“The ministers are due to their leadership, and their leadership publicly said no to Dominga,” said the mayor of La Higuera, Yerko Galleguillos, arguing that this initiative should not be rejected. “Chile today has a tremendous opportunity to materialize a project with high environmental and social standards (…). Chile can’t party Dominga. Dominga is an example of a project for the new generations”, he stressed.
On the verge of the Council of Ministers voting on the Dominga mining-port project on Wednesday, January 18, the mayor of La Higuera, Yerko Galleguillos, referred to the future of this initiative and explained his reasons for defending its installation in the commune of the Coquimbo region.
In conversation with the program Focus on Pivots in Twitter Spacesthe community chief assured that “This project was rejected the day the President (Gabriel Boric) won the elections and said no to Dominga”.
“The ministers are due to their leadership, and their leadership publicly said no to Dominga”Galleguillos asserted.
For this reason, the mayor was explicit in saying that he requested an audience with the Minister of the Environment, Maisa Rojas, but it was rejected.
“I had an audience with her on Friday, January 13 (…). On the last day, Thursday the 12th, they tell me that as a result of the minister’s agenda they might not receive me (…), but I propose the 26th (January) ”, she explained.
It is worth mentioning that the La Higuera fishermen’s union itself, represented by the lawyer Marcelo Castillo, that Thursday they demanded that Minister Rojas disqualify herself from the case.
The foregoing, due to a lack of objectivity and impartiality, having issued opinions contrary to the project and a conflict of interest with the Oceana Foundation.
In addition, last Friday, January 6, the community chief went to the outskirts of the Ministry of Finance to also appeal to Minister Mario Marcel, where he sent him a letter requesting the approval of the permits for the Dominga mining project.
Galleguillos defends Dominga
The mayor of La Higuera defended the Dominga Project, stressing that if this initiative is rejected by the Council of Ministers, “Nobody else is going to come to build an important project in the commune”.
Along these lines, he emphasized that the bioceanic corridor project “fell down”, since “they do not want ports in La Higuera”.
In the same way, he stressed that the initiative has sufficient support from the population, according to the citizen consultation carried out in March of last year.
“96% of the people who went to vote in the citizen consultation of March 2022 said yes to Dominga”he claimed.
In this context, Galleguillos took the opportunity to recall that “when this project was voted on in 2017, the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA) established that (…) the project complies with everything that the regulations establish and recommends approving it.”
“In fact, in the vote, both the director of the SEA and the Environment Department of the Government of President Michelle Bachelet voted in favor of the project, because the project complied with the technical and environmental requirements that the State of Chile has,” he specified. .
Meanwhile, the community chief concluded by assuring that this opportunity to carry out such a relevant and quality project, both environmental and social, should not be missed.
“Chile today has a tremendous opportunity to materialize a project with high environmental and social standards (…). Chile can’t party Dominga. Dominga is an example of a project for the new generations ”, she closed.
