This year too we have been preparing for the COP. The 25th is due to be held in Santiago de Chile from 2 to 13 December 2019 and from there we plan to cycle to Brazil via Bolivia. Brazil was originally supposed to host the event, but last year, following the election of climate sceptic Jair Bolsonaro as president, he announced - just days before the start of COP24 in Katowice - that he was withdrawing his bid to host it. (1)
For us, this will be an opportunity to report on each of these three Latin American countries. In Chile, we plan to document the serious drought problems affecting the centre and north of the country, then go to Bolivia before heading to Brazil: to discover the Andean Altiplano, the Amazonian forest (passing through the areas that burned in September this year and whose images were shown around the world), to try to photograph the large cattle farms and the immense Brazilian soya plantations... To withstand the humidity of the Amazon we equip ourselves accordingly: a new waterproof tent with a full mosquito net and a new waterproof camera body (tropicalised). Unfortunately, on the evening of the purchase of the latter, the news comes: the COP25 is cancelled in Chile!
In Chile, the social crisis that began on 18 October was worsening (riots, fires, some twenty deaths) (1), and President Sebastián Piñera preferred to cancel the hosting of 25,000 people (including heads of state and government, ministers, delegates and representatives of civil society) rather than continue under these conditions. Several days after the United Nations had hesitated between cancelling it or holding it in Bonn - Costa Rica was also mentioned - (2) it was announced that Spain, through its Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, was offering to host the World Summit on Climate Change, which was finally moved to Madrid.
What to do? Preparations for Latin America have ruined us. How can we now spend two weeks in Spain when we can't even afford the train fare to get there... That's where the warm proposal from our former Spanish neighbours and friends who recently returned to Madrid comes in. Many thanks to Hectoras, Marta and Paco, the cousin who is going to put us up in his artist's studio. The attractive bus fares of less than 10 euros!!! help us to get there.
In Spain, we had already documented the intensive agriculture (see the report "The garden of Europe or the third world"). This country is also suffering from climate change, and like Chile, it has been hit hard by drought. The geographical displacement of the World Conference on Climate Change one month before the scheduled date prevented many participants from attending (3), including the peoples of Latin America. Their presence was nevertheless quite visible, for example during the Climate March (whose slogan was "The world has woken up to the climate emergency") where they were at the head of the procession (4) which gathered 500,000 people (20,000 according to the prefecture) on Friday 6 December. On the banners they were able to denounce what is happening in Chile (problems with pensions, education, water which is privatised there) and which has generated the social, political, economic, moral and also environmental crisis (5) and the police repression which responds to it (deaths, torture, rapes, eye gouging). (6)
December 6 is also the date of the launch of the Social Summit for the Climate (Cumbre Social por el Clima) organised by Indigenous Peoples and more than a hundred associations. In parallel to the COP, like the Climate March, this counter-summit is being held simultaneously here and in Santiago de Chile, where it has been maintained. The opportunity to meet to exchange and continue their struggle (Minga Indígena) to defend their knowledge and their territories and to testify to the violence they suffer (murders, disappearances due to intensive agriculture and extractivism) in the city centre at the UGT and at the Complutense University of Madrid where their conferences take place.
So it was only in mid-January, after documenting Cop 25 in Madrid and taking a rest, that we flew with our bikes in the hold to Santiago de Chile. The change of dates cut our budget a bit more, but travelling by bike is not expensive!
After having acclimatized and documented the social movement a little in the centre of the capital (we will be able to take pictures of the 3 months demonstration of the movement) we had planned to head north, that is to say to ride from Santiago de Chile to São Paulo in Brazil in five months of travel.
But the Covid 19 epidemic thwarts everything and forced us to give up the rest of the trip in mid-March when we had reached Bolivia. Because it had become impossible for us to move around because of the measures taken by the authorities of the country (curfew from 4 pm controlled by the army, prohibition to move between the villages) and faced with the fear of the people which even made it difficult to get a hotel room.
In these conditions it was better to return home to continue working on the construction of a new website with our friend Jim. The embassy we were in contact with offered to help us, but we managed to get back on our own and with the bikes (after a rocky night's bus journey and several days in airports and planes) before it became very complicated as we would later read in the press.
As a result, it is unfortunately only a third of the work we could have done that we are presenting to you today. The title of the main topic, if we had reached our final destination, would perhaps have been "COP25: Una travesía (Chile, Bolivia, Brasil)".
Now, nothing prevents us from coming back one day, when from a health point of view it will be possible, and from taking the road again where we had to give up, if not for concerns about money, time (how to fit in several more months of travel if we want to continue documenting the COPs that will follow and try to make reports in each host country) and then about the carbon footprint!
As we are often asked, here it is: in Chile we cycled almost 2,000 km (1,900 km and some wheelbarrows) in less than two months. From La Serena, a bit tired of the Atacama desert landscapes but especially eager to go faster (while relieving a painful knee) in order to have more time to spend in Bolivia and Brazil, we twice put our bikes in the trunk of red vans and took 3 buses.
You will find here a "great report" entitled: Chile after the COP. It covers all the things we observed in this country, but with an emphasis on the water issue, as the situation is really very worrying. And then, to go further, there are also small galleries on specific subjects (from which some images were taken to build the main report called transversal): lithium in the salar of Atacama, the social movement in the capital, the famous copper mine of Chuquicamata, an agricultural cooperative practicing hydroponics, the cloud catchers, a series of portraits of our hosts, etc.
A big thank you and a warm greeting to all the people we met who helped us during this journey!
(1)https://www.novethic.fr/actualite/environnement/climat/isr-rse/climat-jair-bolsonaro-annonce-que-le-bresil-renonce-a-organiser-la-cop25-en-2019-146630.html
(2) https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/10/30/secoue-par-une-violente-crise-sociale-le-chili-renonce-a-organiser-la-cop25_6017460_3244.html
(3) https://www.ouest-france.fr/europe/espagne/madrid/cop25-madrid-dans-une-course-contre-la-montre-pour-organiser-l-evenement-6620279
(4) https://cumbresocialclima.net/marcha-por-el-clima/
(5) https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/10/28/la-protestation-collective-au-chili-fait-echo-a-une-actualite-sociale-planetaire_6017131_3232.html
(6) https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/12/13/torture-mauvais-traitements-viols-l-onu-denonce-la-repression-des-manifestations-au-chili_6022786_3210.html
(All these links were accessed on March 24, 2021)