David versus Goliath in Cochabamba

Ours is a small country and it hardly owns anything any more. Our mines were privatized, the electrification company was privatized, and the airlines, the telecommunications, the railways, our oil and gas. The things we still own are the water and the air, and we have struggled to make sure that the water continues to be ours, said Oscar Olivera, a trade-union leader from Cochabamba, Bolivia, addressing one of the assemblies protesting the annual spring meeting of the IMF/World Bank in Washington, DC, in April 2000. Olivera had been freshly flown in from the city that had been the scene of violent protests that forced the transnational consortium Aguas del Tunari out of Cochabamba Department and called upon the Bolivian government to modify Law 2029 on Potable Water and Sanitary Drainage, proclaimed only five months earlier. The assembly that protested the power of transnational capitalism and neoliberal policies cheered him as a hero. David has defeated Goliath, claimed Olivera, and thus set an example for the rest of the world. From the early days of April Bolivia had been the scene of a wave of protests such as it had not seen for several decades, prompting the Banzer government, elected in 1997, to declare a state of siege. The day the state of siege was declared, 880 police mutinied to press wage demands and students protested in La Paz, and later coca growers from the yunga region set up roadblocks to protest forced eradication. By the time the state of siege was lifted on April 20, the confrontations had claimed five lives, four of them civilian.