La Lucha

Happy Father’s Day from Bolivia. March 19, the feast of St. Joseph, is El Día del Padre in this country. At the Maryknoll Mission Center there was an acknowledgment of the men on staff who are parents; also there was an acknowledgment of the priests who reside here and are seen as spiritual parents of the people. May God bless all the men who take material and spiritual responsibility for the rearing and education of the next human generation.

I am writing this post in anticipation of the weekly cultural conference that we will have tomorrow morning. A man who is something like a political father of the Bolivian people in our generation, Óscar Olivera Foronda, will address the mission center about La Guerra del Agua—the Water War of 2000. This is a saga about the struggle for the right to water in Cochabamba and the recovery of human and Christian values.

It is ironic that a city whose name in Quechua is a compound of “lake” and “open plain” (qucha-panpa), flush with moisture, should face such struggles in providing this most basic element of life to all its peoples. Always an attractive place to live because of the spring-like climate all year round and the abundance of the earth, the population has grown sharply in the last 30 years. A complex of economic, political, and social changes led to a massive migration into the city after 1985, including miners living and working in the mountains and indigenous persons from the campos. This has made the provision of basic services, including water, sanitation, health care, and education a challenge.

The Bolivian government decided at the end of 1999 to privatize water, approving a Water Law and concluding a 40-year contract with the Bechtel Corporation. The law and contract together rendered all water resources, including rivers, lakes, lagunas, deep wells, and even the snowcaps and rainfall, to Bechtel. All the water in Bolivia had been converted into a commodity to be manipulated by private capital and the free market. Cochabamba was the first city to have its water privatized, with the cost of utilities tripling quickly.

Needless to say, this mercantilist vision went completely contrary to the vision of Andean culture. To the peoples, water is a living being; it is a common good, a gift of Pachamama (Mother Earth) for the reproduction of life. It is not given to anyone in particular, but to all creatures, and not only human beings, for water has no owner, no master. Doesn’t this sound a lot like Catholic Social Teaching? Doesn’t this sound Franciscan to your ears, to those of you who sing in the Canticle of the Creatures of “Sister Water, so useful, humble, precious and pure”?

The remembering of these values united all the peoples of Cochabamba: women, men, youth, girls and boys, elders, who formed a popular rebellion against the government to recover their water rights from private interests. For five months the people laid siege to their own city and shut everything down. There were barricades in front of every house in the city and the campos. The roads were barricaded. No business and no transportation. Everyone had said, ¡Basta! Enough! These barricades communicated to the obdurate government the values of mutuality, reciprocity, respect, solidarity, and transparency. These barricades symbolized popular democracy. With great courage, the people overcome the tear gas and even the bullets of the police and army. They organized committees for the defense of their water rights. And by April 2000, the people had won from the government and private interests the power to define the destiny of their water resources.

It was more than an economic victory; it was also a vindication of the power of popular movements to counteract the power of malign power and achieve positive social change.

However, the struggle for justice must be taken up anew in every generation. Access to water in Cochabamba remains a great problem. There is great inequality between the wealthier peoples who live to the north and possess water tanks and reliable utilities, and the poorer folks in the south, where the infrastructure is ancient and inadequate for the swelling population, and flooding is common. Despite the best intentions and good will of political leaders, administrators, engineers, and unions, the system by which water is provided is inefficient, ineffective, and irrational. The people are not united as they were in 2000. The political challenge once more is to organize; to construct a collective social agenda; and to recover decision-making power for the people. The spiritual challenge is realize once more that all peoples are equal; and to be like water itself: transparent, joyful, and always in movement.

I thank Óscar Olivera Foronda ahead of time for sharing this outline of his presentation that I have just roughly translated for you, and I thank him for his courageous and prophetic leadership of the people who thirst for justice and righteousness.