Water for All

A new offering on water from the Democracy Center's Blog. Keep posted for more on water as the 10th aniversary of the Cochabamba Water War draws near.

Cochabamba's Poorest Neighborhoods
Take on the Challenge of Water

Dear Readers:

Today we bring you a special edition of the Blog from Bolivia which took a good deal of work by a team of people to produce -- an important new video about how the people of Cochabamba's poorest neighborhoods have taken on the challenge of getting water.

A decade ago the streets of Cochabamba were made known worldwide when the people of this city came out by the thousands to take back their public water system from Bechtel in the now-famous Cochabamba Water Revolt.

As the ten year anniversary of the Water Revolt approaches, we are going back to it, to dig deeper, and especially to look at a basic question – What difference did it make? We have already written a good deal about that, including
this chapter from our recent book Dignity and Defiance and this briefing paper published last year. These writings have not been varnished versions of that history. They have included accounts of the ongoing problems with Cochabamba's state-run water company along with the stories of the heroism and courage involved in taking it back a decade ago.

With this Blog we want to focus on a very specific piece of the post Water Revolt story, one of the lesser known: How the neighborhoods of Cochabamba’s impoverished south side have taken into their own hands the challenge of getting water.

Because of it's length, 15 minutes, we have broken the video into two parts. Here are the links on YouTube:

Part One
Part Two

The production of the video and the accompanying article below was a collective effort of the Democracy team but in particular Elizabeth Cooper, a student at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts who joined us for part of her summer to work on the project, along with Democracy Center stalwarts Leny Olivera and Aldo Orellana. I think you will see that they have offered up something truly worth watching and reading.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

Bolivia’s Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction

This is an article written by Linda Farthing, I have included her bio below but more than her bio she is a good friend of ours so give it a read!!

Linda Farthing is a writer, educator and activist. She has written and edited books and articles on Mexico, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia, worked as field producer for documentary films in Colombia and Bolivia, and administered college semester abroad programs throughout the Americas.


Bolivia’s Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction
by Linda Farthing

As with so much else in South America’s landlocked and impoverished heartland, Bolivia’s natural environment excels in superlatives: It is home to the world’s largest salt flat (Salar de Uyuni in the southwest); the world’s highest navigable lake (Titicaca, straddling the border with Peru); and the second-largest high mountain plateau (the altiplano), after that of Tibet. The result is an often breathtaking landscape of magnificent snow-covered mountains surrounding windswept plateaus and lakes of an almost unimaginable deep blue, high valleys unfolding eastward into dense, vast jungles to the north, and open savannas to the south.

Less fortunately for both Bolivia’s environment and its people, the exploitation of the country’s considerable natural resources has also been nearly unparalleled: The country was once home to the Spanish colony’s richest silver and gold mine (Potosí); boasted one of the world’s richest tin mines (Siglo XX); and today has two of the world’s largest silver mines (San Cristóbal and San Bartolomé), an estimated half of world’s lithium reserves (Salar de Uyuni), the future largest iron ore mine (Mutún), and the second-largest proven gas reserves in South America (after Venezuela’s). It comes as no surprise that Bolivia’s history and environment have been dominated by relentless extraction.

to read the rest