By Sebastián Betancourt
The Atacama Sostenible Corporation launched the Atacama Port Chamber, an organization that aims to represent and coordinate the interests of the port and logistics sector of the region, promoting integrated, sustainable, and competitive management to boost local and national economic development.
The entity is composed of Puerto Las Losas, Puerto Caldera, Copiaport-E, the law firm Pezoa & Cía. Abogados, the foreign trade agency Comex Solutions, and the international logistics industrial park Los Llanos S.A.
The Port Chamber, which is part of the also presented Logistics and Foreign Trade Cluster, will seek to become a technical and strategic reference for northern Chile, leading innovation, infrastructure, and collaboration processes around the region’s port and foreign trade system. Likewise, it is projected as a key actor in strengthening the logistics chain that will contribute to the development of bioceanic corridors.
Daniela Rojas, president of the Atacama Sostenible Corporation, stated that “both the Chamber and the Cluster are born from the articulation generated within the Guild Council for Logistics, Suppliers, and Foreign Trade of the Atacama Sostenible Corporation. There is a whole strategy behind productive diversification and virtuous linkage for the region, but an executive arm was needed, and for that, the Logistics and Foreign Trade Cluster is born, which will be united with this Port Chamber to represent the interests of the main actors of the Atacama port system.”
“This chamber promotes and groups the strategic actors of the Atacama port system, both the operational ports and those under development. Furthermore, we have Pezoa & Cía. Abogados, Comex Solution, and Los Llanos S.A., which is an actor that will come to cover the need for a logistics sector and which, in the future, we hope can become a free trade and industrial zone of the Atacama Region and that we can connect it directly to the ports of Atacama, the Southern Cone, and Asia Pacific,” Rojas highlighted.
Regarding the challenges ahead for the Atacama Port Chamber, the head of the Corporation commented that “the first thing is to be able to group all these strategic actors, but the objectives have to do with representing the port sector before the planning and logistical decision-making instances that are being generated and that are advancing in Atacama, so that they go with a common voice, both the Comex Table and this Logistics and Foreign Trade Cluster.”
“The idea is also to strengthen operational coordination between the ports so that we can know what the existing gaps are and generate exports not only of products associated with mining, but also so that Southern Cone cargo can leave through the ports of Atacama; promote technological modernization; drive sustainability criteria; and consolidate a port governance in the region that is modern and aligned with international modernization standards,” Rojas added.
“We are an extremely competitive region not only because of the draft capacity and quality of the Atacama ports, but also because of the distance from the mountain range to the ports, which is less than 400 kilometers. So, we are highly competitive, but we are falling a bit behind in development.
“For this reason, the idea is to be able to advance steadily in the consolidation of this structure,” emphasized the president of the organization.
For his part, Renato Pezoa, lawyer and founder of Pezoa & Cía. Abogados, stated that the importance of the Atacama Port Chamber “is vital for uniting the wills and common objectives among the main ports of the Atacama Region, so that agreed-upon policies and general guidelines can be established to allow for operations in accordance with the demands of the new phenomena that will be generated in the region.”
“The Atacama Region is positioning itself as a highly relevant actor in the binational integration processes with the provinces of northwestern Argentina, especially with the Province of Catamarca, La Rioja and Tucumán. Likewise, the Atacama Region is betting on being able to build a viable and much more solid alternative in commercial, logistical, economic and legal terms for the bioceanic corridors,” Pezoa stated.
“For us as a law firm, our interest is aimed at providing new institutions or new tools that allow Argentine actors, as a first step, and relevant actors from Brazilian, Paraguayan and other countries’ trade, as a next step, to be able to choose the ports of Atacama as unified, concerted ports that maintain standardized and updated policies. We are going to develop this in such a way that it becomes a contributory axis to foster this great logistical, maritime and port cluster for commercial integration that will be developed between Argentina and Chile,” assured the lawyer.
