Water in Bolivia: Defeating the Multinationals Is Just the Start of the Problem

[struggle4progress]

Written by Jeff Conant
Thursday, 15 January 2009

Source: Alternet

Set in a landscape of dry brown hills and arroyos flooded with dust, Cochabamba, Bolivia's third-largest city, is not rich in water. Seen from the air in early September, at the tail end of the southern winter, the land is brown and barren from the ridgetops to the river valleys. A warm wind blows dust in billowing clouds. Thousands of feet below the soaring, icy peaks of the altiplano to the west, and thousands of feet above the lush coca fields of the Chapare to the east and the Amazon to the north, Cochabamba enjoys the mildest climate in the country, but suffers from what geographers call "water stress," compounded here, as everywhere, by climate change ...

Cochabamba's privatization struggle started in 1996, when the mayor announced that the World Bank would relieve the city's water stress with a $14 million loan. The next year, World Bank offered $600 million in foreign debt relief. But both packages came with the condition that Cochabamba's water utility, widely reputed for corruption and inefficiency, be taken over by a private company. In 1999, the company, SEMAPA (Servicio Municipal de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado), was bought out in a private bid, by Aguas de Tunari, majority controlled by San Francisco-based Bechtel.

Not long after, union leaders, environmental activists and rural-water stewards came together to form a coalition they called La Coordinadora Por la Defensa del Agua y la Vida, or simply La Coordinadora, to wrest back control of the water utility. What ensued -- street riots, hunger strikes, the occupation of the Central Plaza, the government's declaration of a state of siege, many wounded and one youth killed, and the eventual, ecstatic, ejection of Bechtel -- quickly passed into legend. Occurring only months after the Battle of Seattle, Cochabamba's water war became one of the most widely publicized stories of the anti-globalization movement -- a major triumph for the People, United ...

Like countries throughout Latin America, Bolivia is undergoing a process of constitutional reform, largely driven by the question of the right to water. In 2004, Uruguay enshrined the right to water in its constitution. In 2008, Ecuador ratified the world's first constitution that recognizes that nature itself has fundamental rights, on which human rights depend, including the right to water. Colombia and El Salvador have strong movements to include the right to water in their constitutions. And Bolivia's new constitution, drafted but not yet approved, declares water to be a right that is fundamentalisimo -- profoundly fundamental. If one wants a testament that water and democracy are linked, as Oscar Oliveria insists, this wave of constitutional reform certainly offers it ...

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1663/1/