[News] When Even Water is Not a Human Right

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross03292006.html

March 29, 2006

An Indian Peoples Have Even Fewer Rights Than the Rest of Us ...

When Even Water is Not a Human Right

By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.

"Once upon a time, there was a little orphan girl ('huerfana') who 
had to walk over many mountains each day to fetch water ('itzu') 
because the water was very far away" Esperanza Garcia, a Purepecha 
Indian grandmother in the tiny Michoacan mountain town of Santa Cruz 
Tanaco tells the story that her mother told her. "One day, the 
huerfana made friends with a humming bird ("Tzintzun") and he led her 
to a secret spring right here in the forest. The women were so happy 
because now they didn't have to walk two mountains to fetch the water 
that they married the huerfana to the spring and when they plunged 
her in the water, a long serpent leaped up and that was the stream 
that brought the water to our town." Esperanza frowned at the dry 
littered streambed that runs by her house. "Now the stream is dead 
because they have cut down all the trees and again we have to walk 
for hours to bring water." Clear cuts in the Purepecha mountains have 
devastated forests and water sources.

Women in the third world walk an average of six kilometers each day 
to fetch water, according to U.S. environmental researcher Talli 
Newman. But Indian women are not just fetchers of water but its 
protectors. "Like the corn, we are born from the water" explains 
Maria de la Cruz, a Tzotzil Mayan mother and community leader from 
San Felipe Ecatepec just outside San Cristobal de las Casas in the 
highlands of Chiapas--the Mayans are the People of the Corn according 
to their sacred book, the Popul Vu.

De la Cruz lives a hundred meters from a Coca Cola bottler that 
extracts 1.7 million liters of water each year from the local 
aquifer, leaving 70% of the households in Ecatepec without running 
water. The bottler's yearly extractions are equivalent to what five 
indigenous villages in the highlands are allotted each year. "Yes, we 
are made from the water but I can't even bathe" De la Cruz laughs 
bitterly. Chiapas is home to Mexico's largest rivers yet 68% of its 
1.3 million Indian people do not have potable water.

A quarter of all Mexico's water has its source on Indian lands yet 
many indigenous communities have no access to the precious fluid. The 
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Mazahua women of Villa de Allende out in Mexico state are so 
exercised by these inequities that they have even formed an army--the 
Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women In Defense of The Water (unrelated to 
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.)

Mazahua land lines the banks of the Cutzamala river system, the main 
outside water source for Mexico City 100 miles east. 16,000 cubic 
liters a second rush by their lands and yet eight of their villages 
have no water lines, a demand for which the Mazahuas have sought 
redress since the 1980s when the Cutzamala system was inaugurated. 
Repeatedly rebuffed by water authorities, the Mazahuas have 
threatened to shut off the valves that speed water uphill to the 
Mexican capital. In response, the National Water Commission (CONAGUA) 
sent 500 state police to occupy their villages.

"They take our men by the hair," Comandanta Victoria Martinez of the 
Mazahua Army tells reporters, " but now they will have to confront the women."

This month (March), the Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women In Defense of 
The Water marched up to Mexico City to present their case to the 
World Water Forum convoked for that bone-dry megalopolis March 16th-22nd.

Mexico City was a pertinent place to hold the fourth World Water 
Forum (WWF), an every-three-years conclave organized by the World 
Water Council, the "non-government" creation of industrialists, big 
agriculture, and water profiteers who preach privatization and 
mercantilization of water.

Once set in the heart of a five lake system, the Aztec island of 
Tenochtitlan was a water wonderland, overflowing with canals, 
fountains, aqueducts, and floating farms ("chinampas.") But the 
European conquerors were horse people with little respect for a 
water-based culture so they cut down the trees on the surrounding 
hillsides and silted in the lakes.

Today, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City has dried up. What little remains in 
its aquifers is being pumped out at twice the rate that it can be 
replenished and the metropolitan area's 21.3 million residents 
receive just 184 liters per capita each year, one twenty fourth of 
the national average. Service is so poor in the ragged colonies at 
the edge of the city that cockroaches run out when the faucet is 
turned on. In other impoverished "colonias", the only available water 
source is cistern trucks ("pipas") sent by the political parties and 
the people are forced to sell their vote for a gulp of clean "agua."

Water is a class issue in Mexico as well as one of gender and race. 
While the luxuriant green golf course of the elites receive abundant 
daily waterings, the poor have a hard time just slaking their thirst.

Indeed, the sprinklers were on at the Banamex convention center in 
the ritzy Polanco district this March 16th when the WWF opened its 
doors to the public--Banamex, Mexico's oldest bank, is now wholly 
owned by Citigroup. Just to make the corporate tone perfectly patent, 
among the sponsors of this edition of the WWF was the Coca Cola 
Corporation of Atlanta, Georgia, which, according to the NGO War On 
Want, sucks up 282 billion liters of the world's public water each year.

Mexican president Vicente Fox, once the president of Coca Cola 
operations here and in Central America, opened the session by paying 
lip service to the Indian roots of water by quoting from the Popul 
Vuh and the poetry of Aztec king Nezahualcoytl. Fox was followed to 
the podium by CONAGUA director Cristobal Jaimes--before Fox appointed 
him to the CONAGUA job, Jaimes, the owner of Mexico's largest dairies 
and a major water bottler, was the nation's number one industrial 
consumer of water.

Moving the threads behind the scenes at the fourth World Water Forum 
was Aquafed, the lobbying front for world water privatizers, 
representing such conglomerates as the French Suez, Aguas de 
Barcelona, Biwater, and Thames River. Another powerful lobbyist 
running the show at the WWF was the Washington-based "public 
relations" hucksters Bursen & Marsteller, publicists for such bloody 
dictators as Haiti's Baby Doc, Guatemala's Rios Montt, and the killer 
Argentinean juntas. Bursen & Marsteller organized the accompanying 
exposition where space was available to water conservation groups for 
$600 a day. The Great Unwashed were invited to shell out $120 for 
each day's admission.

The Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women In Defense of the Water did not 
bother to pay an admission. Availing themselves of sympathetic souls 
in the NGO community, they stormed past the ticket takers and went 
looking for CONAGUA's Jaimes ("I cannot solve your problem" he had 
told them once before.) Repelled by security guards, the comandantas 
formed a picket line and began to shout "Queremos Agua!" ("We Want 
Water".) With their wooden rifles, sheathed machetes, long skirts, 
farmers' sombreros, and a look so stern that it could stop traffic, 
the women terrified the organizers. "This is what happens when we let 
them get away from their 'metates' (Indian corn grinders)" CONAGUA 
sub secretary Cesar Herrera sneered in earshot of a La Jornada reporter.

But for the most part, the defenders of public water stayed on the 
outside, gathering in marches (20,000 on the WWF opening day), 
alternative forums, and even a Latin American Water Tribunal. 
Indigenous peoples from the North and the South of the Americas came 
together to compare notes. Hopis from New Mexico brought a gourd of 
their sacred water. "Water is a gift from our mother earth. It does 
not belong to us" pronounced Josephine Mandanin, an Ojibwa water 
caretaker. Dine (Navajo) spokesperson Waleigh Jones of the Black 
Mountain Water Coalition told of how the Peabody Coal Company 
constructed a 200-mile pipeline that brings massive amounts of Indian 
water to its strip mine. As in Mazahua territory, 50% of those living 
along the pipeline have no access to drinking water.

With its giant river systems, Latin America is the world's most 
important water source but has the smallest per capita consumption on 
the planet, according to World Bank data presented at the WWF. The 
defense of water in the heart of the southern continent crystallized 
in Indian territory in 2000 when the majority Aymara and Quechua 
population of Cochabamba, Bolivia rose up against the transnational 
Bechtel Corporation which had taken over management of the local 
water system and raised rates 300%. Tens of thousands camped out in 
the plaza of that Indian city for a month until Bechtel finally 
packed it in. "The war in defense of our water showed us the power of 
those down below," recalled Oscar Oliviera, a director of the 
movement to defend Cochabamba's water who testified at the 
alternative tribunal.

But Oliviera warned that the privatizers of water now have their 
sights trained on another indigenous water source - Paraguay's 
Guarami basin, the earth's largest reserve of sweet water. Under the 
pretext of Bush's Terror War, U.S. troops have established a garrison 
strategically sited close by the Triple Frontier (Paraguay, Brazil, 
Argentina) near the spectacular Iguazu falls.

"We must be vigilant of those who would make water into a 
merchandise. Water is a fundamental human right," Oliviera emphasized.

The struggle to include water as a fundamental human right in the 
WWF's final statement was carried to the forum floor by Bolivia's 
water secretary (no other country has a secretary of water) Abel 
Mamani, a popular leader from the all-Aymara city of El Alto which 
has been locked in a titanic battle with the French conglom Suez, 
doing business in Bolivia as Aguas Ilumani, for years. Insisting that 
he would not sign the final declaration if water was not declared a 
universal human right, Mamani was joined by Venezuela, Cuba, and 
Uruguay (and to a lesser extent by Honduras, France, and Spain) but 
the revolt was quickly squelched. "The right of water is not relevant 
to this forum," the World Bank's Jamal Shagir told the press. Laic 
Fouchon, president of the World Water Council, labeled Mamani's 
remarks as "discourteous and disagreeable" because the Bolivian had 
pointed out that 2,000,000 babies die every ear from a lack of clean water.

According to the final declaration of the fourth World Water Forum, 
water is not a fundamental human right for the world's people in 
general and Indian people in particular. Although they are the source 
of so much of the Americas' water, indigenous peoples received no 
mention in the forum's final document.

John Ross is on deadline for "Making Another World 
Possible--Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006" to be published this fall 
by Nation Books. He has no time to talk.


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