Movimiento Socioambiental Comunal por la Tierra y el Agua (MOSACAT)

MOSACAT — the Movimiento Socioambiental Comunal por la Tierra y el Agua, rendered in English as the Socio Environmental Community Movement for Land and Water — is a Chilean grassroots community-organising group based in the Cerrillos commune of Santiago that fights against AI-infrastructure-driven water exploitation in a drought-prone metropolitan corridor. The group's signature multi-year campaign has been against Google's proposed second Chilean data centre in Cerrillos, which would have drawn an estimated 7.6 million litres of water per day — equivalent to the entire community's annual water usage. MOSACAT is led by a small team of 10-15 organisers and is publicly anchored by founding member Tania Rodríguez (54), a former school teacher in Santiago who has become Chile's most-cited grassroots voice against hyperscale AI infrastructure.

Cerrillos Google data centre campaign

MOSACAT's central fight is the Cerrillos Google data-centre project, sited in a water-stressed Santiago commune at the southern edge of one of Latin America's most drought-prone capital regions. Google's first Chilean data centre, in Quilicura, had been authorised in 2018 to extract 50 litres per second (over a billion litres annually) of groundwater; the proposed second centre in Cerrillos was authorised in 2020 to extract 228 litres per second — more than seven billion litres annually. MOSACAT analysed Google's environmental documentation and discovered that the second facility would consume approximately double the water of the first; the group's campaign tactics have run along three lines.

• Public demonstrations against Google's water authorisation. When MOSACAT discovered the staggering volume of water that the Cerrillos data centre would draw, the group held several demonstrations in a sustained campaign that ran from 2019 through 2023 against the company's authorisation and the broader pattern of corporate water extraction from a drought-stressed metropolitan commune.
• Strategic litigation through Santiago's environmental tribunal. MOSACAT's legal-and-political campaign produced its signal win in 2024, when Santiago's environmental tribunal suspended construction of the Cerrillos project until Google reassessed its environmental impact — a ruling that forced the company to redesign its cooling system and undergo a new environmental review. The tribunal ruling is the corpus's clearest documented Latin American case of community grassroots organising successfully halting a hyperscale-AI infrastructure project on water-extraction grounds.
• Disengagement from state-mediated dialogue. Rodríguez has framed MOSACAT's strategy shift as a deliberate exit from state-led consultation: the group dropped its dialogue with the government, she has explained, "because we realized it basically had been building the projects for the tech companies". The reframing positions MOSACAT as a grassroots community-of-residents organisation working at the planning-system and judicial-review register rather than at the multi-stakeholder-consultation register.

Rodríguez has summarised the underlying philosophy in two standing public framings: "We end up being everybody's backyard" — the extractive geography critique — and "We're not against Big Tech, but in favor of nature. We don't want our countries to get steamrolled by extractivism" — the positive-frame articulation that MOSACAT's fight is for ecological sovereignty rather than against AI as a technology.

Place in the movement

MOSACAT is the corpus's first Latin American local-group anchor, the corpus's first Spanish-speaking grassroots community-of-residents organisation organising on AI-infrastructure water exploitation, and the corpus's first local-group anchored on the Southern Hemisphere data-centre water-extraction front. The non-AI-audience-engagement vector MOSACAT anchors — residents of a water-stressed metropolitan commune engaged in AI-infrastructure decisions through groundwater-extraction grievance and Santiago's environmental-tribunal route — is structurally distinct from the existing US data-centre opposition local-groups' engagement vectors: Memphis Community Against Pollution and Tigers Against Pollution anchor the Black-led environmental-justice register on the xAI Colossus fight in Boxtown; Panhandle 1st Coalition anchors the rural West Texas water-and-air register on the Project Matador fight; Coalition to Protect Prince William County anchors the civic-coalition procedural-rule-of-law register on the Digital Gateway fight in Northern Virginia. MOSACAT anchors a fourth grassroots register — a small-team community-of-residents organisation in a drought-prone Global South capital, organising through Spanish-language community framing and the Chilean environmental-tribunal route — and is the corpus's clearest documented case of Latin American community grassroots organising halting a hyperscale-AI data centre on water-extraction grounds.

The Chilean case also positions MOSACAT alongside the corpus's existing Latin American organisational anchors at the policy-advocacy register: Derechos Digitales, the Santiago-anchored regional digital-rights organisation operating across Latin America at the policy-and-litigation register, and Coding Rights, the Brazilian feminist-tech organisation operating at the participatory-research register. MOSACAT operates one rung below those two anchors — at the local commune-of-residents register rather than at the national or regional digital-rights register — and is the corpus's first entity grounding the Latin American AI-civil-society field in the physical-infrastructure layer of hyperscale AI compute as that infrastructure is sited in a water-stressed Southern Hemisphere capital.