The regional government of Puno declares Lake Titicaca a protected area, but Peru’s central government refuses.
‘Lake Titicaca is polluted, we don’t know how to save it, it’s asking for help,’ says Soraya Poma, president of the Red de Mujeres Lideresas Unidas en Defensa del Agua y el Lago Titicaca (Network of Women Leaders United in Defence of Water and Lake Titicaca), the organisation that has fought for four years to have this water source made a legal subject.
The wish of Poma and 60 other women leaders from the 13 provinces bordering Lake Titicaca came true on 24 April, when the regional council of Puno approved a regional decree declaring Lake Titicaca a subject of rights.
According to the decree, this recognition will allow the adoption of an ecocentric approach to the management of the lake, guaranteeing its long-term conservation and restoration in the face of environmental threats. The Regional Council’s decision also gives the lake its own legal personality and guarantees its integral protection.
The decision was not well received by the executive, which, in a joint communiqué from the Ministries of Agrarian Development and Irrigation, Environment, Justice and Human Rights, and Culture, pointed out that the decree ‘does not take into account the normative and institutional provisions for its protection established in the Political Constitution of Peru, the Organic Law of the Executive Power and the Organic Law of the Regional Governments’.
While the executive and the regional government of Puno continue this normative discrepancy over which institution is responsible for the recovery of the lake, Titicaca continues its slow agony.
A dying lake
‘For four years we have been working to raise awareness in the communities, and we have also been attending workshops because we needed to know the regulations, such as the Water Resources Law,’ says Poma, describing the path the Guardians of Titicaca took when they decided to protect Cota Mama, the Aymara name for the mother lake.
Lake Titicaca is really polluted, Poma adds, and it is not what it used to be. It now contains heavy metals and a lot of solid waste from the northern part of Juliaca – the city of Puno – goes into the lake, there is glass and the giant frog has disappeared.
‘The main source of pollution is domestic sewage. The second is solid waste,’ says Eduardo Dios, former technical secretary of the Multisectoral Commission for the Prevention and Environmental Restoration of the Lake Titicaca Basin. This commission, chaired by the Ministry of the Environment, was created in 2013 with the aim of defining actions for the comprehensive recovery of the lake and coordinating policies, plans, programmes and projects to this end. More than ten years later, however, the task remains unfinished.
The Supreme Decree that established the Multisectoral Commission states that ‘the Lake Titicaca basin and its tributaries are affected by the discharge of effluents from formal and informal extractive activities, as well as by untreated domestic wastewater from the populations within the basin’.
The document also states that concentrations of heavy metals and sediments from mining activities exceed water quality standards (WQS) in the lake and the basin’s main rivers, including the Ramis and Suches.
Livestock activities, more important on the Bolivian side, also affect the lake, Dios says of all the sources of pollution that reach Titicaca, which straddles Peru and Bolivia.
Aquaculture has been installed in both countries, the former official adds, but this activity is more developed on the Peruvian side. Dios claims that the cages in which the trout are kept are very close together and raises another problem: the disposal of feed and the production of trout excrement. ‘This fertiliser load is very high and changes the conditions for bacteria, which obviously affects the ecosystem of the water,’ says Dios.
‘When the Multisectoral Commission began its work, it was perhaps too late, the alarm bells were ringing much earlier,’ admits Dios, referring to the pollution that has plagued Lake Titicaca since before 2013, when the committee began its work.
The former technical secretary of this committee recalls that at that time there were two algal blooms, one in the inner bay of Puno and the other in the Bolivian part of the lake, which resulted in ‘a lot of dead fish and amphibians’. ‘It was a scandal at the time, and this event generated greater interest on the part of the [government] sectors to provide for investments,’ says Dios.
However, the expert admits that for the various government sectors responsible for the recovery of Titicaca, the lake was ‘not a priority’, as the Commission had hoped, but just another request on a list of demands.
‘We had many meetings with the participation of the people of Puno themselves, so that they could express their concerns and generate interest. The first sector to respond was the Ministry of Housing,’ recalls Dios.
The Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation (MVCS) is responsible for the construction of the wastewater treatment system for the Lake Titicaca basin, i.e. the construction of the wastewater treatment plants (PTAR) programmed to reduce pollution in the lake. It is also responsible for cleaning the canals that feed into the lake.
Dios mentions that the commission prioritised the construction of ten treatment plants, but that only six are currently being built, arguing that negotiations with local governments failed to define the conditions for all of them.
Mongabay Latam contacted the Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation about the current status of these projects, but did not receive a response by press time.
‘It is a unique ecosystem and home to an important population. Despite the fact that it is polluted, degraded and everything else, it receives a lot of visitors. We are in the eyes of the world,’ says Dios, adding that restoration needs to be a priority.
Lake Titicaca is one of Peru’s top tourist destinations. The Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism estimates that 500,000 visitors are expected over the next decade.
A call for help
‘Lake Titicaca is not only a source of water and a tourist destination in Peru. It is also part of the cultural identity of an entire people. For us, as an indigenous community, it represents our cultural identity and unites us spiritually,’ says Poma, the Aymara leader.
For Poma, as for the indigenous people who live around this great lake, Titicaca is a living being with which they are intimately connected. For example, Poma says it is through the changes in the lake that they can tell when the harvest is ready or if they still have to wait to harvest.
‘We do rituals for Cota Mama, asking for good projects, health, love and work. Cota Mama likes fruit, apples and oranges, white and yellow flowers, and she loves cow’s milk,’ says Poma of the lake she is now trying to protect.
Julio Mejía, the legal advisor to the women’s collective that protects the lake, supports the demand that Lake Titicaca be declared a legal entity in the Peruvian constitution and in international mandates. For Mejía, this declaration is based on Article 2 of the Constitution, which regulates the protection of a “healthy and balanced” environment.
Mejía also explains that Article 3 of the Constitution contains an open clause for the inclusion of new rights based on human dignity.
The lawyer mentions the law on water resources, which should be interpreted in accordance with Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). According to this convention, says Mejía, “peasant communities and indigenous peoples have the right to use, maintain and conserve the resources present in their territories”.
The lawyer also cites national rulings, such as the one that declared the Marañón River to be the rightful owner, a decision that was upheld in the first instance and confirmed in the second. And on an international level, Mejía recalls the case of the forests of New Zealand. ‘This is a national and international trend that dates back to 1972. It is not new, we have legal support, but we have encountered resistance,’ says Mejía, referring to the response of the executive branch.
The communiqué issued by the Ministries of Agrarian Development and Irrigation, Environment, Justice and Human Rights, and Culture, following the Puno Regional Council’s decision, urges the Regional Council of Puno to join the local population in ‘redoubling the efforts of the three levels of government’ to protect this ‘important natural and cultural heritage’.
However, when Mongabay Latam asked the Ministry of the Environment, which chairs the Multisectoral Commission, about the progress of the work to restore Lake Titicaca, it simply sent us the aforementioned communiqué, which was already in the public domain.
‘The State, by constitutional mandate, must fulfil a series of obligations. These must be translated into policies and investments to ensure that the ecosystem is healthy and sustainable,’ says Mariano Castro, former vice-minister for environmental management, who headed the Multisectoral Commission when it was created. ‘In this sense, the [Puno Regional Council] decree seeks to respond to this commitment,’ he says.
Castro also calls on the constitution to comment on the state’s obligations to guarantee human rights in environmental matters. ‘In order to guarantee these human rights, it is essential to guarantee the sustainability of nature, in this case the Titicaca ecosystem,’ he says. ‘What is important is that both states – Peru and Bolivia – prove and demonstrate that their policies and their performance in general guarantee the sustainability of the Titicaca basin. That is the point,’ he says.
