El Alto´s Uprising Over Water

El Alto, the poor and sprawling city above Bolivia´s capital of La Paz, is on the march again in its efforts to remove, fully and finally, the French water giant Suez. Here´s a quick take on what is going on.

In December the neighborhood groups of El Alto announced their demand that their water system, privatized in 1997 under pressure from the World Bank, be returned to public hands. The private contract excluded tens of thousands of families from any hope of getting water and sewage service to their homes.

In January, following two days of protests and a peaceful citywide general strike, Bolivian President Carlos Mesa issued a proclamation declaring that the contract with Suez was being cancelled and that a process would begin to form a new public company.

The Democracy Center was the first to write about the story, back in December, followed by later coverage by the Miami Herald, New York Times and others. Here´s our original reporting on the story.

This week is the second chapter in the effort by the people of El Alto to take back their water. Suez officials signaled from the start that, despite declarations from the Bolivian government, they had no interest in going quietly. Suez declared that funds granted to the company by international donors would be treated as Suez assets. They talked publicly of demanding expensive compensation. News reports suggested that President Mesa received a phone call over the issue from French President Chirac. Officials at foreign embassies spoke privately that is was time to teach Bolivians a lesson about the power of contracts and the cost of breaking them.

In meetings with the neighborhood groups, Suez floated the idea of staying engaged in the local water company as an investor, a proposal soundly rejected by a community that had come to mistrust Suez deeply. It turns out that the Bolivian government has been talking with Suez in private about exactly that option and put the public/private model squarely in the table in negotiations over how to form a new water company.

Suez claimed all along that the uprisings in El Alto were never broadly supported and instead were the actions of a few radicals in the neighborhood groups. The Mesa government apparently took the same bet.

This week it became evident that Suez´s doubts about widespread opposition to it were a bad bet. Over the course of the past few days thousands upon thousands of people have taken to the streets, backing the demand for Suez´s complete ouster. Here´s a good article (in Spanish) from today´s La Prensa in La Paz which includes a photo of the protests. Police actions against the protesters have resulted in injuries, included one elderly woman hospitalized after being hit with a tear gas canister.

Will the company and the government never learn that ¨No¨means ¨No¨? Suez can disagree with the negative view of it held by the people they were supposed to serve. The government can question the wisdom of kicking out a foreign company. But they should not question that that ouster is indeed the public´s demand.

As I wrote in The Nation last month, water privatization forced on a people is a policy doomed from the start. It should be no surprise now that such an opposition has emerged.

¨Legal security¨has become the new rallying cry toward Bolivia from foreign investors. On one side, they have a valid point. Investors need to know that agreements worked out in a contract are reliable agreements. On the other hand, all too often, corporations have worked out these deals behind closed doors with government officials who had neither the compentency or the integrity to cut a deal in the public´s interest.

The implicit understanding between corporations has been -- don´t worry, if the people don´t like it we have an army. That didn´t work in Cochabamba five years ago, but one dead teenager and more than a hundred wounded paid the price. The Mesa government and Suez had both better know that the bullet won´t work this time either, for anything other than putting blood on their hands.

Here´s how to contact Suez´s CEO in France. Drop him a note and tell him that it has come time to say Bonjour Bolivia:

Mr. Gérard Mestrallet
CEO, Suez Corporation
gerard.mestrallet@suez.com