• 4 min de lectura
• 4 min de lectura
There are infrastructure projects that are, in essence, projects of civilization. The Bi-Oceanic Road Corridor —that route of more than 2,400 kilometers called to unite the Atlantic with the Pacific, crossing Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Chile— belongs, it seems to me, to that category. It is not only about bringing our ports closer to the Asia-Pacific markets and saving the time and costs imposed by the Panama Canal route; but rather, it is a bet on the place that the Southern Cone wants to occupy in the geometry of global trade.
A necessary reflection on the matter should consider at least the following: that the Chilean regulatory framework needs to be updated and certain discrepancies must be resolved; that the project will inevitably face a structural tension within the Environmental Impact Assessment System; and that Chile's comparative advantages are real, but not unconditional. Let's see.
Firstly, Law N°19,542 of 1997 is still in force in Chile, which created state port companies and enabled the concession of berths to private operators. Although it is a model that has functioned reasonably for three decades, its scheme was conceived for ports that operated as nodes of bilateral trade, and not to absorb the cargo flows of an entire subcontinental region.
Secondly, Chile lacks a general law on public-private partnerships that provides transversal coherence to the regulations for this type of project. The port, road, and sanitation sectors each operate under their own statutes, with their own institutions, logics, and standards. When a project requires articulation over a horizon of decades, this regulatory dispersion becomes a significant risk.
Something similar occurs with the Environmental Impact Assessment System. It is worth asking if it was designed for projects of this scale, and the answer is no: the SEIA was conceived as a control mechanism for individual, localized projects with delimited impacts, and not for critical cross-border infrastructure. In this way, the system that should guarantee that priority infrastructure does not destroy the environment it intends to benefit, can become the main obstacle to its materialization. This is another example of the tension between environmental protection and the demands of development, something we are far from resolving as a country.
To all of the above, we must add the coordination among a multitude of bureaucratic bodies; the possible judicialization due to uncertainties associated with the indigenous consultation of ILO Convention N°169; the disparate application of local criteria (municipalities) and so many other fronts that the ongoing reforms —expediting deadlines, one-stop shops, coordinating entity, early socialization— only partially alleviate.
However, not everything constitutes challenges: Chile currently offers comparative advantages for structuring regional operations focused on the corridor. One is geographical: we are the natural Pacific outlet for the central-west of the subcontinent, an advantage that the corridor simply makes available. Another is institutional: decades of successful concessions have accumulated a regulatory and jurisprudential framework that reduces investor uncertainty. The third is the scale provided by the northern mining industry, from which other industries can benefit. The fourth – which is often cited last and is the most decisive – is stability, the rule of law, and certainty regarding the enforceability of judicial decisions (something that, in the horizon of long-term investment, is not a minor detail). However, these advantages are not a fixed given: they are the result of historical decisions that can easily be reversed if they are not cared for with the same energy with which they are announced.
What the Bi-Oceanic Road Corridor ultimately reveals is that Chile needs more than procedural reforms: it needs a fundamental political decision on what legal status corresponds to critical regional-scale infrastructure. And time is running out.
