Can an Activist Revolutionize Government from the Inside?

Rodrigo Mundaca, a leader of Chile’s water justice movement, has grand plans.

JANUARY 30, 2025

In February of 2024, fires raged through the hills above Valparaíso, a city on Chile’s central coastline. More than 100 people died; thousands more were displaced. The destruction caused by the fires, which ripped through informally constructed hillside neighborhoods, was worsened by dry conditions in the province. Firefighters complained they did not have access to enough water to douse the flames.

In November, I visited the town of Villa Independencia in the burned zone. Jorge Rojas, who operates a sushi truck, showed me a documentary he had made with a friend. Hour-by-hour footage captured the deepening disaster. At noon, ash was already falling on the coastal city of Viña del Mar; by 6 p.m., when the fires reached Villa Independencia, the sky was black. Residents who had not left in time found themselves trapped within tunnels of fire billowing around the roads. Some asphyxiated in their cars, others on foot. Bodies lined the roads.

Mundaca rose to prominence by publicizing the plight of small farmers in Petorca, a rural province in the region where large agribusiness operators have consolidated control of most of the water rights.

Nine months later, residents were rebuilding. They told me that they felt abandoned by the government since the fires: After meager payments for the first three months, there was little public support. Disaffection with the country’s political class was rampant. Rumor had it that the fires had been set deliberately to clear space for a new road through the otherwise tightly packed hills, with development to follow. Two firefighters were arrested for deliberately setting the fire, but nobody I spoke with believed they had acted alone.

The dry conditions producing this tinder box threw into relief the vexed position of the province’s governor: Rodrigo Mundaca, a leader of Modatima, a movement focused on achieving water justice, who became the regional governor of Valparaíso in 2021 and was reelected late last year. Mundaca rose to prominence by publicizing the plight of small farmers in Petorca, a rural province in the region where large agribusiness operators have consolidated control of most of the water rights. In the last decade, fleets of water trucks came to fill the gap, delivering emergency water shipments from nearby valleys.

Modatima aimed to challenge the Chilean water code, which allows private use rights to be bought and sold on markets, with little state regulation. And yet after Mundaca’s first term as governor, water ownership in Petorca and elsewhere in the region remains hugely unequal, with smallholder agriculture unlikely to recover. Water trucks remain crucial to rural survival. The fires have highlighted the slow disaster of the region’s aridification — and the challenges even the most committed environmentalist politicians face amid climate change.

Mundaca is among a group of leftwing leaders who came to power in the last half decade in Chile with grand plans to revolutionize the country’s political economy. His ally, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, pledged to institute sweeping reforms and establish an “ecological government.” This has not come to pass, and the country’s mood has turned. Why has the left fallen short of its lofty ambitions?

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In 2019, Chile exploded. A metro fare hike of 30 pesos — roughly three U.S. cents — sparked a turnstile-jumping student protest on October 18. A week later, more than 1 million people were marching in Santiago. Hundreds of thousands more joined actions nationwide. The protestors’ demands were manifold: reforms of Chile’s reviled privatized pension system, free public universities and relief of educational debt, greater autonomy for Chile’s Indigenous peoples and legalized abortion. Conservative President Sebastián Piñera declared that Chile was “at war with a powerful enemy,” and sent the country’s military into the streets to quell the unrest, an uncomfortable echo of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Over the next five months, police shot hundreds of protesters in the eyes with rubber bullets. Thirty people died, and more than 4,000 were injured.

On November 15 of that year, a coalition of parties signed a pact to present Chileans with the opportunity to write a new constitution. Nearly 80 percent of the public voted to approve it. The candidates they elected for the process were largely newcomers to formal parliamentary politics. Most leaned left. Several Modatima affiliates joined representatives from feminist, Indigenous rights and environmentalist movements, and — alongside other social movements focused on water like the Movement for Water and Territories (MAT) — they managed to insert their demands into the new charter: the document included recognition of water as a human right and common good, and reclaimed state control of the resource. 

Gabriel Boric, a former student activist, won the presidency in December of 2021. He vowed that “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it would also be its tomb”— a reference to the radical restructuring of the country under Pinochet’s military junta. During Pinochet’s rule from 1973 to 1990, the government turned to private corporations to manage its pensions, sold off state owned enterprises, radically cut government expenditures, and privatized water rights. The country’s 1980 constitution enshrined this handcuffing of the state and an emphasis on markets. Boric ran on burying this model; his victory seemed to indicate a new chapter in Chile’s history. 

But in September 2022 the new constitution was voted down, rejected in all 16 regions in Chile. The political terrain had shifted: For the first time, the country made voting obligatory, bringing millions of unpredictable new voters to the process. Several measures proved unpopular, including a reference to Chile being composed of various nations, in honor of its Indigenous peoples. Fake news swirled, including a common claim that under the new constitution the government would confiscate people’s homes. And with high post-pandemic inflation and the arrival of Venezuelan immigrants fleeing political and economic strife at home, some voters sought to express their displeasure with Boric’s administration by rejecting the charter he’d championed.

Gabriel Boric, a former student activist, won the presidency in December of 2021. He vowed that “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it would also be its tomb”— a reference to the radical restructuring of the country under Pinochet’s military junta.

Boric, scrambling, responded with plans to address key demands of the protest movement, including a reform of the unpopular individual-payer pension system that pushed retirees below the poverty line. On January 29, Boric claimed victory as Congress approved a bill that will increase current pensioners’ monthly payouts and raise employer contributions. Still, as the reform bill made its way through a conservative Congress, it was watered down to keep widely disliked private pension fund administrators in place, leaving vocal supporters of pension reform unsatisfied. A former student leader, Boric had also campaigned on a plan to forgive much of the nearly $12 billion of outstanding student loans in the country. That plan was likewise rebuffed by congress and redesigned in more limited form, and is now working its way through the legislature.

The hoped for political transformation was not achieved. What victories the president can claim have not come easily. The right has fought to memorialize the protests as violent and criminal, with success. On the left, many are discouraged that a mass movement and constitutional process that seemed to promise historic changes has all but fizzled out.

Modatima was founded in 2010 as drought ravaged the Petorca region. Its strategy, co-founder Luis Soto told me, was to raise awareness of the region’s water issues, build local support through door-to-door mobilization and bring the issue to parliament for legal remedy. The movement successfully recast Petorca’s problem from one of insufficient water to one of unfair water distribution.

Mundaca, a founder and face of the movement, was sentenced in 2014 to 541 days in prison for defamation after accusing the country’s former interior minister of water theft in Petorca (his sentence was later commuted into a fine and an apology). The following year, he was attacked and beaten in the streets of Santiago.

But when he entered office in 2021, having spent more than a decade critiquing Chile’s privatized water system, he found himself an administrator of that very same system. His remit was limited and in trying to respond to his constituents’ demands, he found himself relying on solutions he once decried. As an activist Mundaca had long criticized the region’s reliance on trucks to deliver water to remote rural areas. In office, he has touted his government’s expanded fleet of water trucks as a victory for water security. Although he previously denounced the environmental impact of desalination plants in the region, he has appeared alongside President Boric to present a project for a new plant he claims will help quench the region’s thirst.

While Mundaca was able to help fund rural water users’ associations and water infrastructure, his government could neither change water laws, as these are decided at the national level, nor even, in a fundamental sense, directly manage water for its citizens. The deadly February fires in Valparaíso offer an illustration, he told me in his corner office overlooking the city last November. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcased hills rolling into the wide blue bay. Earlier that day, he had announced the arrest of four more individuals from a “criminal organization” responsible for the February fires — three connected to the state forestry company, and one firefighter. But the government’s fire problems are also structural: Not only was there no water in some of the affected communities to fight the fires, he said, but his regional government did not have control over restoring basic services, because they are privatized. “When we had to reconnect water or electricity, we had to speak with the CEOs of the companies providing electricity and water,” he said.

The fires highlighted the urgency of the issue. “There’s a big difficulty today in this country, because a country that doesn’t have control over its water, how can it combat a fire of that size?” he said.

As an activist Mundaca had long criticized the region’s reliance on trucks to deliver water to remote rural areas. In office, he has touted his government’s expanded fleet of water trucks as a victory for water security.

Other movement militants who have entered politics face similar contradictions as they try to strengthen environmental governance in an economy largely reliant on resource exports. In the fast-growing Santiago exurb of Colina, city councilor Catalina Lillo entered office in 2021 as part of a wave of Modatima activists who ran for office. In her municipality, special development zones have been filled with upscale condominiums since the 1990s, housing urbanites keen to leave the city. These new builds have access to sewers and to running water from deep wells, while in more rural areas nearby some 2,500 families depend on water trucks for sustenance.

Lillo ran on plans to make water use in the community more democratic. But those ambitions were thwarted when the proposed constitutional reforms, which would have “deprivatized” water, failed in 2022. A year later, the Boric administration greenlit a multi-billion dollar project to expand a copper and molybdenum mine whose residue is stored in the Colina River watershed. Environmentalists warned that expanding the Los Bronces mine, which is owned and operated by the multinational Anglo-American, would affect nearby glaciers, endangering the water system of greater Santiago. (Anglo-American says the project is being developed with “extensive protection for the environment.”) But the company, Lillo said, won over the local population by doling out favors, such as access to clean water. “It’s clientelism,” she said. In November, Lillo lost her bid for reelection.

Other movement activists worry that joining government or state institutions is self-defeating. Juan Pablo Orrego, an environmentalist who has spent decades fighting the building of dams in Patagonia and the mountains above Santiago, said it’s a trap to believe an activist can change things from the inside. “I’ve seen quite a few people try — go into to parliament and government, become a senator,” he said. “They get corrupted, or they start compromising and compromising. Or they get politically destroyed.”

A segment of the Chilean left clearly holds this view of Boric, who since entering office has moderated many of his positions. His decisions to greenlight Anglo-American’s mine expansion — 12 years after calling for the company’s expropriation — and streamline approval for other mining projects are evidence that he now leads an “anti-ecological” government, said Camila Zarate, a delegate to the constitutional convention and environmental justice organizer with the Movement for Water and Territories (MAT). And since Mundaca campaigns alongside Boric’s coalition, she said, he is implicated too.

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Modatima, while not a political party, has shifted its strategy from protest to direct intervention in politics. A number of influential activists have given up their grassroots work to focus on getting elected and changing water governance through institutions.

Mundaca believes that this change is a positive one. His first term, he says, “showed that the left can govern, and can govern well.” While Boric’s popularity has fallen during his time in office, Mundaca has maintained his support. In elections last year, he won in each of the region’s 38 communities, even those in which opposition mayors have prevailed. 

Still, Chile more broadly has lurched to the right since the rejection of the constitution in 2022. Another constitutional convention the following year saw the election of a slate of right-wing candidates focused on law and order — topics that are resonating with voters amid a rising murder rate and the deepening presence of organized narco traffickers in the country in recent years. Across Chilean society, polling shows mass disaffection with congress and Chile’s political parties.

Other movement activists worry that joining government or state institutions is self-defeating. Juan Pablo Orrego, an environmentalist who has spent decades fighting the building of dams in Patagonia and the mountains above Santiago, said it’s a trap to believe an activist can change things from the inside.

When I visited the burned neighborhoods above Valparaíso in November, distrust in the government was palpable. In the aftermath of the fires, shellshocked survivors had set about supporting one another. Ollas comunes, communal kitchens, sprang into existence to feed the newly needy — a recurring Chilean tradition born in the dictatorship and revived during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Lissette Samit, who continues to run an olla named for the murdered communist balladeer Victor Jara, told me while peeling onions that she felt her community had been abandoned. “We’re putting all our efforts into recovery,” she said. “It’s a matter of willpower, no? The state has to take responsibility.”

Boric is barred by Chilean law from serving a second consecutive term. The frontrunner in this year’s presidential elections, Evelyn Matthei, is a conservative mayor of one of Santiago’s neighborhoods and the daughter of Pinochet’s health minister. She has cited seawater desalination as the solution to Chile’s water crisis, a position finding increasing purchase across the political spectrum, despite worries about high energy demands and increased costs for users, whose fees would pay for the facilities’ construction. Matthei has glossed the water problem as a shortage of political will rather than one of resources. If she wins in November, the country will find out whether she is correct.

✺ Published in “Issue 24: Bodies” of The Dial