As reported today, January 24, 2020 in El Mercurio de Valparaíso and La Estrella de Valparaíso, the Court of Appeals of Valparaíso ruled in favor of Las Salinas against the appeal for protection filed by the Comité Pro Defensa del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural de Viña del Mar (Committee for the Defense of the Historical and Cultural Heritage of Viña del Mar). The Court of Appeals of Valparaíso unanimously rejected the appeal for protection filed by the Comité Pro Defensa del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural de Viña del Mar (Committee for the Defense of the Historical and Cultural Heritage of Viña del Mar) against Inmobiliaria Las Salinas Ltda, for earth removal on the 15.8 hectares of land, carried out on September 2 of last year, a sector where the company intends to build a housing complex.After analyzing the situation presented by the Committee, the company’s response and the information provided by the Environmental Impact Service (SEA), the Municipality of Viña del Mar and the Regional Ministerial Secretariat (Seremi) of Health and the Environment, Ministers Eliana Quezada Muñoz and María del Rosario Lavín Valdés concluded, according to the ruling, that “there is no illegality to be addressed”. In the document they explain that the recourse for protection is “due to the exceptional nature of the present procedure, conceived to attend urgent situations that are currently and seriously affecting constitutional guarantees of undoubted ownership of those who appeal”, a situation that would not be such, so that “the present action for protection must be dismissed for lacking object and opportunity”. In addition, the ruling establishes that the Comité Pro Defensa del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural de Viña del Mar must pay the costs of the process because, according to the ministers, a legal action for protection would not be grounded. On the contrary, the ruling established that there is no damage to people’s health or the environment due to the removal of soil that took place on September 2 because, as the company explained to the Court of Appeals, “it consisted of obtaining soil samples to measure odors as part of the requirements of the environmental evaluation process, which has not been repeated”. The Committee of Experts in Sanitation (CES), composed of four scientists from different areas: Michael Seeger, biochemist and doctor in sciences from the University of Chile; Marcel Szantó, doctor in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid; Luis Álvarez, geographer and master in Urbanism from the University of Chile, and Salvador Donghi, biologist with postgraduate studies in cell biology and biotechnology at the State University of New York, gave an account of the work carried out during three years for the site’s sanitation. They affirmed that “as a scientific group we do not pronounce ourselves on the ruling in particular because it does not alter the work developed up to the moment of three years of configuring the team and whose objective has been aimed at developing remediation strategies, through an interdisciplinary approach, that can potentially extrapolate this same condition in other realities of the national context”. In spite of the forcefulness of the ruling, the lawyer of the Comité Pro Defensa del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural de Viña del Mar, Gabriel Muñoz, affirmed that they will appeal to the Supreme Court so that any type of activity to be developed in the place, which used to be an oil company land, will be informed.
