Demonstrators blocked all roads into the city; the government cut off power to local radio and television stations. Middle-class matrons took wounded protesters into their homes and beauty salons to nurse them, and bowls of vinegar mixed with water and baking powder—useful for soaking bandannas for protection from tear gas—appeared outside a thousand respectable doorways.
Then, from behind a line of military police, a sharpshooter in civilian clothes fired a rifle into a crowd of unarmed civilians. He was caught on video by a Bolivian television crew, and was later identified as Robinson Iriarte de la Fuente, a Bolivian Army captain who had been trained in the United States. He was hit in the face and died instantly. Dozens of other people were treated for bullet wounds.
By the time Daza had been raised onto his bier and the police and the Army had been repeatedly prevented from seizing his body, there was clearly no future for Aguas del Tunari in Cochabamba. They may have noted that, several weeks earlier, Mayor Reyes Villa had left their side. The company argued that it had not left voluntarily but had been pushed out. Banged together by parliamentarians and water specialists from the Coordinadora who gathered in La Paz, the new law gave legal recognition to usos y costumbres —traditional communal practices—by protecting small independent water systems, guaranteeing public consultation on rates, and giving social needs priority over financial goals.
This triumph seemed to the water warriors too good to be true, and it was. Laws in Bolivia are implemented—if, indeed, they are ever implemented—only after bylaws have been attached and approved, and the government soon made it clear that, in the case of the new water law, this process could take years. Service is still poor. Corruption has reportedly been reduced, but an intolerable situation persists: the poor in Cochabamba, those who are not on the network and who have no well, pay ten times as much for their water as the relatively wealthy residents who are hooked up.
Since simply raising water rates across the board is politically impossible, that means new partners or new loans. Neither is it likely to get much help from the World Bank. What its officials do when confronted by an actual pro-poor coalition is, of course, another matter. In Bolivia, its representatives have never met with the leaders of the Coordinadora. But, its supporters point out, at least it is Bolivian. Curtin had been involved in the deal as a consultant for International Water, and represents the interests of Bechtel and its partners in talks with the Bolivian government.
In November, , after negotiations had deadlocked, the consortium filed a complaint against the Bolivian government in a World Bank trade court in Washington. The complainant was Aguas del Tunari, but the political weight was supplied by Bechtel.
It seems that International Water, which was originally registered in the Cayman Islands which has no comparable investment treaty with Bolivia , moved its registration to Amsterdam soon after the Cochabamba contract was signed. Bechtel and its partners are demanding at least twenty-five million dollars in compensation for the broken contract.
While trade-court proceedings are notoriously slow, nobody seems to believe that the Bolivians can afford that kind of money. The truly frightening part is the impact that the Water War has had on the foreign-investment climate. The United States Embassy agrees. A subsequent auction to sell the La Paz telephone company drew no bidders at all. The United States has not yet decided, the official added, whether to formally designate the breaking of the contract in Cochabamba an expropriation.
That will depend on the settlement, if there is one, that is reached in the case. Quiroga, who is forty-one, is tall and fair. He graduated in from the University of Texas, where he studied industrial engineering, and worked for I.
Gas exports will lead the way. A long-awaited transcontinental highway connecting Brazil and Chile will pass through Cochabamba. Fibre-optic cables will be laid. The hypocrisy of the United States and Europe on free trade. Meanwhile, American and European farm subsidies, along with tariffs on textiles and agricultural products, make it impossible for Bolivia to sell its exports in the Global North. When I asked him about the Water War, he looked uncomfortable. Quiroga insists that the World Bank and the I.
He had recently been to a meeting of the World Economic Forum—he goes almost every year—and his remarks struck me as having an up-to-the-minute cosmopolitan gloss. Quiroga sighed. Some things, certainly, never change. The case had been transferred from the civilian criminal-justice system—no judge was willing to hear it—to a military tribunal, which has final jurisdiction over the cases it hears.
Upon his acquittal, Iriarte was promoted to the rank of major. Nobody is going to try that again for a long time. Vargas is young and chic, and she had recently finished a postgraduate course in development administration in thoroughly deregulated Britain.
She nonetheless has an unfashionable enthusiasm for regulation. They waste a lot of water. But the world is changing. Within five years, they will be charged for water—and they will be regulated. Trying to find a path outside the binary of state or market control, the Coordinadora has no model. They also know that their water company—and Bolivia generally—cannot survive without foreign investment. He has also announced his candidacy for President. The movie touches on many water themes; the major themes throughout the movie that are all tied together are colonialism, exploitation, and privatization.
While the filmmakers are trying to tell a story about native exploitation, the whole reason that the main characters are filming a movie about Columbus and the Tainos who lived much further north in Bolivia in the first place is because of their economic instability.
They are benefiting off of their poverty, by only paying their extras two dollars a day. This comes to a head when Daniel overhears his conversation on the phone in English with their backers, laughing about how the natives will happily work for two dollars a day. These scenes show how even today natives are exploited when they have less.
Costa is on a similar level with the water company even though they are making a movie about the historical exploitation of natives. The exploitation by the film crew that is tied to water is near the end of the movie when they ask the women to drown baby dolls as the natives did when they were escaping from the dogs. The water privatization theme is central to the plot. It [the drug trade] was Milton Friedman heaven: all privately run, no taxation, no regulation and in essence -- if you want to look at it cynically -- duty free access to markets," observes Quiroga, who is now Bolivia's president.
Politicians like Quiroga fully supported the eradication of coca, but the loss of drug money made the country even more dependent on international financial institutions like the World Bank. The Bank advised the country to continue selling its remaining assets, including water.
Cochabamba put its water system up for auction in Only one bidder showed up. The company, called Aguas del Tunari, a division of the large American construction firm Bechtel, promised to expand water service.
Two months after taking over the water system, Aguas del Tunari raised the water rates. People, resentful and angry, took to the streets in protest. One of their leaders was Oscar Olivera, a long-time union activist. He and others tapped into the anger many Bolivians feel about their country's long history of political corruption and foreign domination. In the process, many of the irrigators developed a sophisticated understanding of technical details. The experts said it was unjust, they were at a disadvantage—it was amazing.
And they wanted us to train them! The dusty, rickety building felt like a squat, though upstairs you would find Oscar Olivera, perhaps the most important leader—certainly the most visible spokesman—of the water war.
I found Paredo working the phone, arranging a rally for the August 10 referendums that would ultimately lead to the recall of her hated enemy, the prefect Manfred Reyes Villa. She had a wide, tough face and spoke faster than most Bolivians, her thin lips revealing four missing front teeth.
I asked her whether female irrigators here are locked into a subservient role, a generalization often made about the developing world. Women probably came out in more force than men in the water war. Now, lots of women work in commerce and the roles are changing more and more. Then she shifted the topic from women to families, emphasizing the unity and intelligence of irrigators as a whole, in opposition to earlier governments and their worldviews.
Their children are professionals and they have their own wisdom from their own culture. I asked her why, if there was so much force behind this new irrigation law, progress in granting the irrigators their registros has been so slow?
I asked. Omar Fernandez is one of those people. Here in La Paz, he draws on the experience in governance he picked up during the research process.
I ask him about the moment when the irrigators overwhelmed the government technicians. And then I realized that the people, our communities, could do the same, they also had the capacity to work with these terms and concepts. In October , during a pause between bloody battles in the streets of La Paz, congress voted unanimously to adopt it—an unprecedented level of consensus.
It was a typical Bolivian triumph. The president of the day, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada—soon to flee the country after allegedly unleashing a massacre—refused to pass the bylaws and regulations needed to implement the law. So nothing actually happened. Now, with the country on its third water minister in three years, things are finally moving.
Early this year, Tiquipaya became the first of about a dozen communities to receive registros from the central government that officially recognize and in legal practice establish their legal right to use their water basin in perpetuity.
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