some form of protection — which to this day has not happened.
What did happen was a response from the Ministry of Housing to a press release from Red Precordillera, stating that the State will not create a park in Bosque Panul, due to the high cost it would entail (40 billion pesos). When asked for the documents supporting this, they refused to provide them.
A citizen investigation revealed that this value was not the real or market value, but had been inflated by the Navarrete Rolando family, through fake transactions carried out between different companies they themselves had created. In other words, it was not the market that set the value of Panul, but its own owners.
This situation is serious, because if private parties were allowed to set the price of their land, the State could never create public parks. The law is clear on this point, and it is the market value that must prevail — not real estate speculation, especially on land where supposedly no homes can be built.
Today, the constitution created under the dictatorship allows the State to protect our environmental heritage through parks, via the municipal or metropolitan zoning plan (articles 59 and 59 bis, General Urban Planning and Construction Law).
However, neither Mayor Rodolfo Carter nor the Michelle Bachelet government through its Intendant Orrego have taken steps to protect this place.
With this urban policy, the Nueva Mayoría and the right end up being more neoliberal and dictatorial than the very dictatorship that preceded them.
And when will there be a real valuation?
If this continues, the future of the forest is bleak. The organized community is overwhelmed in its care, and while it is kept clean and activities such as reforestation and protection days are held, its deterioration is constant. There are very few saplings or new trees, which speaks to the critical state in which Bosque Panul finds itself.
We call on political authorities to set aside their interests and listen to what the public has been demanding for years — dignified treatment of our last forests that survive in one of the most polluted cities on the planet.
We want a real valuation carried out, to determine how much we will need to pay as a society to have a Public Park in Panul, as a first step.
We will soon be sharing information that explains why this important territory remains unprotected.
The content expressed in this article is the responsibility of its original authors and does not necessarily represent the views associated with the Panul Para Todos project.
The information archived in Archivo Panul was collected using automated tools, so there may be inconsistencies between what is presented here and the original link. You can visit the original link at the top of this article.