Mexico City: It was a last minute invitation from fellow travelers in the water wars from Canada with the Polaris Institute who issued the call to meet with community based and indigenous groups from around Mexico meeting to look at the emerging issues of water privatization. There was no way to say no.
Landing on a Sunday afternoon to a torrent of last minute warnings that the old hotel across from the Alameda Central, where the conference was housed, was right on the march route sent the international “guests” worrying about being caught up in mad demonstrations. This was the Sunday a million supporters of the PRD Mayor of Mexico City marched in total silence to the Zocalo in the enter of the city, which finally forced President Fox to can his Attorney General and redraw the trivial charges designed to remove immunity from the popular Mayor and prevent him from standing as a favorite in the next presidential election. The symbol of the marchers was a square, white face mask, similar to what one sees so frequently in Japanese trains and airports. Running in the Alameda that Monday morning, I could see in the pre-dawn masks over the mouths of nude statues facing the park in a magnified sense of silence.
The conference was quickly oversubscribed as close to 300 showed up from all over Mexico when organizers had hoped for half of that. The stories were interesting on the international side as speaker after speaker from Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru — our fighting partners from FENTAP — Salvador, and Bolivia joined with veterans of water wars in the US and Canada to share information in common about multi-national companies seeking to privatize at any cost precious, public resources. On the second day as I was leaving from this short, but encouraging visit, a number of speakers from urban and grassroots organizations as well as indigenous communities were speaking of the issues they were encountering around access to affordable and safe water.
The privateers seem to be moving into the water wars in Mexico now. There were half-dozen cities mentioned where bids for private operations of water were not critical issues including Cancun among others. This is bad news for Mexico. I told the story of our labor-community coalition and its fight to prevent water privatization in New Orleans in halting Spanish and simple English. Today’s (May 15th) front page Times-Picayune story about an alleged bribe from a defeated bidder quoted me more eloquently than I was in Mexico City in saying the following:
“Any time you allow private interests into something that has to do with the public good, you take the risk there will be self-aggrandizement instead of public service,” said union organizer Wade Rathke, a leader of the Coalition on Sewerage & Water Board, a consortium of community, labor and environmental groups that opposed privatization.”
All of this is a prologue to the World Water Forum that is coming to Mexico City in 2006 to “showcase” big corporations and big government collusion and cooperation in such enterprises. Listening to representatives of community after community in Mexico recently, one can tell the reception committee is forming for this Forum, and it will not be welcoming.
