Cochabamba Water Company Head Fired

On Tuesday night the board of directors of Cochabamba's public water company (SEMAPA) fired the company's directors. Here's today's article in Los Tiempos. Cochabamba's mayor, who heads the water company board, says that the company's director, Gonzalo Ugalde, was mismanaging the company and hinted at financial "irregularities" as well.

A few years ago the water staff at the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) asked me to meet with them in Washington and posed a question. "Fine, let's assume that water privatization is not going to happen in a lot of places like Cochabamba. What could we do to strengthen the efficiency of public water companies?" My answer was the same then as it would be now – build the capacity of the public boards of directors of these companies to really watch over operations and to understand the economic choices at hand in issues such as setting water rates.

That is what the SEMAPA water board is trying to do, under pressure from the community. I spoke yesterday with one of the board's publicly elected members, Franz Taquichiri. He was elected last year by my neighborhood to represent us on the board and he has dug in and learned the issues and how to ask the right questions. Maybe he doesn’t have the same training in economics as a Bechtel water manager would, but he has something more important – a clear mission to make sure that the company serves local water users and not foreign investors.

Does this mean that we should expect everything to be rosy at SEMAPA? Not hardly. The Democracy Center is in the process right now of undertaking a major study of Cochabamba's water service five years after the "Water Revolt" that tossed out Bechtel. We're looking at how many new hookups there are, the cost of water, the quality of it – the nitty gritty details that aren’t as romantic as protests in the street. What we find we'll report, unvarnished.

But this is the stuff of democracy, citizens digging in and getting into the details of the institutions that are supposed to be serving the public. The citizens of Cochabamba who are demanding more vigilance over their water company are doing more than just that. They are building democracy the hard way, piece by piece.