El Salvador: Frontline of global struggle over water privatization

It is the simplest thing. In the industrialized world, a billion people do it 10 times a day. They turn on the water. They drink it, wash with it, brush their teeth and cook with it. It is reliable, hot or cold, potable and cheap.

Lake Suchitlán WW photo: Heather Cottin

Still, in these countries, people buy bottled water. They don’t need to,l but they buy it all the same. Bottled water sales in the U.S. alone came to $8.3 billion in 2003. It isn’t special water. Recent reports show that bottled water sold by Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé, its leading producers, get their product from municipal water systems. Their profit margins are astronomical.

Last year human beings spent $100 billion on bottled water, three times more than the amount needed to meet the United Nation’s goals of giving everyone access to water by 2015. ( Michael Blanding, “The Bottled Water Lie,” AlterNet, Oct. 26, 2006)

If these companies have their way, they will be taking control over municipal water systems, rivers, lakes and streams all over the world.

They have already started.

Billions of people lack access to safe drinking water. It does not run in their taps. Balancing heavy jugs on their heads, women and children walk long distances in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East and Africa to bring water to their homes. According to Cornell University researchers, diseases resulting from water contamination cause 40 percent of all deaths worldwide.

In the Third World, as in the industrialized capitalist countries, corporations deplete aquifers and lakes, rivers and streams and sell the water at a huge profit.

In countries like Bolivia, the Philippines, the U.S. and El Salvador people are organizing to fight water privatization.

In El Salvador in early July, campesinos and workers from the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front protested in Suchitoto on the day the country’s president, Antonio Saca, came to the city to promote a law that would privatize water. The military who accompanied Saca used El Salvador’s anti-terrorist act, modeled on the U.S. Patriot Act, to repress the protest.

Fourteen people face sentences of up to 60 years for marching against water privatization.

Nearby Lake Suchitlán has no water treatment plant; most of the residents pay two dollars for a jug of potable water that might last a family two days. Although El Salvador has many lakes and rivers, industrial waste and sewage pollute the water and no laws exist to protect the environment.

In El Salvador 60 percent of the population is unemployed and the average daily wage is about $5.00. Privatization has tripled prices for electricity and telephones. Water privatization would be a disaster.

Since the Suchitoto arrests, El Salvador has been tense with repressed anger. On July 25 students protesting at the National University in San Salvador in support of the Suchitoto 14 were brutally put down. The students responded with revolutionary murals and graffiti: “No to the Anti-Terrorist Law.” Saca’s right-wing ARENA party is increasing military and police presence throughout the country.

Protests against water privatization have spread around the globe, from Bolivia, where militant actions presaged Evo Morales’s rise to power, to Stockton, Calif., where water activists defeated a privatization plan. Recently protesters tore up their water bills in Quezon City in the Philippines.

Water privatization is the most cynical and cruelest act. People must have water, so the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and all the “Free Trade” agreements dictate that the poor must pay for it. But one year’s profits from the bottled water industry would provide enough money to build the infrastructure for safe water for everyone on earth.

During a recent struggle against water privatization in the Philippines, one activist said, “Water, like freedom, is essential for humans to live with dignity. Unfortunately nowadays, this life-giving liquid is being traded by profit-driven private corporations, with the collusion of this debt-saddled government, as a consumer product, which means that people’s right to water now depends on the contents of their pockets.” (GMA-TV News)

This fight for water is at the frontline of the struggle against neoliberal capitalist restructuring. And while the water privatizers tout the effectiveness of market forces to take over the world’s water supply, the arrests in Suchitoto show that when they can’t get what they want through the “free market,” they have the brutal capitalist state to fall back on.

Revolutions come when people realize that they have to organize to defend their basic human rights. And what is more basic than water?