Twenty-five years ago, a social movement erupted in a small South American city that reverberated around the world. When the Bolivian government contracted a multinational corporation to privatize water provision in the city of Cochabamba and its surrounding agricultural region, a coalition of city residents and rural farmers came together to oppose rate hikes and the dispossession of water systems they had built themselves. Within less than six months, the movement succeeded in pressuring the government to repeal the water privatization law and cancel the contract with the company Aguas del Tunari. Their victory marked a turning point in Bolivia and the world as the reigning neoliberal economic model went from the offensive to the defensive—at least for a time.
The coalition was organized by the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida, formed in November 1999, whose principal spokesperson was the factory worker union leader Oscar Olivera. In 2004, Olivera published a first-hand, blow-by-blow account in English of how the movement came together, organized, grew, and won. The book, Cochabamba: Water War in Bolivia, published by South End Press, has been out of print for many years. Now, a quarter century after their victory, Olivera and other activists and scholars have published a new version of this book, complete with Olivera’s original five chapters on the lead-up to the conflict, the revolt itself, and its immediate aftermath, in addition to six new chapters.
The two new chapters by Olivera—one of which is an interview with the water activist Nelly Pérez—deal with the aftermath and legacy of the Water War and the state of water access in Cochabamba today. A chapter by the Mexican activist and sociologist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, who participated in the Water War and wrote a book about the social movements it sparked between 2000 and 2005, offers an account and analysis of the water privatization conflict, highlighting concepts of sovereignty and social property. Cochabamba water activists and community organizers Marcela Olivera and Stefano Archidiacono, along with activist and editor Alexander Dwinell, show how the Water War built on and employed practices of “water commoning” to achieve a temporary but significant “commoning of politics.” Political philosopher Massimiliano Tomba explores the concept of “social property” that movement participants developed through the experience of defending water. Finally, Uruguayan writer and activist Raúl Zibechi addresses the roots of the Water War and why grassroots movements are currently weak.
The republished chapters on the Water War convey the strong sense of hope and power in the early months of the new century, as tens of thousands of people from different backgrounds gathered from across the Cochabamba region to oppose the government of Hugo Banzer, the former dictator (1971–1978) turned democratically elected president (1997–2001). His privatization plan’s Achilles heel was its failure to recognize that water sources and systems are “commons” or “social property,” meaning they were neither public nor private property but rather communally held based on historical use and ongoing use and participation.
As Olivera explains, the privatization not only raised rates in the city center, where residents enjoyed municipal water service; it also dispossessed peripheral neighborhoods and peasant communities of water systems they had built themselves. In neighborhoods close to the mountains where seasonal rains fill lakes, rivers, and aquifers, cooperatives had their own water sources like wells, springs, and shares of lake waters. But in the dry and neglected migrant neighborhoods of the Zona Sud, residents purchased water at high rates from water trucks, filling metal barrels and neighborhood tanks supplied by the municipal water company SEMAPA. The privatization also seized water sources and systems from peasant and irrigators’ unions, whose ancestors had built and maintained them for large estate owners and later won them through agrarian reform after the 1952 Bolivian revolution. Privatization handed all of this—municipal, peripheral, and rural water sources, systems, and management—to a private multinational company that had done nothing to build this intricate network and promised very little to improve it.
Olivera’s original chapters detail the creative tactics the movement used to oppose and ultimately defeat privatization. Movement participants gathered in mass meetings, staged mass rallies and marches, and organized strikes, blockades, a rate-payment boycott, and a popular referendum on the contract with Aguas del Tunari. In the early days of April 2000, after months of battles with police and the military, marches from across the region converged on the city center, shutting it down despite brutal repression. Their courageous actions and the government’s heavy-handed response garnered sympathy for the movement beyond Cochabamba and forced the government to negotiate and bow to its demands. Water sources, systems, and administration were restored to the municipal water company SEMAPA, peripheral neighborhood cooperatives, peasant unions, and groups of irrigators. But the same problems that had plagued the system before the conflict, including the fact that half the city of Cochabamba lacked secure and affordable water provision and sewage service, remained.
The key to their victory and the way forward was ordinary people acting ‘as sovereigns, exercising politics directly, without recognition from the state framework, surpassing parties and the state itself.’
The new chapters narrate the ways that Cochabamba officials and activists attempted to resolve these problems after Aguas del Tunari’s departure. As Olivera emphasizes, one of the biggest lessons that Cochabamba water activists and their counterparts elsewhere took from the Water War was that the key to their victory and the way forward was ordinary people acting “as sovereigns, exercising politics directly, without recognition from the state framework, surpassing parties and the state itself.” While efforts to apply this approach to the reconstituted SEMAPA did not work out, this principle influenced social movements around Bolivia, Latin America, and the world in the early 2000s and continues to do so.
Olivera paints a grim picture of the state of water access and management in Cochabamba today. Under the leadership of President Evo Morales (2006–2019) and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party that won the presidency on this surge of social movement mobilization, the Bolivian national government undermined rather than strengthened autonomous community water management in Cochabamba and other parts of the country. The MAS employed a twin strategy: coopting social movements and activists they could control, and vilifying those they could not. Coordinadora leaders, to their immense credit, fell into the latter category. After the MAS took power, according to Olivera, ordinary people’s “capacity was expropriated from above, and once again the situation was reduced to decisions made by those in power.” But the organization that Olivera heads, named Fundación Abril in honor of the revolt, has remained independent from the state, the MAS government, and other political parties. It works daily to build and fortify the capacity of ordinary water users to manage and improve their water systems. Through these experiences, Olivera notes, he learned to “recover the Andean worldview” that “life is not just composed of human beings.” It also includes “water, rivers, mountains, plants, animals.”
The most moving part of the book for me was where Olivera discusses the toll that his dedication to activism has taken on his family. I remember being struck by his statement in the 2004 edition that his dream was to be an ordinary worker who could come home to his family in the afternoons and help his children with their homework. Now his children are grown up and deeply proud of their father’s dedication, even if it often took him away from them while they were younger.
The most remarkable aspect of Olivera’s work is his consistent commitment to and belief in the ability of ordinary people to defend their ways of life and build a better world.
I was fortunate to attend Olivera’s 75th birthday party earlier this year. Friends, family members, and comrades from around Cochabamba attended in person, and many more called in from around the world. People made toasts attesting to the importance and impact of Olivera’s work in their neighborhoods and communities. In a tribute that brought us all to tears, one friend observed that the most remarkable aspect of Olivera’s work is his consistent commitment to and belief in the ability of ordinary people to defend their ways of life and build a better world.
Even as Bolivia faces difficult days, with the economy in crisis, weakened social movements, and the conservative right on the rise, the Water War lives on in the continued work and memory of its leaders and participants. This book is a gift to a new generation of English-reading activists, students, and concerned people around the world. May we learn from the lessons Olivera and the other authors take from the Water War and its aftermath: the importance of maintaining social movements’ independence, building solidarity across differences and geography, binding our future to the wellbeing of the rest of nature, and creating the world we want in the here and now as we confront authoritarianism and environmental crisis by building and fortifying organizations rooted in community and environmental justice.
Sarah T. Hines is an associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia, published in Spanish as Agua para todos: Comunidad, propiedad, y revolución en la Bolivia moderna. She is currently researching and writing a new book, tentatively titled Losing Glaciers: An Environmental History of the Andes Mountains. She lives between Cochabamba and Oklahoma.