About

As the government agency responsible for water use planning and management in Chile, the DGA plays a vital role in the country. Despite only joining the organisation in September 2018, chief legal officer Luis Andrés Ulloa Martínez has already facilitated improvements to ensure DGA receives a high level of legal support to ensure it fulfils its duties to the nation. In addition to working on relevant subjects, Ulloa has redesigned and restructured DGA’s legal function and gives a brief summary of what this has entailed: ‘The legal department of the DGA has not been modernised since the 1990s, and in this intermediate time there have been a series of new laws, of which this organisation was not able to assume. When I assumed this position I designed a structure that would take charge of these new tasks that the law assigned. The main one is the review of the legality of the pronouncements in environmental matters, which the DGA is responsible for evaluating. In this sense, we created an environmental law department, a water law department, a hydraulic works department, a sanctioning law department and a management unit. In September, at the time of assuming this position, the annual achievement of goals did not exceed 30%, in December of the same year, and after this restructuring, the legal department achieved a goal achievement of 105%, due to this we are currently updating the systematic backlog that this organisation had in the management of administrative fi les’. For the last two years Ulloa has taught fifth year students in Chile’s national universities as a postgraduate teacher. ‘It has been a very pleasant experience, and it makes me very happy to be able to teach younger people’, he says. Immediately prior to joining DGA, Ulloa spent four years as legal manager of Energía Llaima, his second ever in-house role, and where he was recognised in the inaugural GC Powerlist: Chile in 2017.