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

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

Of course Yssa was right, but what does it mean to respect the water after centuries of plunder have left countries like Bolivia bereft of even the most basic resources, and after decades of dictatorship and crony capitalism have eroded the social fabric to the point where many people must choose between corruption and hunger? How we view the corruption and apparent failure of SEMAPA depends on how we understand the economics of scarcity that came before, and the problem of debt that wracks the country, and the depth of poverty that forces Bolivians, from the rank and file to the halls of government, to make incredibly difficult choices; how we judge the faltering democratic institutions in Bolivia depends on how we view the history of dictatorship, oligarchy and colonization from which these institutions emerge.

What the water war won, after all, is the political space to discuss and develop real alternatives -- something that hasn't been seen in Bolivia for somewhere in the vicinity of 500 years. Of course, water is always local, and this political space -- let's call it water democracy -- demands diverse means to thrive. One of the problems with water privatization is that it imposes a static, singular economic imperative on a subject that is, by its nature, fluid. The many struggles for water across the Americas reveal that building water democracy means encouraging new models to emerge.

As Olivera told me so eloquently after admitting to the difficulty of constructing something new, "The water war showed us that it's possible to change our lives, collectively; that even if our enemy is very powerful, he's not invincible. We learned that, maybe capitalism can privatize everything, but what it can never privatize is our capacity to dream. And as long as we have the capacity to dream, we have the obligation to keep struggling for a better world."

The Red Vida and other regional water networks are struggling to define what public management and community control of water might look like in the next century; what they are finding is that a diversity of models are needed to respond to a diversity of crises and conditions. At the Cochabamba seminar, this notion was perhaps best summed up by Adriana Marquisio of Uruguay's Comision Nacional en la Defensa del Agua y de la Vida when she said, "Popular control of water is a dream that does not belong solely to technicians and academics, but that is constructed from the accumulated wisdom and experience of all of our communities. To bring about true public management of water, we must get beyond the logic of politics -- fear of acting outside the electoral sphere; we must get beyond the logic of nationalism -- fear of acting beyond the borders of our own countries; and we must get beyond the logic of miracles -- recognizing that things won't change overnight, but at the same time allowing ourselves to imagine a profound and complete change."

As far as the means of the water struggle go, this may have been best captured by Anna Ella Gomez, a Red Vida member from El Salvador: "The water movement must be like water: transparent and always in motion."

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.

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