Maude Barlow in Bolivia

Um, I haven't been on this blogger thing for so long, I can barely remember how to use it. I got back from Bolivia recently and have published my first article about something that happened there, a visit by Maude Barlow for a historic meeting. The story appeared in the Star a week ago Sunday, and begins like this:

Wearing bright sneakers and a long beige overcoat, her hair sprinkled with confetti, Canadian activist Maude Barlow is touring one of Bolivia's poorest communities.

At 4,300 metres altitude and flanked by rugged Andean peaks, Villa Solidaridad is home to 100 Indian families. Their cluster of adobe dwellings sits on the edge of El Alto, the sprawling city above La Paz, Bolivia's capital.

On Villa Solidaridad's northern side is a privately owned treatment plant that supplies water to El Alto and La Paz. A pipe from the plant spews waste water onto the villagers' side of a chain-link fence.

Until recently, the people of Villa Solidaridad did their laundry with this water and some children became deathly sick drinking it. The villagers had little choice, being among the 1.2 billion people in the world without access to clean water.

"When we bathed in the water, it burned our skin," says Carlos Ortiz Silva, the community's elected leader.

For the full story, click here.

It didn't fit in the published story, but I wanted to say that this is was an incredible event because the meeting I describe in the article--between Barlow, Bolivia's water minister and Norway's minister of Development Cooperation--could be the first step in the creation of a UN Convention declaring that water is a human right and must be delivered by not-for-profit public systems. This could be the first positive victory in the anti-globalization fight, by which I mean, the first time the movement has put up a public-sector alternative to the neo-liberal model and had it legalized at the highest international level.

The story in Bolivia, I think, adds another dimension of fascinating, because social movements there are helping create a new "public" model. When I left it was still unclear what this would look like. But in the coming years, in Cochabamba and La Paz-El Alto, it's certain that the social movements in the water fight will be creating public water utilities with a heavy amount of participatory social management, to a degree no one can yet anticipate. In this and other matters, Bolivians have explicitly rejected the old statist model that we're all occasionally so embarrassed to defend. And if South America's poorest country can do this while instigating a radical reform at the United Nations, well, that's pretty incredible.

On October 11, a more in-depth story (by yours truly) on what's happened to the water situation in Cochabamba since the infamous 2000 water war will appear in Corporate Knights' annual water issue.

Water, you know. It's the new black.

..

Also, vanity. Here's a picture of me talking to some of the villagers of Villa Solidaridad, and right to my left Oscar Olivera, an enormous prince of a man.




(photo by my friend Boris Rios)