wordpress.org
June 21, 2001

The Pehuenches’ Last Stand Santiago

When workers for the giant energy company Endesa began work on a 570-megawatt hydroelectric dam across the Bio Bio River in southern Chile, they built a wall to divert the river’s course. Then the rains came. The river rose until it burst through the wall. When it crumbled, a handful of Pehuenche Indian women who have refused to move to make way for the dam at last saw proof that nature, if no one else, was on their side.

Nicolasa Quintreman is among the Pehuenche women battling for their ancestral homeland.

They had been warning that the spirits of the river, the sky, and the volcanoes in this rugged Andean valley would take their revenge since 1990, when the Chilean government gave energy giant Endesa the go-ahead to build the dam at Ralco, in the heart of what ecologists describe as the richest ecosystem in the land.

“You cannot upset the elements. We knew nature would punish them for this,” said Rosaria, one of the seven Pehuenche women holding out against the project.

In early June, Endesa was forced to open the floodgates at the Pangue dam, further downstream, when the swollen river came thundering down into the Pangue Reservoir, threatening to burst the dam.

But despite this “divine” intervention, the Pehuenche “girls”—most of whom are over 70 years old—seem to be fighting a losing battle against what will be the biggest hydroelectric dam in Chile. Since construction began in 1998, the diggers have already cut huge swaths out of a nearby hillside and although the recent rains have interrupted work, Endesa says the dam is still on course to start running in July 2003.

Sisters Nicolasa and Berta Quintreman—both older than 70—are leading the resistance against the project. “What would I do with a dishwasher anyway? I wouldn’t even know how to switch it on,” Nicolasa says, sitting proud amid festoons of onion strings in her smoke-filled cooking hut. “I was born here and so were my parents and their parents. If they want me to leave this place, they’ll have to carry me out dead.”