The Inter-American Development and Cochabamba’s First “Water War,” 1964-1977

• In Event: Revolution and Development: Economy and State-Making in Bolivia, 1940s-1970s

Abstract

Summary: In the 1960s, Inter-American Development engineers arrived in Cochabamba for the first time to oversee an overhaul of the city’s urban water provision and distribution system. Invited first by the MNR government of Victor Paz Estenssoro, the René Barrientos and Hugo Banzer dictatorships continued the relationship with the bank, borrowing millions of dollars for urban water projects in Cochabamba and other Bolivian cities. This paper examines the bank’s efforts to side-step peasant control of regional ground water sources in the wake of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution’s agrarian reform by drilling deep wells in Cochabamba Valley aquifers. While bankers and contracted engineers expected that well water would be easier to control, and argued that deep wells would not interfere with existing irrigation wells, peasant irrigators countered the IDB’s “expertise” with technical arguments of their own based on their long experience interacting with the aquifer. Peasant mobilization not only forced the IDB and Bolivian state to make concessions to irrigator communities in exchange for their consent for new well-drilling, but also definitively established that aquifer layers are interconnected and therefore the right of peasants with historic water rights entitle to approve or reject internationally-funded state water projects.

Author

• Sarah T Hines, University of California/Berkeley