It was one of the greatest turning points in our recent history. With its epicentre in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the Water War opened up a new period of popular struggles in Latin America. Not only did it succeed in delegitimising neo-liberalism, but by placing horizontality and the obedience of leaders to the grassroots at the centre, it also marked the cycle of struggles that began in 2000 and culminated in the fall of the privatising governments.
The water war brought together the peasant irrigators, the neighbourhoods of Cochabamba that had created their own water systems, and the city’s main trade unions, an almost unrepeatable alliance, but one that was able to show its strength in the organisation of huge mobilisations that neutralised repression and forced the government to suspend the privatisation of the drinking water service, which had been granted to the multinational Bechtel with the support of the World Bank.
In the southern part of the city, migrants from the Andean region, who had already built their houses, opened their streets and started to build services, began to organise themselves into water systems. With community contributions, they built their underground water sources (boreholes), storage tanks and distribution networks. Everything was done in a spirit of solidarity, without any profit motive and with decisions recorded in minutes.
The people of the community took charge of the management of the water systems and took responsibility for the technical side, training themselves or calling in specialists. Rotation was a constant practice, as the population in the southern part of the town came from farming areas and the miners who moved in, both of whom were steeped in community traditions and practices. While the miners brought their long and militant union culture, the peasants brought their Andean worldview of solidarity.
The first urban drinking water system was created in 1990. I was able to meet Fabián Condori, one of its founders, thanks to Óscar Olivera, who was then head of the factory workers’ union and from there played a very prominent role in the peasant, workers’ and popular uprising. “Each family contributed one boliviano a month for explosives, tools and office rent. Each family had to dig six metres a month at a depth of half a metre, all in rocky terrain, a very hard and slow job that took them three years to complete”, explained Don Fabián.
During the three years of work, they held 105 meetings, one every ten days. “The problem is that people did not rest, they came from their work to contribute, each family had to contribute 35 eight-hour working days, any member of the family could work, but mostly the women worked. Everyone was blistered and very tired. Pickaxes, shovels, wheelbarrows, sifting earth, compacting, it was a lot, a lot of work. I realised that women were harder workers,” recalled Fabián, who was already in his 80s.
The other side, the irrigators, are farmers who have their own sources of water, such as rivers, ponds and wells, which they have managed since before the arrival of the Spaniards. They had to organise themselves at regional level to overcome fragmentation. For four years, between 1994 and 1998, local irrigation associations fought the “war of the wells” to defend their sources, which led to the strengthening of the associations and increased regional coordination.
When the privatisation of everything they had built up over decades was about to be signed, peasants and urban neighbourhoods formed the Coordinadora en Defensa del Agua y la Vida (Coordination for the Defence of Water and Life), a meeting of two very similar cultures of organisation and struggle, anchored in the autonomy of each local collective and in the coordination of the struggle with a very low level of bureaucratisation, or, if you prefer, where direct democracy played an important role.
The Coordinadora led the blockades, the rallies and all the struggles that won a resounding victory in April 2000, showing the world that ‘yes we can’ when there is collective organisation and determination. The same year saw the uprising of the Aymara communities of the Bolivian Altiplano, and the following year the uprising of the Argentinean people on 19 and 20 December 2001, a veritable wave of victories from below.
The water warriors soon realised that they were not faced with the traditional private-state alternative, which was always limited and confused. They proposed ‘community’ ownership of the water service, which would depend not on the state but on the organised population. It is not public, although according to the legislation and a certain left it would be ‘private’; like everything that is not state property in this world view.
Above all, they showed that it is possible to fight without leaders or parties, and that organised people are capable of great triumphs on their own.
