Little Lucienne, only three years old, walked alone inside the multi-court of the Liceo de San Nicolás boarding school. It was, like all those courts, made of cement, with impeccable white lines that marked its limits and areas, ending with two goals equipped with their respective nets.
But the girl did not have a ball to make sense of the field, she wandered alone with no one to play with, nor did she seem to know what soccer is about.
In addition, because she is Haitian, her language limitations prevented her from asking for collaboration. She had nothing left but to move from there to here and making swirls with her arms or taking some half-hearted jumps within that rectangle that, as far as she understood, she was used to play with.
Her parents, who were talking to one side, and the rest of her compatriots, who were sorting the clothes that the Municipality had collected for them or watching the Mario Bros. movie in the boarding school dining room, were no more oriented than she was.
A few months ago, the overflow of the Ñuble River took away all the belongings they had in those houses they had built on the banks.
They built them, because a local “who took advantage of the ignorance of these people sold them one million two hundred each of those lands, despite the fact that they are properties that correspond to National Assets, therefore, assets for public use,” he accused. the mayor, Víctor Hato Rice.
The ball is not in his possession either. Most of them are irregular immigrants, so the Government cannot have any type of subsidies, social aid programs or any bonus, so strictly speaking, they have no one to turn to, because strictly speaking, for the State do not exist.
Ignoring the rules of the game, they go to their damaged houses every day to clean them, try to repair them and make them fit for a return that, in theory, is not going to happen either. “Classes will start soon and I have to vacate the boarding school at least five days before the students arrive. They cannot stay and the other thing that is clear is that they will not be able to return to those houses,” warned the community chief.
As if that were not enough, this game without balls, rules or teammates, did not have a referee either: While in National Assets they assure that although these properties are registered in that portfolio, they are of municipal administration.
“That’s what they say,” Mayor Rice replied, and added that “if you look at the Regulatory Plan, it clearly says that they are lands of National Assets and we as the Municipality have no interference. We do not have the legal powers to do evictions, that must be done by the Carabineros and under the order of the Presidential Delegation, mayors have never had the powers to request evictions of people, ”he warned.
And this is the scenario brought about by the flooding of the rivers in the Central-South zone of Chile.
They demonstrated that the criteria for the regulatory plans in many of the cities of the central valley contemplated natural risk factors, there are no flood maps (unusual in a country like ours); They have shown that “the calls” not to build, buy or sell irregular subdivisions have had no effect and that illegal immigration in the absence of efficient policies has been self-regulating, looking for itself on the mat of the map.
“But the floods of water in the country are cyclical, and it is likely that there will be more and more, as there will also be more and more forest fires and without a doubt that the people who are going to be affected the most are those who live in poverty,” warned Octavio Rojas, academic researcher at the EULA Center, of the University of Concepción.
Floods, witch subdivisions and the PRC
The 2019 cadastre carried out by the then Municipality of Ñuble, estimated at 45 witch plots settled in a total of 344 hectares in the region.
Despite the legal initiatives to facilitate the regularization of land that the Government has promoted and a few (but celebrated) court rulings that have stopped the sale of unregulated lots, in our region, little or nothing has been known about eradicated witch lots.
“Today we do not have a precise cadastre, but what is clear is that there is at least one of these subdivisions in each of our 21 communes,” warns the National Property Seremi, Rodrigo Baeza.
“Unfortunately, in Chile there is a territorial planning problem, because although there are legal tools or sectoral regulations, ordinances, communal regulatory plans (PRC). All of these point to the fact that the inspections correspond to the Municipal Works departments, while Bienes Nacionales is in charge of the application of Decree Law 26,095n, which is related to the possession of small real estate, which is basically the regularization of property titles. domain,” he details.
But reality does not go very hand in hand, and this is what the seremi admits, who is aware that ignorance of the law can no longer be argued, so most of those who sell and buy know that they are doing a business on the margin of the law, because oversight capacities are always weak, because there have not been more than two or three demolition orders in the country for building irregularly, and because even though it is noted that this type of property cannot be inherited or sold, it is sold and inherited. Outside the law, but it is done.
“I believe that greater powers should be given to the Municipal Works directorates, but it is very unpopular for a mayor to show up and start destroying houses.”
On the other hand, he points out that “urban development policy dates back only to 2011, which was when this issue began to cause concern. The Comptroller’s Office is currently making a cadastre of the irregular subdivisions that exist in the region.”
In the case of those affected by the fires in February or the floods in June, they will not find answers in the Minvu either.
“We are not involved in these subdivisions because they completely ignore the regulations, they make demarcations through some fences and try to regularize them for National Assets, but that is where the Minvu appears to verify that they comply with the requirements,” explains the seremi. of the branch, Antonio Marchant.
The engineer, who visited the subdivision on the banks of the Ñuble bridge, says he was surprised by the partitions, the radiers and even the electrical connections. “However, they are not only victims of an irregular lottery sale, but they are mostly foreigners from Haiti, Peru or Venezuela, who believe that they are the legitimate owners of those sites, but the truth is that apparently, they were victims. of a scam.”
No flood maps
The UdeC researcher, Octavio Paz, explains that on the subject of land regulation, “there are two problems that I see in terms of planning, and one is the speed of updating the communal regulatory plans, which are too slow and do not consistent with environmental changes within the basins or changes in the urban point of view, because many times spontaneous settlements are generated in rural areas that later end up being incorporated into urban sectors”.
As a second point, he observes that “when the issue of subdivisions began to be discussed, the criterion was the protection of agricultural land, but the sectors with risk factors were not considered, which was where people began to settle, in fact practically there are no maps of flood hazards or danger zones, not even within the urban sectors that do have planning instruments”.
The foregoing is key to understanding how far the flow of a river can go in the event of overflows or a flood. On the other hand, “information on flows, from a long time ago, are available. In Europe, they have already studied this for a long time, and that is why they do not have these problems ”, he warns.
On the other hand, when these maps are available, “the risk study does not end up being binding with the territorial qualification instrument, therefore, the areas that are incorporated correspond to a political decision rather than a technical one and that is something much more deep and damages the preventive capacity that governments may have”.
Returning to San Nicolás and entering the boarding school, we see Don Mario Salazar, a 71-year-old Maulino who, a few years ago, left his job as a lumberjack to come to Ñuble and live near his children.
In fact, his daughters, who live in the same camp, were the ones who managed to get into his 3 by 6 house and took him out with what he was wearing. He lost a television that cost him 80,000 pesos (second-hand), electrical appliances, and his two brushcutters that helped him make some money.
Not knowing what he will do when he has to leave the boarding school, he says that “I want to go back home, but now they say that these lands belong to the State and that it seems that the person who sold us deceived us… Do you know if they are going to give us a bonus?”
