Here’s a (long) excerpt from an article by Daniel Aldana Cohen in Walrus magazine. I believe he’s actually the son of a former publisher of mine, Patsy Aldana, who is a fabulous and brilliant woman—so no surprise there.
Anyway, it’s about the water wars and economics in Bolivia, which is a sort of Ground Zero country for the fight for water as a human right. Corporate giant Bechtel’s strangling of the country’s water (gathering rainwater, I believe, became illegal) actually led to a remarkable revolution there, where Bechtel was thrown out and the first ever indigenous campesino was voted into power—by an astonishing 53%.
The country is a threat to the rest of the world simply because it appears, at least, to be fighting so hard to have an actual, working, vibrant democracy.
Here’s the excerpt, from Canada’s wonderfully informative Walrus magazine:
Private water makes a killing (though not exactly as promised)
Around the world, a growing freshwater crisis is causing disease and death, sparking violence, and exacerbating the food crisis. More than a billion people lack access to clean water, and still more go without sanitation. A debate is raging over whether to address escalating shortages via public institutions or privatization.
Since the Conservative Party came to power in 2006, Canada has moved forcefully into the privatization camp. For example, in April of this year, the Toronto Star reported that Canadian negotiators had blocked the United Nations’ Human Rights Council from taking steps to declare water a human right. [in case anybody wonders where Harper and co.—and the other side too—stand in terms of giving human beings access to potable water]. Yet Canadian-funded research conducted in Bolivia has suggested a very different tack—that a public, rights-based approach to water is the best way to distribute it fairly and effectively.
During the late 1990s, the World Bank began pressuring Bolivia to extend its campaign of privatization to its urban water utilities. It had little trouble finding allies in the country. By 1999, it had signed up the president, Hugo Banzer, an aging former dictator, and Manfred Reyes Villa, a wealthy businessman, former army man, and the popular mayor of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city.
[Like the sickness of communism, here's how bad privatization can get when in the hands of the wrong people]
Under Reyes Villa, Cochabamba’s water utility was sold to the only bidder, a subsidiary of the American corporation Bechtel, and prices rapidly skyrocketed as much as 200 percent. Under the Bechtel contract, it became illegal for city residents or peasants in surrounding communities to collect rainwater for drinking, irrigation, or anything else. The water that irrigated the farm fields of communities like Tiquipaya would instead be confiscated and rerouted into the leaky pipes beneath the city.
In early 2000, Gonzales joined hundreds of his neighbours as they poured into Cochabamba to join a massive and initially peaceful insurgency against the privatization. “We came down in columns, different communities taking their turn each day,” he recalls. “We were gassed and hit with rubber bullets.” A seventeen-year-old boy was killed during a day of street fighting, shot in the face by an army sniper who was later exonerated and promoted.
Following the violence, Reyes Villa changed his mind about the water privatization. Bechtel executives fled the city after local police told them they could no longer guarantee their safety. Anxious to avoid more violence, the national government declared the contract void.
Coming as it did after fifteen years of successive privatizations of state enterprises, the water war represented a turning point in Bolivians’ political consciousness. In the five years following, they overthrew three presidents before electing leftist Evo Morales, the continent’s first indigenous president, in 2005 with an unprecedented 53 percent of the vote.
Bolivia’s response to the oppression, and the ‘water shocks’, are the plus side of what can come out of what Naomi Klein calls the ‘Shock Doctine.’ After the shock—whatever it is—there is as much opportunity for solidarity and mutual care as there is for exploitation and disenfranchisement.
And if the new government eventually turns out to be yet another Big Man, may the people be able to respond in solidarity, and without being brutalized.
As Smokin’ Joe Frazier said in the documentary I just finished: “Shoot your shot. First man first. We was both dead. If he woulda hit me first, maybe I woulda gone down.”
Read the rest of the article, if you get a chance.
Lots of love to you—and may we stand up for people outside of our own family, tribe, corporation, country or whatever. May all sentient beings be happy, and may their thirst be quenched,
Pete xox
