Water for All
What if it was possible for our communities, even urban communities, to directly and democratically control even the most fundamental resources upon which we rely?
… What if this was true not just for the rich and middle classes, but even for people who are today the most impoverished and marginalized?
… And what if this were true even for the scarcest of resources?
What if… is!
In 1995 the then Vice-President of the World Bank, Dr. Ismail Serageldin told a Newsweek report, “Many of the wars this century were about oil, but those of the next century will be over water.”
And, like clockwork, on April 2000 a water war broke out… but it might not have been the kind of war that Dr. Serageldin was predicting. The battle took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a city of approximately 800,000 people, where the water had recently been privatized and sold off to Bechtel Corporation, the largest engineering firm in the United States. The battle was between Bechtel, along with the police and military of Bolivia, on one side, and on the other side almost the entire population of the city Cochabamba and its countryside. The people won. What’s remarkable is not only that the people of Cochabamba succeeded in deprivatizing their water supply, but they also maintained the right to self-administration… a directly democratic alternative to the problem of corruption within the state-run water company.
The story actually goes much further back than April of 2000. It goes back to the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when hundred of thousands of indigenous farmers and miners migrated to the city due to the collapse of the agricultural and mining sectors of the economy following liberalization.
The over 400,000 people who would come to make up the southern half of the city of Cochabamba found that they were not receiving water service from the city, and that purchasing water from the private sector would cost them seven times what it cost their fellow citizens in the north of the city. Already financially poor, and in an arid climate, the neighborhoods of Cochabamba began forming water committees based on a model of community self-management.
To create their own, self-managed water systems, community members chipped in their money and their labor to construct water storage tanks, distribution networks, and wells going up to 100 meters in depth.
Since the cooperatives are neighborhood-based associations, there is no single owner or executive. Instead the ultimate authority is the entire assembly of the community, a totally democratic process.
There are currently over 140 community systems operating in the south of Cochabamba. Following the victory to deprivatize their water in 2000, and the election of the first indigenous president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, in December of 2005, the self-managing communities of Cochabamba faced a different set of challenges as the state run water company, SEMAPA, began to show an interest in providing water to their communities.
With their experience of social management, beyond the false dichotomy of state versus private sector, the residents decided to not be absorbed into the state-owned water company. And instead chose joint administration: they would purchase water from SEMAPA at very reasonable rates, store the water in large tanks, use their community systems to distribute water to the families… and continue demanding that the state fulfill its obligation to bring water to the entire population
The chose to stay in control of their water because it allowed them to maintain the organizations they have built, which are spaces in which they discuss not only water, but all issues which affect the neighborhood and the whole country. They have achieved a form of popular sovereignty and social influence that points toward greater democracy than what most of us currently experience.
Despite marginalization and extreme poverty, the people of Cochabamba have out of necessity created an ingenious response to some of the most pressing issues of our times… they have created a model which consists wholly of decentralized, horizontal initiatives that is successful, sustainable, efficient and without bureaucracies.
