30 YEARS OF STRUGGLE IN DEFENSE OF PUBLIC COMPANIES
AND WATER RESOURCES.
Our Latin American countries have been conquered for our resources and common goods, our peoples oppressed, exploited and plundered.
Our peoples then suffer the oppression exercised by the imperialist countries with their policy of plunder and struggle for the division of the world. This is a policy emanating from the dispossession of other nations that are connected internationally with international agencies such as the IMF, WB, WTO, ICSID [International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes]. Another link in this chain of oppression and exploitation is that exercised by monopoly companies, corporations that export capital to our countries favored for economic policies, under investment protection agreements, free trade agreements, etc. Part of this chain are the governments of our countries that accept and apply these prescriptions emanating from international agencies doing nothing more than fulfilling the sad role of lackeys of imperialism, of the financial oligarchies, of the local pro-imperialist bourgeoisie who benefit from these crumbs while the workers and people, victims of oppression and looting, are subjected to the most extreme poverty.
Our country of backward and dependent capitalism is facing a water crisis, which is the responsibility of all governments until today that is derived from the mismanagement of soils and water resources, beyond climate change. This has impacted agriculture with a great drought, and the metropolitan area, with more than half of the country's population, has had its water supply affected.
The struggle in defense of water begins with the defense of Public Companies. In 1992, the effort to advance in an accelerated manner on the path of privatization and surrender by the government of National Party was faced with popular street mobilizations that were later channeled into a popular initiative that by its content was an anti-imperialist struggle in defense of the national patrimony, centered around the workers’ (PIT-CNT) social organizations such as FUCVAM, FEUU, sectors of the political parties, opposed to the Law of Reform of State Enterprises, inflicting a defeat on the government and the promoters of the law ending with 70% support of non-privatization of public companies in general.
The progress in water privatization began with the privatization of drinking water and sanitation services. The government through the parliament made concessions in the Department of Maldonado east of the Maldonado stream on the provision of drinking water and sanitation; this fact goes unnoticed by the union, but not for the neighborhoods which mobilized without managing to modify the situation.
In 1995, the parliament introduced into the five-year budget law the power to grant concessions in the remaining 17 departments in the interior of the country. Thus, in 2000 it handed over concessions to the west of the Maldonado stream after a strong struggle with the neighborhood together with the union, then making concessions to Aguas de Barcelona, a subsidiary of the Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, to the east of the Maldonado stream, and to the west the waters of Bilbao consortium made up of Kartera Uno, Iberdrola, and Aguas de Bilbao. These events create the conditions for a serious struggle with all the people in defense of the public company, the defense of a source of work and of water resources. On this basis we define our objectives:
Declare surface water to be in the public domain
Declare access to safe drinking water and sanitation a fundamental human right.
Demand that the provision of drinking water and sanitation services be carried out putting social reasons before economic ones.
That drinking water and sanitation service should be provided exclusively and directly by a state legal entity.
Demand a water and sanitation policy based on the principle of sustainability of the resource.
Demand the participation of users and civil society as a whole in the planning, management and control of water resources establish river basins as basic units for their management.
Recuperate the concessions ceded by the Uruguayan state.
This struggle took place in the light of what was the water war in 2000 when the people of Cochabamba in Bolivia rose up, fanned by the regional situation of structural adjustments imposed by the international credit organizations (IMF, WB, IDB) under the guidelines of the Washington Consensus and the Brady Plan promoted by the United States.
In 2002, in view of the eminent progress of the concessions and the announcements of the government in office, a national commission (CNDAV) was formed, which from its beginning was made up of the trade union movement (PIT-CNT), the Federation of Students (FEUU), the Federation of Housing Cooperatives for Mutual Aid (FUCVAM), neighborhood social organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, to block the way through a popular initiative, a referendum, with the demands previously raised, thus ensuring in that process a path of difficult return if the reform was achieved.
Once the reform was achieved in 2004, together with our people, there was reflected in the constitution the preservation of water resources for future generations, access to drinking water and sanitation as a fundamental human right, and the non-privatization of OSE [State Sanitary Works]. However, since every struggle of the people did not end there, we understood that those who promoted this battle had just begun.
Many struggles had to take place, in principle due to the withdrawal of the concessions made by the government of the Colorado Party in 2000 to a private foreign company, later undone by the reform. However, the new, pseudo-progressive Frente Amplio [Broad Front] government, which just took office in 2004, promised to maintain the concession, ignoring the popular verdict. Then, as a result of the struggle and because the business was no longer profitable for them, they did not allow water concessions in the rest of the country, they withdrew.
In the 1990s, the governments promoted neoliberal policies, stimulating foreign investment, opening space for agribusiness, when the privatization policy was defeated which was established in the country. From here, monoculture forest plantations, soy monoculture, the establishment of three mega pulp-chip production plants (paper mills) Estora Enso, UPM I, UPM II, and in 2012 the intention to establish an open-pit mine in the center of the country, which provoked popular resistance, and the mobilizations were not long in coming.
Already in 1992 the forestry law, which prepared the establishment of the paper mills, was put into question; this subsequently divided the trade union movement where opportunism, which is the majority in the leadership of the trade union movement. It considered, together with the government of the pseudo-progressive FA [Frente Amplio] the social block of changes, following the government and its policy, supporting the establishment of pulp mills, of open-pit mines, the possibility of oil extraction by fracking, ignoring the environmental, economic and social consequences that this implied. On the one hand, the deepening of the foreign take-over of the land and the displacement of medium and small producers in the countryside, the establishment of forest monoculture on a permanent basis, soil degradation and the reduction of runoff to the water source, strongly impacting the water balance, the contamination of the fresh water sources, etc. As a consequence of this policy that is opposed to the interests of the workers and the people, it led us to the agricultural crisis, a product of three consecutive years of drought and deficiency in the management of soil and water. This year it hit hard the medium and small producers in the countryside who were already indebted, and the popular sectors in the family basket [of basic needs] due to the shortage of fruits and vegetables.
As a corollary of this policy, the FA government promotes a modification to the irrigation law that ultimately privatizes water sources. Broad sectors took up the struggle in the street and, before the promulgation of the law, a popular referendum began against the law, which we could not defeat as we did not get the necessary number of signatures, although we did still achieve more than half of the necessary number.
The modification of the irrigation law then promoted the concentration of land in a few hands and the hoarding of water for irrigation by private and foreign capital, meaning more contamination of fresh water reserves that could be used by the OSE to purify it for human consumption. Today in the metropolitan area, with more than 1,800,000 inhabitants, we lack access to drinking water.
Finally today this coalition government of the traditional right with the fascist ultra-right, in order to prevent a great drought in the supply of water to the population of the metropolitan area, proposes to incorporate into the current system a new water treatment plant to extract water from the Rio de la Plata to purify it. This project, carried out by private companies, is a good business for the private company Neptune. It is not only unconstitutional, as a private initiative that the management of OSE is conceding to a private company for 30 years; it is also an environmental setback for the place where it is intended to establish it, in Arazati, department of San José. Along with the ecological risks that this entails, there are the costs that benefit these private companies that are transferred into a tax, in short, to the people.
Carlos Sosa – Secretary of the Trade Union Front of the PCR-U and former leader of FFOSE (Federation of Officials of the State Sanitary Works)
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