El Alto, Bolivia – Living on the barren outskirts of the fastest growing city in Latin America, Hilda Tintachipana doesn’t expect many modern comforts.
Raising and selling rabbits pays the bills for the 27-year-old woman and her young family. They live in a dank, two-room house with spotty electricity, but that’s just a fact of life, she said.
But Tintachipana draws the line at water.
It’s a disgrace, she said, that she must tap the muddy spring outside her house or collect rain to feed and bathe her young children. She blames the foreign company that promised her water years ago, but never delivered.
“We’ve been waiting for service in this part of town for a long time,” she said. “We even have the pipe running down the middle of the road, but it’s dry. Without water, there is no possibility of life.” Such complaints can be heard throughout Latin America in countries that privatized water and other resources during the 1990s, only to see whole populations react with outrage.
The reaction was strongest in Bolivia, where opposition to foreign control of water and natural gas set off an explosion of civil unrest that brought down presidents Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and Carlos Mesa.
Peasant leader Evo Morales rode that wave of protest to assume the presidency last month. One of his first proposals was to kick out the last foreign company delivering water to the impoverished, 9 million-person country – the French firm Suez, which serves the capital of La Paz and the adjacent city of El Alto.
To anti-globalization activists around the world, what has become known as the water wars, and their imminent end in Bolivia, are a celebrated case of poor people defending themselves against wrong-headed free-market policies pushed by institutions such as the World Bank.
Such protests have also raged in Argentina, where anger over rate increases pushed Suez to abandon its water contract in the city of Santa Fe. The company is also seeking an early end to its concession in Buenos Aires due to government price controls that the company says prevented it from turning a profit.
Last Thursday, hundreds of people in the Argentine town of Cordoba took to the streets to protest water rate hikes of as much as 500 percent mandated by Suez.
“This was the first shot across the bow of people saying, ‘Hey, these policies aren’t working for us,”‘ said Thom Kruse, an activist who has written extensively about the Bolivian water conflict. “It played an important role in marking the beginning of the end of these neoliberal reforms.” Suez spokeswoman Maya Alexandesco said the privatizations helped rescue crumbling water systems long run inefficiently by public water companies. In Latin America, Suez has water concessions in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Mexico. It is the biggest water company in the world.
“The whole argument of the big, mean private company coming in to make money from the poor is not valid,” she said. “We never made much profit from the Bolivia concessions.” Bolivian officials fault Suez for not connecting enough households to water lines as mandated by its contract and for charging as much as $455 a connection, or about three times the average monthly salary of an office clerk.
They have met once with Suez representatives to negotiate the company’s exit, although Suez’s contract runs through 2027.
“Our experience with the company has been a disappointing one, and it’s time to take another approach,” said vice water minister Rene Orellana. “We need to think of people first instead of paying dividends to investors.” What Morales will do about water after the utilities are back in public hands remains unknown.
Orellana suggested setting up a new public water company, although problems with such public companies led Bolivia to privatize its water utilities in the first place.
When the U.S. company Bechtel took over the water works in the city of Cochabamba in November 1999, it increased rates by as much as 100 percent to raise money for needed improvements neglected by the public utility that came before it.
That move proved to be suicide for Bechtel and launched the first round of protests in Latin America’s water wars. With Cochabamba paralyzed by street blockades, the Bolivian government canceled Bechtel’s contract just six months after it started.
The citizens’ collective Semapa that ran Cochabamba’s water utilities before it was privatized is back in control and has so far left water rates largely untouched. But it hasn’t had much luck delivering water. Only about 40 percent of the city’s residents enjoy running water.
