In the year 2000, in a remote Bolivian city most of the world had never heard of, ordinary people did something extraordinary — they took on a multinational corporation, defied their own government, resisted the Washington Consensus, and won. The Water War of Cochabamba, Bolivia, was not just a local revolt against unaffordable water bills. It was the first crack in the wall of neoliberalism that had been suffocating Latin America for fifteen years, a warning shot heard from Montevideo to Milan, and the opening chapter of a global struggle to reclaim water as a human right.
To understand why it happened, one must first understand what had been done to Latin America by the Washington Consensus.
In the 1980s, many Latin American countries emerged from decades of repressive military dictatorships. The newly elected governments were attempting to consolidate their fragile democracies while watching the military barracks in their rearview mirrors. At this insecure time of democracies, Washington DC struck Latin America with the imposition of neoliberalism in the form of the Washington Consensus. The Latin American countries were forced to open their markets to Wall Street capital, privatise assets of the public sector and cut down expenditure on healthcare, education and social welfare policies. These policies inevitably lead to increased poverty and inequality, causing what is called the Lost Decade of the 1980s.
On the 25th anniversary of the Water War, the book "Echoes of the Water Wars: Legacies of Cochabamba, Bolivia ” was published in 2025. It brings together contributions from Bolivian activists as well as writers and analysts who supported the movement from outside the country.
In June 1999, the World Bank issued a report on Bolivia that addressed the water situation in Cochabamba. The city and its surrounding region, with about a million inhabitants, had long faced water shortages for drinking and farming. The World Bank, along with the International Development Bank, had made privatisation a condition for loans and recommended that there be “no public subsidies” to offset increases in the price of water services.
In September 1999, the Bolivian government signed a contract with a company, “Aguas del Tunari” granting control of the water resources and distribution in Cochabamba area. Registered in the Cayman Islands, it was a consortium of International Water of the US, Abengoa of Spain, and four Bolivian companies. International Water, which held the majority interest in the consortium, was part of the vast holdings of US-based Bechtel Corporation.
In October 1999, the government enacted Law 2029 to regulate water and sanitation. It restricted long-standing traditional communal water practices and removed protections for rural systems based on collective management and local sharing arrangements.
At that time, only half of Cochabamba’s population was connected to the central water system. Many others obtained water from cooperative water houses built to meet local needs. Yet, Law 2029 declared that, within the territory covered by a privatisation contract, such systems were illegal. Only the contracted company could distribute water. The law thus demanded that the autonomous water systems be handed over without reimbursement or compensation for the people who had invested their own labour and resources in building them. The law extended even to wells installed in people's own properties. The law also restricted peasants from collecting rainwater without official permission. For many critics, this amounted to the privatisation of rain itself.
The 40-year contract awarded to Aguas del Tunari proved even more controversial than Law 2029. It specified that at the end of each year, rates would rise annually in line with the consumer price index in the United States, in effect “dollarizing” water payments. The contract guaranteed the company an average 16 per cent rate of return per year on its investment, regardless of management performance or service quality. There was a clause in the contract stating that the contract itself superseded all other contracts, laws, and decrees.
Once Aguas del Tunari began operations, it took advantage of its exclusive rights under Law 2029 to assert control over existing water networks. In some cases, households’ water bills skyrocketed as much as 300 per cent. A pensioner, or a teacher who made $80 a month, might see a bill jump from $5 to $25 a month. The consortium had been assembled quickly after no other company bid for the privatisation contract. Its capital base appeared limited. Many observers concluded that the company intended to finance investment largely through payments collected from Cochabamba’s residents themselves.
The people of Cochabamba rose in revolt against the commodification of water for the profit of a private company at the expense of the rights of the citizens and traditional local practices. In November 1999, they formed a community organisation called "Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida” (Coordinator for the Defence of Water and Life) with citizens, farmers and workers. Protests began in January 2000 and continued for four months. Demonstrators blocked roads, organised marches, occupied government offices and eventually took over the office of the water company itself. The government responded first with police repression and later with military force. They even resorted to cutting off the supply of food and other goods to the city. Ultimately, the popular resistance proved stronger than the government’s resolve, so the latter had no choice but to terminate the private company contract and repeal Law 2029 in April 2000.
The victorious water activists, along with supporters from Canada, the US, India and Brazil, issued the Cochabamba Declaration on 8 December 2000. The Declaration stated that water belongs to the earth and all species; is sacred to life; and it is a fundamental human right and a public good.
The privatisation of water in Cochabamba was not the first privatisation initiative in Bolivia. Nor was Law 2029 the first legal measure designed to facilitate privatisation. Both were part of the neoliberal policies pursued since 1985. At the same time, this economic model was not simply an external imposition. It was also supported by part of the local business oligarchy, which wanted to benefit through collaboration with foreign firms.
Following the Water War, Bolivia entered a new period of resistance to neoliberal policies, particularly through mobilisations led by Indigenous and popular sectors. This broader wave of struggle helped create the conditions for the rise of Evo Morales, who was elected president in 2005. He was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president and the first to be elected in Latin America.
The Bolivian activists also carried their message about the water rights of citizens to other countries of Latin America, Europe and even India. They helped inspire the formation of the Inter-American Network for Water Defence and Rights, REDAVI. Subsequently, other networks emerged, such as the European Water Movement, the African Network for Water Justice and KrUHA in Asia (People’s Coalition for the Right to Water”) based in Indonesia. It came up in 2002 during debates over Indonesian water laws influenced by the World Bank. The People’s Forum for Water encompasses all these networks of the world.
The historic Water War of Bolivia became a major point of reference for movements across Latin America and beyond. In Uruguay, a 2004 referendum was approved by 64% of the voters for the water rights of citizens. After the constitutional amendment, Uruguay became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognise access to water and sanitation as a fundamental human right.
In 2010, the United Nations formally recognised access to safe drinking water and sanitation as a human right.
In Italy, voters rejected water privatisation in a 2011 referendum, in a major popular rebuke to the government of Silvio Berlusconi's neoliberal economic policies. The Italian referendum became one of Europe’s largest anti-privatisation mobilisations.
In Chile, the social uprising that began in 2019 intensified pressure to reform the ultra-neoliberal Water Code of the Pinochet regime, established in 1981. The reforms enacted in 2022 gave greater priority to human consumption and environmental protection.
India witnessed its water-rights movement in 2002 in Plachimada in the Palakkad district of Kerala. The villagers complained that the Coca-Cola bottling plant established in 1999 extracted massive quantities of groundwater, which affected the wells of households and the water sources of farms. The local panchayat refused to renew Coca-Cola’s license, arguing that groundwater belonged to the community and that extraction harmed public welfare. The plant was closed in 2004.
The people of Cochabamba, who blocked roads and braved soldiers in the high-altitude cold of Bolivia, did not just win back their water. They inspired struggles across the Global South against the Washington Consensus and sent a simple message: citizens can win even when their own governments stand against them.
The author is an expert in Latin American affairs