Update on the Water Revolt on El Alto

For those of you interested in the ongoing story of the water revolt unfolding in the city of El Alto Bolivia, here is a brief update.

On Monday community groups are set to launch a citywide “paro”, which is essentially a general strike, to press their demand that the Bolivian government cancel its contract with the French-led private water company, Aguas del Illimani. For more background see our original story from a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the link.

The government has already made some modest concessions to El Alto, in an effort to stop the protests. These include a slight reduction in the charges people have to pay to hook up to the water and sewage system, allowing those fees to be paid in installments over ten years, and discontinuing the practice of basing hook-up charges and water rates on the dollar (which translates into an automatic 5% per year increase as the local currency loses value against the dollar). The government also replaced the chief federal official in charge of water and has promised to renegotiate the company’s contract to provide for extension of water service to the tens of thousands of families who do not have it.

That last issue, the failure of the water company to provide service to so many families, remains the real issue and community groups aren’t buying the government’s pledges of making a better contract. They have good reason for their doubts. The company itself, in an interview with The Democracy Center, has said it is under no obligation to extend service to families living in the city’s growing and desperately poor, marginal neighborhoods. The bottom line is that El Alto groups want to return their water to public control, just as the people of Cochabamba did five years ago.

We’ll keep you posted here at the Blog on what happens next week.