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Original article: Las Salinas de Viña del Mar: Cáncer, contaminación y el colapso del modelo chileno de justicia ambiental

By Movement for a Park at Las Salinas in Viña del Mar

The recent column by Jorge Bustos (read here) addresses an uncomfortable truth that Chile must confront sooner or later: the controversy surrounding Las Salinas can no longer be perceived merely as an environmental or urban debate. We are facing one of the country’s most severe cases of environmental and health injustice.

What is most concerning is not just the historical pollution. The truly alarming fact is that the scientific evidence developed by the community has reached a level where a clear and consistent relationship now exists between the pollution in the Las Salinas area and cancer mortality patterns observed in Viña del Mar.

In simpler terms, we are discussing systematic reviews, meta-analyses, evidence-based toxicology, environmental epidemiology, geospatial analysis, and advanced causal modeling.

There is yet another deeply troubling fact. When objectively comparing the technical level of those supporting the community’s position, the scientific advisors from the Movement for a Park at Las Salinas significantly surpassed the technical standards exhibited by the company and much of the environmental institutional framework.

While historically prominent figures linked to the technical defense of the project—such as Salvador Donghi, Michael Seeger, and Roberto Orellana—gradually faded from the public front of the conflict, only Luis Álvarez Aránguiz (Master’s degree) has actively continued defending the Copec project.

In contrast, the community assembled an interdisciplinary team of specialists including epidemiologist and public health doctor Esteban Hadjez B., sociology doctor Mónica Vargas, clinical psychology doctor Arturo Prieto, computer science doctor Juan Pavez, environmental psychology doctor René Squella, and electronics engineering Master’s degree holder Pablo Roncagliolo, among others. They technically asserted something very simple: the risk to human health was never subjected to a real and comprehensive scientific evaluation.

Herein lies the most critical point of the entire process. The Second Environmental Tribunal itself stated that for a risk to exist, three components must be present: a source, a receptor, and an exposure pathway. This legal standard is correct. Yet subsequent events have demonstrated precisely what the community has been warning about for years: the active removal of contaminated soils created real pathways for population exposure.

This means that the risk framework recognized by the tribunal was ultimately realized in practice. Nevertheless, a genuine Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) was never demanded, particularly concerning the cumulative cancer risk derived from complex mixtures of pollutants.

This is the core of the problem. The institutional framework reduced the analysis to general limits, partial modeling, and administrative compliance. However, it never addressed the real phenomenon: the «cocktail effect of pollutants.» Because actual health damage does not depend on an isolated chemical. It depends on cumulative exposure, interactions between pollutants, biological susceptibility, and more than a century of petrochemical burden on the population.

No serious calculations were ever made regarding the Incremental Cancer Risk associated with exposure to complex mixtures of PAHs, BTEX, PCBs, pesticides, lead, and hexavalent chromium, among other internationally recognized carcinogenic and neurotoxic contaminants. And this is not a minor technical detail. It is exactly the type of evaluation mandated by Law 19.300 when there are risks to human health.

However, the system functioned under a dangerously simplified notion: “If certain general limits are not exceeded, then there is no risk.” This is scientifically false.

Modern toxicology has been proving for decades that there is no safe threshold for multiple environmental carcinogens under cumulative exposure and complex mixtures. The situation becomes even more critical when subsequent resources before the Supreme Court end up functioning as a true institutional lock. Because the technical substance was never deeply reviewed.

In practice, the system ended up giving extraordinary weight to the scientific interpretation of a single technical minister from the Second Environmental Tribunal, without an independent and systematic interdisciplinary scientific review.

Here emerges a serious structural flaw in the Chilean model of environmental justice. In highly scientifically complex environmental conflicts, the interpretation of one individual is insufficient. International comparative experience demands: independent scientific panels, interdisciplinary review, advanced toxicology, environmental epidemiology, and integrated health risk assessment.

Chile did exactly the opposite. This brings us to the most uncomfortable question: Can the persistence of a restrictive doctrine regarding health risk in light of such an extraordinary accumulation of scientific evidence and subsequent facts be explained solely as an innocent mistake?

This question can no longer be casually dismissed. Because while Chile debated procedures and legal pathways, people continued to be exposed. And exposure to environmental carcinogens has a brutal characteristic: its damage possesses latency. Between exposure and cancer, it can take 10, 20, 30, 40 years, or even be inherited by future generations through epigenetics.

This is the chronic and silent tragedy of Las Salinas. Biology does not negotiate with procedural doctrines. Biology accumulates damage. And communities have the right to know the complete truth, to protect themselves, to remediate, and to regenerate the harm caused after a century of toxic exposure.

Movement for a Park at Las Salinas in Viña del Mar
Contact: unparqueparalassalinas@gmail.com

El Ciudadano

La entrada Viña del Mar’s Salt Flats: Cancer, Pollution, and the Collapse of Chile’s Environmental Justice Model se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.