Latin America is blessed with an abundance of fresh water. The region contains four of the world's 25 largest rivers - the Amazon, Paraná, Orinoco and Magdalena With one-fifth of the globe's water resources, Brazil on its own has more water than any other country. The region as a whole has one of the highest per capita allocations of fresh water in the world - a little less than 110,500 cubic feet per person per year. Geography, pollution and social inequality, however, badly skew Latin Americans' access to water, and very few consume anything near their full personal allocation." (2)
For perhaps one third of the citizens of the continent lack of access to sufficient water means not having access to a toilet, or only one shared by dozens of others. The world sanitation crisis affects more than two billion people, with drastic affects on health and of course selfesteem and morale - especially for women who find it more difficult to make impromptu arrange
What are the fundamental reasons for this crisis? In 2006, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reported the answer clearly: "The scarcity at the heart corner huge supplies of water for irrigation
Unsustainable forms of urbanisation, rooted in poverty
Under-investment in or lack of maintenance of water infrastructure for poor
Damage done to the water supply by agribusiness and industry, which mainly enjoy complete impunity in their theft and damage to natural resources.
Climate change is melting the Andes ice caps which source the glaciers and run-off which are ultimately the supplier of much
A classic example of the last two factors is El Salvador, the most water stressed country in the region. Privatisation and years of neglect of infrastructure mean that poor areas of the capital San Salvador get only a few hours water in their taps a day, and many none. The result is that people have to buy water from mobile tankers. Tony Hamilton reports that:
"The road to a small community called Milagro a Dios ends at a well, where a barefoot girl with pigtails and a pink T-shirt pumps water into a large black bucket. She says her name is Elisabeth. She's 8.
"Four years ago, Elisabeth nearly died. Her mother, Teresa de Jesus Aleman, says the problem was water from a shallow well. Teresa says it used to produce clean water. But things changed after a massive
"The water was ruined. All the water
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was ruined,' she says. *The water came out of the wells, some overflowed. It was all ruined because the water was contami"The family couldn't afford bottled water. So they kept using the well. Teresa says lots of people got sick, including Elisabeth
"They got very sick,' she recalls. 'She was diagnosed with four classes of parasites, and the other girl, too, and supposedly it's because of what we
Water struggles in Latin America are class struggles; look behind any water conflict and you will find a conflict of class
Perhaps the classic example of unsustainable urbanisation is Mexico City. Here the water table is sinking, the aquifers beneath the city are being emptied, and a huge water crisis is looming. The drainage system is antiquated and collapsing, leading to flooding and drains overflowing in the rainy season. For a few months every year the water system
Because of the emptying of the aquifers the whole city is sinking. This is taking place at alarming rates. Subsidence is a threat to buildings in many parts of the city (a human made addition to the threat posed by earthquakes and the nearby volcano, Popocatepetl). According to the Mexico Valley Water Authority the net subsidence has been an incredible 7.5 metres since 1900. Several lakes have been formed in areas where the ground has dipped due to water pumping, and these lakes are widening.
Eventually the subsidence will make whole areas of the city uninhabitable if the inflow of people is not stemmed.
Without question Mexico City is overcrowded. It should be a conscious part of any socialist policy to stop the inflow of people. This is not saying that it's population growth in and of itself which causes poverty; it is merely saying for one fifth of the population of a vast country to attempt to live in the same city is totally irrational and causes environmental breakdown.
One aspect of it, which we won't dwell on too long, is the Gran Canal del Desague (grand drainage canal) which snakes out past the huge barrio of Indios Verde in the north of the city. Vast amounts of the city's sewage go out through this canal. At various points on the edge of the city and outside, municipal and water authority workers try to clear the water of large objects - but they always call the police for human body parts. Then the so-called 'black water' heads out of the city, much of it to be eventually used for agricultural irrigation.
The reason for it is simple: landless peasants and agricultural labourers know that they can earn a better living as 'ambulantes' (street traders) or even beggars in the city, than if they stay on the land and starve. The city's exponential growth cannot be slowed until there is justice on the land and agricultural workers can earn a stable living.
A complicating tactor is climate change. Global warming is melting the vital Andes snowcaps. Associated Press reports:
"Quelccaya in southern Peru, the world's largest tropical ice cap, is melting. Melting is also visible in the other northern Andean
27 countries — Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. In Peru, home to 70 percent of Earth's tropical glaciers, the Andes Mountains have lost at least 22 percent of their glacier area since 1970 and the melt is speeding up, according to Peru's National Resources Institute, INRENA, a government agency. Rock shows through lavishly snow-covered mountains throughout the Peruvian Andes. The Broggi glacier has disappeared altogether. Ice caves once popular with tourists are gone." (4)
It is more than 10 years since a semi-insurrectional movement in Cochabamba, Bolivia, stopped the proposal ('Law 2029') to privatise the area's water supply, and to sell it to a new company, Aguas del Tunari, a consortium of local and international capital, including Bechtel of the US (massive profiteers from the Iraq occupation) and Abengoa of Spain. The Cochabamba movement began the long struggle for the defense of the country's natural resources that eventually led to the
Since then there have been repeated local struggles over water. At the 2006 international water forum in Mexico City, an alternative people's conference held a large demonstration and authored a manifesto proclaiming that water is a right, not a privilege.
In October 2007, at least 25,000 people marched in El Salvador in defense of the right to water and against water privatisation. It was one of the biggest demonstrations since the signing of the country's 1992 peace accords.
In Colombia and elsewhere local organisations have been fighting to get the right to access water to be made part of the constitution. Whereas this is a good propaganda tactic, since the real causes of water poverty are class and power, it is in the struggle against the ultra-reactionary capitalist elites on the continent, whose contempt for the poor knows no bounds, that a long-term solution will be found. 1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/21/ machu-picchu-train-irrigation-protest 2 http://globalpolicy.org/component/content/ article/215/46052.html 3 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyld=4983325 4 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251448,00.html. See also http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/science/ earth/14bolivia.html Left: Protesters sit and knit under the wheels of trucks blocking work on the dam