Bolivia: 15 Years After the Cochabamba Water Revolt, Echoes in New Cases of Corporate Abuse
Bolivia: 15 Years After the Cochabamba Water Revolt, Echoes in New Cases of Corporate Abuse
Written by Philippa de Boissière
Monday, 27 April 2015 21:13
Fifteen years ago this month the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia were victorious in their now-famous showdown with one of the most powerful multinational corporations in the world, in what has come to be known as the Cochabamba Water Revolt. The attempt by the US Engineering giant Bechtel to privatize the city’s water supply backfired spectacularly when the people of Cochabamba faced down government forces to kick the multinational out of the country and to reclaim their rights to one of the most basic human necessities on the planet.
For people the world over, this stunning popular victory over corporate hubris in the Andes not only continues to inspire hope that another world is indeed possible; it also shines an urgent light on three fundamentals in the ongoing wider battle against the abuses of corporate power in South America: how the road is paved to allow foreign corporations to seize control of the continent's forests, waters and territories; the damages they inflict when they get there; and how communities are fighting back against a deepening transnational assault on their resources and on their sovereignty.
For Bechtel, the road into Bolivia and its water systems was paved by Washington Consensus-inspired loan conditionalities. In the late 1990s the World Bank told Bolivia to privatize Cochabamba’s Water as a condition of further lending for water expansion. In 1999, the Bolivian government agreed and signed a lavish forty-year lease with a mysterious Bechtel subsidiary that wasted no time in hiking up the cost of water. Rates rose by 50% and sometimes by as much as double. The result for ordinary Cochabambinos was devastating, with many families being forced to choose between such basics as water or food. People from across the department responded with unified indignation, three times shutting down the entire city with blockades, marches, and general strikes. Despite heavy state repression that left one teenage boy dead and hundreds more injured, the people succeeded in kicking Bechtel out of the country, reclaiming their water supply and achieving a powerful victory that still resonates globally today.
Fast forward to South America 2015. These same fundamental themes of foreign corporate dominance and resistance are echoed across three current cases involving powerful European multinationals, profiled in a recent report, Corporate Conquistadors, from the Democracy Center, Corporate Europe Observatory and Transnational Institute. In Peru, Spanish Repsol is threatening not only the sovereignty but the very existence of local indigenous communities, as it pushes ever deeper into fragile Amazonian ecosystems in the insatiable quest to expand its reserves of oil and gas. To the south of Peru, in the region of Espinar, Swiss Commodities and Mining conglomerate Glencore Xstrata is bulldozing over human rights as local community members share testimonies of already scarce water supplies being destroyed by its twin mega mining projects, Tintaya and Antapaccay. Finally, Italo-Spanish energy giant Enel-Endesa is set to flood some 8,500 hectares of vitally important agricultural lands in Huila, Colombia where it is constructing a 400MW dam to generate cheap energy - either for export or to set in motion a new wave of mega mining and unconventional gas operations.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/5305-bolivia-15-years-after-the-cochabamba-water-revolt-echoes-in-new-cases-of-corporate-abuse
= new reply since forum marked as read
Both governments have signed U.S. "free trade for the rich" agreements: Colombia, recently, under a center-right president, Manual Santos, after a decade of prep--murder of many labor leaders and other leftists, brutal displacement of 5 million peasant farmers, compliments of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs"--by Bush pal, the murderous fascist Alvaro Uribe; in Peru, signed by corrupt rightwinger Alan Garcia, since replaced by leftist Ollanta Humala who doesn't seem like much of a leftist any more. (Seems to have made the Corporate Compromise like so many of our Democratic Party leaders, hangin' out with the rich and powerful.) Both Colombia and Peru are selling their peoples' natural resources out from under them with little or no benefit to the majority of the people, and great harm to many people and to the environment.
Peruvian government web site touting its ties to the IMF and World Bank (gawd!):
Lima, June 10, 2014.- In October 2015 Peru will host the Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank Group (WBG) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the world’s most important multilateral agencies, of which Peru is a full member.
The 2015 WBG/IMF Annual Meetings will provide Peru with a unique opportunity to strengthen its increasingly relevant position in the global stage. For seven days the country will be at the center of world attention and will have the chance to showcase its achievements and the policies implemented to become a referent at the regional and global level.
http://www.2015lima.gob.pe/en/2014/06/peru-to-host-world-bank-imf-meetings-in-october-2015
More at the link.
That says it all about Peru's 0.01% and Ollanta Humala--WELCOMING the World Bank and IMF into Peru, for godssakes! So anxious to be a "player," which inevitably means selling out your people and your country.
More from the OP article:
Fifteen years after Bolivia's water revolt, the leveraging power of loan conditionalities has given way to a popular myth among conservative governments in the region that securing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is the cornerstone of economic development, regardless of the cost. Just as powers from the Global North are in a frantic scramble to control natural resources, national governments across Latin America are competing to woo investors. Combined with this corporate resource grab is a deeper ideological and political assault that allows multinationals to consolidate ever greater powers over governments already weakened by decades of neoliberal policy prescriptions. In Peru, these dynamics are clear to see: both (Spain's) Repsol and (Swiss) Glencore Xstrata have been directly implicated in an intense industry-led push for widespread deregulation of crucial environmental protections in favour of unfettered extractivism - demands that were dutifully taken up by policymakers in 2014's highly controversial “paquetazo” of reforms. Meanwhile in Colombia, (Italo-Spanish energy giant) Enel-Endesa was able to use the government's much vaunted promise to uphold “investor confidence” as a weapon against it, pressuring on three separate occasions for weaker commitments to affected communities, in a licence process that already reeks of corporate impunity.
Over and over again, the premise that giving away natural resources is a doorway to a better life has proven devastatingly false. In Peru, indigenous peoples who have inhabited the Amazon for more generations than are countable are seeing their traditional ways of life being decimated in just a few short decades as rapid industrialisation and a series of toxic spills have impacted on their ability to hunt and fish. In the copper and iron rich region of Espinar, community members at the COP20 People's Summit in Lima told us how they are being left destitute after heavy metals being leached into the water from Glencore Xstrata's mining operations are wiping out herds of livestock. This desolate story is repeated in Huila, where people who fought for their land rights during the peasant uprisings of the 1970s are now being violently evicted to clear space for Enel-Endesa's megadam project. Like Bechtel fifteen years earlier, both Glencore Xstrata and Enel-Endesa have benefited from the repressive use of state forces against civilians in asserting their government-assisted “rights” over precious raw materials.
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/5305-bolivia-15-years-after-the-cochabamba-water-revolt-echoes-in-new-cases-of-corporate-abuse
(my emphasis)
This is an horrendous model for economic development--letting transglobal corporations run rampant through your country--even with a relatively "liberal" president and government, as in Peru (so very like Clinton I). "Liberal" these days means "Neo-liberal" which means liberty for the rich few to steal everything in sight, with maybe a few sops to the people, such as non-racist social policy that eliminates obvious bias--gains that evaporate as the underclass sinks further into poverty (as here in the U.S. with poverty-stricken black ghettoes). (--Bill Clinton's social liberalism becomes a cruel joke, as community after community is devastated by Transglobal Corporate Rule.)
This important article (by Philippa Debossier, author of "Corporate Conquistadors"
also discusses the crucial issue of climate change:
There is one facet in all this that is markedly different than in Cochabamba fifteen years ago: the accelerating climate crisis and the ways in which these new cases exacerbate its impacts. Repsol's relentless bingeing on fossil fuels is taking it to increasingly fragile frontiers in oil and gas exploration, setting in motion a slow industrial genocide for indigenous peoples living in the Peruvian Amazon. Glencore Xstrata is pushing communities in Espinar into greater climate vulnerability with its industrial appetite for water resources already stressed by climate-induced glacial melt. Enel-Endesa's rainforest-destroying, methane-belching hydroelectric dam, El Quimbo, is set to kickstart Colombia's own climate-wrecking fracking industry. Although wrapped in carefully crafted greenwash and invoking the myth of Corporate Social Responsibility, each of these multinationals are emblematic of how corporate activities are not only eroding social justice on the ground in South America but are also simultaneously driving climate change, with devastating consequences the world over.
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/5305-bolivia-15-years-after-the-cochabamba-water-revolt-echoes-in-new-cases-of-corporate-abuse
(my emphasis)
I have a lot of experience of corporate "greenwash" and it is something that thinking people and well-meaning people need to look out for. For instance, there is NO SUCH THING as "sustainable" logging in Planet Earth's current condition. The "Forest Stewardship Council" label is an utter crock. We need to put on our skeptic caps whenever we hear "green" from the maw of the Corporate P.R. monster. "Corporate social responsibility" is another baldfaced lie, when it comes to giant corporations and transglobals--entities that need to be demolished, frankly (their corporate charters pulled, their assets seized for the common good).
I am not opposed to "the marketplace." In fact, I think it's a good thing and a basic human need. But NOT these non-competitive, all powerful, everlasting corporate monopolists and rapers of the Earth. that the U.S. has unleashed upon the world. The article focuses on Spain's and Switzerland's corporate monsters, but the model is HERE--was unleashed here, and is our own rotten "gift" to the world. U.S. corporate monsters are committing equally great crimes in Latin America--indeed, even much greater crimes, combined with billions and billions of U.S. tax dollars bleeding into repressive militaries and police forces, and rightwing coffers, in Latin America, and billions more in secret budgets to destroy Latin American democracy.
