This talk examines the history of the environmental clauses in Chile’s constitution. That constitution was imposed at gunpoint by the Pinochet dictatorship and has been widely assailed for preserving the “guardrails” of Chile’s neoliberal economic model. Surprisingly, the 1980 constitution, designed in a secretive and anti-democratic process by conservative legal scholars and politicians, included surprisingly innovative language on environmental rights. And, as this paper demonstrates, this language was not toothless. It established the basis for two landmark legal cases in the Supreme Court over water and water rights while Chile was still ruled by Pinochet during the 1980s. These cases signified major victories for Chile’s robust environmentalist and indigenous rights movements.

Thomas Klubock is John C. Coleman Professor of History, University of Virginia. He is the author of three books on Chile, Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951, and a co-editor of The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics.