There is a lot of very political debate on the internet on these events. This one seemed to work for a balanced perspective.
Sell the rain
How the privatization of water caused riots in Cochabamba, Bolivia
Connie Watson, CBC Radio | Feb. 4, 2003In South America, private companies have taken over municipal water supplies in at least half a dozen countries, but there's one city where the takeover didn't go as planned.
In 1999, a consortium, controlled by U.S. multinational Bechtel, signed a 40-year deal to increase water supplies and services to Cochabamba, Bolivia. Six months later, rioting Bolivians chased the company out of the country.
. . .
water is still a big problem in Cochabamba.
"Here, seven neighbourhoods have their own water," says Saltiera. "The rest don't have it. Twelve neighbourhoods don't."
Raoul takes me on a tour of the shantytowns that encircle Cochabamba. The ramshackle homes creep up the hills in a haphazard way. Many of them are built on land that was illegally taken by a steady stream of peasants settling there, abandoning their hard life in the country.
The poor now look down on the city nestled in the valley below.
In Valle Hermoso, the roads are bumpy, the sewer is an open ditch and electric wires come to a sudden stop outside the home just up the hill.
It's one of the oldest neighborhoods in the area. It's been there for 50 years. People pay taxes but they're still not getting basic water services from Cochabamba's water utility, known as "Semapa."
But that doesn't mean Valle Hermoso doesn't have a water system.
"Here's water right out of the faucet," shows Maximo Montanos, the president of Valle Hermosa. "In the morning, there's more pressure, in the afternoon, less. Each house has this type water."
Montanos used his own money to help organize a water system for his neighborhood. Each house has its own meter, attached to the rudimentary pipe coming from a small water tower. Montanos is proud of the system, but the water's not good.
He tries to scrub grease off his calloused hands with a big chunk of soap. The water doesn't produce suds. Instead, it develops a dirty, hard scum that sticks to the plastic basin.
The family's drinking water is delivered by a truck with a hose. Every house goes through at least a barrel a day. Each one cost about 85 cents Canadian. These are almost North American rates on Bolivian incomes of about 100 dollars a month.
At least 20 per cent of the people in Cochabamba have built their own neighborhood water systems, like this one, to get basic water. Montanos says people get less and less from the government now that it has privatized nearly everything in the country.
"One of the problems we have is that a lot of money comes here in the name of the poor people but never reaches the poor people," he says. "It always stays up in the top and we never see any of it. We have a right to have basic services. We're fighting for that."
By any standards the city's utility has been a failure. Only 60 per cent of the population is hooked up to the Semapa system, and they may only get water a few hours a week. Semapa has a long list of problems – "Clandestinos" users who re-route the water but don't pay for it, leaky pipes that lead to major water loss, leaky accounting that leads to major corruption and debt.
With such poor service and a bad reputation, Semapa became a perfect candidate for a private takeover aimed at weeding out corruption, hooking up more users and building a more efficient system. It seemed a natural solution in a country where almost every resource and service was being privatized.
Economist Roberto Fernandez Teran, who teaches at the University of San Simon in Cochabamba, says the state used to be the major employer. It owned everything – the oil company, the mines, the railroads and the factories. Whatever profits were made went into paying for social services.
By 1995, on the advice of the World Bank, the government owned nothing. But it owed the bank enormous sums of money. Fernandez says Bolivia is dependent on the World Bank now because it has no real income of its own anymore. Repaying the international debt is crippling the country.
"A lot of business people have the idea this government can save us because it's gotten all kinds of international loans. But what they forget is you have to pay the debt, you have to pay interest on loans and that gets us into more debt," says Fernandez. "So actually it's done absolutely nothing to try to resolve the economic crisis in the country."
Fernandez says the government's privatization scheme raised no cash, the private companies are paying next to no tax, and they've laid off thousands of Bolivians who used to work for the state industries.
"We haven't sold companies, we've given them away. Given them to the U.S., given them to the French, to foreigners, to other countries," he says.
With anger and frustration on the rise over this rash of privatizations, the takeover of Cochabamba's water system was next. It was nothing short of a disaster.
The government had the blessing of the World Bank early on, but the bank pulled out when the government chose a high-priced water project. There are hints that corruption played a role in the choice.
In the end, only one company made a bid. Aguas del Tunari, controlled by the multinational Bechtel, took over the water system in November 1999.
By January water bills were skyrocketing. Protest was gelling into an anti-privatization movement. Rioting Bolivians took over the streets in April.
"I was in front of the march. We were playing music. And I was crying," remembers Lenny Olivera, a computer science student at the university. "I wasn't crying just because of the gasses, I was also crying because I was so disillusioned with the police and the fact that we were acting peacefully and they were reacting with such violence."
Olivera says those eight days in April 2000 were a turning point in her young life. While the young boys threw rocks and tear gas clouded the air, she and other students played music – the Tarkeada, indigenous music of social resistance in Bolivia. It goes back to the time of the Spanish invasions.
"One thing we noticed was that if you're continually blowing on your instruments, the gas does make your eyes water but it doesn't get into your lungs. It was a way to keep us from getting very affected by the gas," says Olivera. "I noticed that if you stop then the gasses would get into your lungs and you'd start coughing. So one of the things I decided was that if we just kept playing the music we would be protected."
"It was an amazing time for us, the first time we'd seen this type of victory, a social movement that was successful," says Marcela Olivera, who was a key organizing force behind the marches, the battles and fight to keep water in the hands of the people.
"I remember singing the national hymn as we were marching through the streets, and the police not knowing what to do because they didn't know if they should stop and take their hats off and listen to the national anthem or they should fire gas at us.
"You have to realize, this wasn't just April, it was November to April. It was the building of a movement. So there were people who brought food, brought water into the streets, people who came with vinegar for people to help them with the gas. There were intellectuals and campesinos, a mix of people that knit together to form a whole around the issue of water.
"I think people sometimes forget this wasn't only about throwing Bechtel out, throwing out an international company. There was a second part going on here. A water law that was to be passed in congress, that is a law that affects all of Bolivia. For that reason, campesinos [peasants] and people outside Cochabamba got involved, called our attention to the fact that this law would make all water saleable. In fact, what people said is they would even be able to sell the rain."
Bechtel has a different version of what happened. The giant California-based corporation had the controlling share of the company that agreed to provide water services to Cochabamba in 1999.
A spokesman, who didn't want to be interviewed on tape, stated that the company didn't buy the city's water, it simply signed a 40-year contract to operate water and waste services and there was no guarantee of profits in the deal.
The company says it was the government that doubled and tripled some people's water bills, partly to pay for the huge debt the public utility had wracked up over the years. And those increases were all rolled back, two months before riots spilled onto the streets of Cochabamba.
No matter whose version of events you believe, hundreds of thousands of Bolivians filled the streets. Their protests turned into riots. One young man was killed by sniper fire.
The government suddenly announced on the eighth day of bloody conflict that the company had fled the country. The company claims the government broke the contract. Cochabambinos took it as a huge victory.
But three years later, are they any better off? ...
In the agricultural area outside of Cochabamba, water is used as it's always been. It rushes down the mountainside in a cement irrigation canal, past fields of scrawny flowers and crops of alfalfa.
"If you look up into the mountain range behind us, you'll see behind there is all of our water system, a series of lakes that gives us our water," shows Virginia Museo, who is part of the powerful irrigation farmers organization in this region.
Museo says the government tried to pass a new water law at the same time it was privatizing the Cochabamba's water system. Under that new law, the irrigation farmers' ancient water rights would have vanished. Their rights would have gone to the private water company.
"There was amazing unity between the city and the country, and I'll explain why," says Museo. "Behind us is a major lake… and that lake is the main water source for all of this area. We were so angry about the water law that was going to be passed, going to violate our traditional ways of using water, that we went up there and at two different places we cut the water source off for the cities, so that down below nobody had any water, and we said, 'Look, this is what's going to happen if the water law passes. You're not going to have the water.'"
Museo says farmers didn't win anything in the water war, they only managed to hang onto their traditional customs and uses.
"We're still able to use water the way we used to," she says. "Water is to grow food. If you don't grow food, how do you eat? That's what we protected and will continue to protect. We truly believe that no one owns the water. Life has no price, so water has no price."
Back at Maximo Montano's place in Valle Hermoso, the water war has had a lasting effect – one of empowerment.
"We have to have water from Semapa. We have a right to," he says. "There are 7,000 people living here. If you talk about the whole area, there are 22 to 30,000 living here. Within the law, we're part of the city. We pay taxes. We have a right to have water. The only way we're going to get the water is fighting for it. But we're going to fight for it and we have the right to have that water."
Semapa's service may not be any better, but as a company it's drastically changed. It's run by a board of local politicians, residents and members of the workers' union, so any controversial decisions to raise rates will be made by the whole community.
But Gonzalo Ugalde, the new head of Semapa, says the real fight is only beginning.
"The people don't see the real problem," he says. "They go to streets to recover the Semapa identity. But now the problem of the water here is very dramatic. The problem is here, in the hills. It is the privatization of the resources, and the main distributor."
Ugalde says investors who were part of the private company that sparked the water war in Cochabamba are now up in the mountains, quietly taking control of the key lakes and water sources for the city.
"Privatization is very important because the water is more important than the gold now," says Ugalde. "The gold is for a few people, but the water is for all people, all around the world. If you obtain control of the water, you can obtain control of the people."
If you'd like to read this (or hear it), here's the link. The page also includes links to other related articles:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.html
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