Defeating the Multinationals Is Just the Start of the Problem for Anti-Globalization Movements

By Jeff Conant, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2009.

The same was true, he told me, of the Water Ministry itself.

"Before Evo Morales was president, because of the sacrifices of the social movements and La Coordinadora, we got this ministry. It grew out of our demand that the government take our needs seriously."

Bolivia is the first country in the hemisphere to have a Cabinet-level position dedicated to water governance. According to Jaldin, this is one of the most important developments in his country in recent years.

"It sends a message that our little organizations can have a big impact. Now the human right to water is on everybody's mind, throughout Latin America and the world."

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.

Today's Struggle

During the last week of August 2008, a seminar took place in Cochabamba organized by a coalition of Latin American water rights groups called the Red Vida (whose acronym in Spanish means the Interamerican Network for the Vigilance of Water Rights). The title and theme of the event was, "The Public Management of a Common Good," and people involved in all aspects of water management had come from virtually every country in the Americas to share their experiences.

At long, open meeting sessions the national water workers union of Uruguay told of its solidarity with the deeply impoverished city of Potosi, where they were installing a new water system; a state bureaucrat from Venezuela argued forcefully and in a flurry of rhetoric that the state can meet the needs of the people only after the people take back the state from the oligarchs; a young activist from Ecuador shared tales of water-delivery systems run by rural communities on microcredit; a group of Colombians told how they had recently navigated several of that country's great rivers in their quest to collect a million-and-a-half signatures to reform their constitution; an Italian solidarity group announced a project for an Andean water school to be partially funded by the city of Venice. In short, the Cochabamba meeting was a platform for a tremendous diversity of popular organizations to share the lessons they were learning in forging what many participants referred to as "a new culture of water."

The Red Vida seminar was presided over by the directors of several local water committees -- ad-hoc groups responsible for supplying drinking water and sanitation services in marginal areas where Cochabamba' notoriously inefficient public utility fails to provide. Bolivia's Minister of Water Renee Orellana was present, as was  Olivera.

The event opened with words by Eduardo Yssa, the Aymara director of ASICA Sur. With piercing eyes and wearing the traditional bowl-cut of the Aymara, Yssa, who had recently been in a near-fatal auto accident, put aside his crutches, thanked everyone for being present and got straight to the point.

"Compañeros," he said, "if we go much longer failing to recognize that water is life, we will have no life left."

Before a roomful of water managers from up and down the spine of the Americas, all struggling to construct a new politics of water, Yssa invoked his ancestors.

"Before," he said, "when there was no rain in the altiplano, the authorities were obliged to walk up to the springs, up in the mountains, on foot, and to carry a bottle of water back to the altiplano. There they would meet with another authority, who would bring music, autochthonous music. Then, in a special ritual, with the sacrifice of a goat or a llama, they would toss the water to the four winds, the four cardinal points, and they would pray, and then it would rain. They got results. Today, we come to the city like children, and we fail to practice these things. We fail to respect the water."

"Compañeros," he repeated in halting Spanish, "as long as we fail to recognize that water is life, because though you might have money, or gold, or silver, though you might have entire gold mines, you won't have life, until we respect the water, all of life is in danger."

See more stories tagged with: bolivia, water, bechtel, water privatization, water justice, cochabamba, water democracy

Jeff Conant is the International Research and Communications Coordinator for Food and Water Watch.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »