The Water Lords: Speculators in Water

As already documented in Chapter 3, more than 600,000 of Guayaquil’s inhabitants depend on the ‘tanqueros’ for their daily supply of water. Private water vending is of course not a recent phenomenon. It was a common activity in the time of the Incas, and became the standard means of urban water provision in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the introduction of urban water engineering systems in the late nineteenth century water distribution became increasingly organized by the state, while new engineering practices aimed to provide the entire city with access to water. However, with the exception of a few years after the opening of the La Lolita treatment station in 1928, Guayaquil never really succeeded in achieving the objective of full coverage. Nevertheless, the aim of providing unlimited quantities of potable water for all of the urban population at a marginal (highly subsidized) price was never abandoned, and has been built into successive Master Plans until this very day. The political economic realities of Guayaquil’s urbanization process ran counter to this objective, for reasons discussed in previous chapters. Although the plans always held up the promise of unlimited and guaranteed water supply, a promise which served very important political and ideological functions as it deflected potential social unrest, cultivated clientelist political programmes, and contributed to legitimizing privatization, a growing number of people became systematically excluded from access to publicly provided water. Particularly during the period 1960–90, there was a growing gap in water coverage. Whereas 73% of the urban population was connected to the public water system in 1974, this declined to just 64% in 1990. In absolute terms, 222,269 people were deprived of connections in 1974, but by 1990 this number had risen to 596,013 (according to conservative INEC data). According to the 1980 Master Plan, 75 to 80% of the metropolitan population was connected to the supply system in 1980,while only 20% was serviced by tank lorries (224,964 people). This means that there has been an almost threefold increase in the number of people who are dependent on private water purchases in just over little more than a decade (EMAP-G 1980: Cuadro 4.4–16).

The Water Mandarins: The Contradictions of Urban Water Provision

Billions of litres of water flow through the centre of Guayaquil each day, as the Rivers Daule and Babahoyo converge to form the River Guayas. Given this fact, it is perplexing to find that 35% of the inhabitants of the city do not have access to adequate and reliable water supplies and the whole city suffers from chronic absolute water shortages. In this and the next chapter, we shall explore the contradictions of urban water provision, which result in a sizeable part of the urban population, invariably the poorer end of the social spectrum, not having access to piped potable water. This situation, in turn, makes them easy victims of water speculators, the private water sellers that distribute water in non-serviced areas by means of tankers. In Guayaquil, approximately 400 tankers service a population of half a million people, or approximately 35% of the total urban population. These water-merchants buy water at a highly subsidized price (70 sucres/m3),while they sell it for up to 6,500 sucres/m3 (November 1993), a price of up to 300 times higher than that paid by low-volume consumers who receive water from the water company. We will also explore the strategies and structure of the water company, infrastructure and investment planning, price mechanisms and control structures in the light of these exclusionary and disempowering mechanisms of the existing water system. In short, we shall explore the contradictory dynamics of the ‘Water Mandarins’. The complex networks of those that hold control over the water tap, water infrastructure, and water distribution will be excavated in order to unearth the relations of power that infuse and eventually organize the intermittent flow of water in Guayaquil. Of course, analysing the changing dynamics of water supply in Guayaquil is like trying to hit a moving target. The field research for this book was completed in 1998. Since then, the public water company has awarded a concession to International Water Services, a Dutch-based subsidiary of Bechtel and Edison Spa, to operate, administer, and expand Guayaquil’s water and sewage services and infrastructure (see below).

The City in a Glass of Water: Circulating Water, Circulating Power

In recent years, an impressive body of work has emerged in the wake of the resurgence of the environmental question on the political agenda, addressing the environmental implications of urban change or issues related to urban sustainability (Haughton and Hunter 1994; Satterthwaite 1999). In many, if not all, of these cases, the environment is defined in terms of a set of ecological criteria pertaining to the physical milieu. Both urban sustainability and the environmental impacts of the urban process are primarily understood in terms of physical environmental conditions and characteristics. We start from a different position. As explored in Chapter 1, urban water circulation and the urban hydrosocial cycle are the vantage points from which the urbanization process will be analysed in this book. In this Chapter, a glass of water will be my symbolic and material entry point into an—admittedly somewhat sketchy—attempt to excavate the political ecology of the urbanization process. If I were to capture some urban water in a glass, retrace the networks that brought it there and follow Ariadne’s thread through the water, ‘I would pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the nonhuman’ (Latour 1993: 121). These flows would narrate many interrelated tales: of social and political actors and the powerful socio-ecological processes that produce urban and regional spaces; of participation and exclusion; of rats and bankers; of water-borne disease and speculation in water industry related futures and options; of chemical, physical, and biological reactions and transformations; of the global hydrological cycle and global warming; of uneven geographical development; of the political lobbying and investment strategies of dam builders; of urban land developers; of the knowledge of engineers; of the passage from river to urban reservoir. In sum, my glass of water embodies multiple tales of the ‘city as a hybrid’. The rhizome of underground and surface water flows, of streams, pipes and networks is a powerful metaphor for processes that are both social and ecological (Kaïka and Swyngedouw 2000). Water is a ‘hybrid’ thing that captures and embodies processes that are simultaneously material, discursive, and symbolic.

Hybrid Waters: On Water,Nature, and Society

In recent years, we have become increasingly aware of the importance of water as a critical good, and questions of water supply, access, and management, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, have become key issues (Gleick 1993; Postel 1992; Stauffer 1998). The proliferating commodification and privatization of water management systems; the combination of Global Environmental Change with increased demands from cities, agriculture, and industry for reasonably clean water; the inadequate access of almost a billion people on the planet to clean water (over half of whom live in large urban centres); the proliferating geopolitical struggle over the control of river basins; the popular resistance against the construction of new megadams; the political struggles around water privatization projects; and many other issues; have brought water politics to the foreground of national and international agendas (Shiklomanov 1990; 1997; Herrington 1996; Roy 2001). In the twentieth century, water scarcity was seen as a problem primarily affecting developing societies (Anton 1993). However, at the turn of the new century, water problems are becoming increasingly globalized. In Europe, the area bordering the Mediterranean, notably Spain, southern Italy, and Greece, is arguably the location in which the water crisis has become most acute, both in quantitative and qualitative terms (Batisse and Gernon 1989; Margat 1992; Swyngedouw 1996a). However, northern European countries, such as the UK, Belgium, and France, have also seen increasing problems with water supply, water management, and water control (Haughton 1996), while transitional societies in eastern Europe are faced with mounting water supply problems (Thomas and Howlett 1993). The Yorkshire drought in England, for example, or the Walloon/Flemish dispute over water rights are illuminating examples of the intensifying conflict that surrounds water issues (Bakker 1999). Cities in the global South and the global North alike are suffering from a deterioration in their water supply infrastructure and in their environmental and social conditions in general (Lorrain 1995; Brockerhoff and Brennan 1998). Up to 50% of urban residents in the developing world’s megacities have no easy access to reasonably clean and affordable water. The myriad socioenvironmental problems associated with deficient water supply conditions threaten urban sustainability, social cohesion, and, most disturbingly, the livelihoods of millions of people (Niemczynowicz 1991).

Whose Water and Whose City? Towards an Emancipatory Water Politics

Urban water is part and parcel of the political ecology of power that structures the functioning of the city. The preceding chapters showed how the circulation of water, the most natural of goods, is inserted into the maelstrom of social power relations through which the urbanization process unfolds. The urbanization of water and the urban hydrosocial cycle on which the sustainability of the city depends is impregnated by myriad social, cultural, political, and economic meanings and powers that place control over and access to nature squarely within the realm of key moral and ethical questions. In particular, it raises the issue of the relationship between nature, social justice, and the city. While the city cannot exist without the perpetual metabolic transformation of nature, this very transformation turns nature into a deeply social process in which nature, society, and the city can no longer be separated. It also suggests, of course, that some key questions need to be asked with respect to the social and material construction of the city’s nature and the power relationships through which this transformation and urban metabolism is organized and maintained. In this vein, we have attempted to explain how a political ecological analysis permits casting a new and different light onto the socio-ecological metabolic dynamics of the urbanization process itself. The previous chapters indicated that this urban transformation of water is a manifestation and expression of wider relations that clearly transcend the simple question as to who does and who does not have access to water. It also suggested that the water problem is not merely a question of management and technology, but rather, and perhaps in the first instance, a question of social power. The many manifestations of this power discussed in this book suggest how an enabling and empowering water politics need to address this question of power head on. In particular, those that defend the rights of the disempowered to the city’s nature have to understand the central political power relationships that structure the existing pattern.

Contested Waters: Rituals of Resistance and Water Activism

The discussion in the previous chapters has shown how water is deeply embedded in the practice of everyday urban life, and how the uneven power over its control and the oppression caused by its absence result in it being highly contested terrain. A wide spectrum of social conflicts and struggles consequently unfold over the appropriation of and access to ‘metabolized’ urban water; struggles that are embedded in and embody social, political, and economic power relations. Put simply, the transformation of nature and the urbanization of nature’s water express the political economic and socio-ecological power relations that shape the urbanization process itself. The urban hydrosocial cycle is indeed infused with a myriad of social tensions and is contested terrain at each moment of its flow. We shall consider not only the strategies of the weak and the weapons they deploy, but also the tactics of the water vendors. Their control over water enables them to mobilize a range of tactics to maintain if not expand their hold over water and the appropriation of water rents. This chapter will explore these multifaceted dimensions of the social struggles around water and their political, economic and social significance. The most striking, if least powerful, actions are those waged by urban communities to gain or improve access to water. From the position of those facing oppressive mechanisms of water supply, four strategies have been identified (see, among others, Espinoza and Oliden 1988): passive acceptance, individual resistance, self-help, and social protest/mobilization. Notwithstanding the immense problems associated with problematic access to water, acceptance of the exclusive and/or exploitative status quo is very often the most common behaviour, resulting in the absence of collective action. Cotic and Dascal (1987) suggest that the nature of an eventual possible, but essentially private solution (i.e. domestic connection to a comprehensive networked system), results in passive acceptance as a particular form of response. While the demand for the provision of roads, schools, health services, or public transport is often subject to collective action and struggle,water (and waste disposal (Olaya 1991) ) has rarely resulted in popular and collective revolts.

The Urban Conquest of Water in Guayaquil, 1945–2000: Bananas, Oil, and the Production of Water Scarcity

With the end of the war came a partial reversal of the devastating decline associated with the cocoa collapse, paralleled by a profound reconfiguration of class relations. The pre-war bipartisan political structure (Liberals and Conservatives) was replaced by a myriad of new political parties, expressing the divisions within the ruling elites, the rise of Left political parties as a result of growing proletarianization (Maiguashca 1992: 200–1) and, most importantly, the emergence and spectacular growth of populist movements. New forms of class struggle would emerge out of this maelstrom of change, each expressing itself through a mixture of new and old languages, symbols, and activities. It is not surprising, for example, to hear ‘San Lenín’ called upon for assistance alongside saints of the more traditional variety (Maiguashca and North 1991: 99–100). The ferment of this rich mix of class relations through which daily life was organized at the time the world was on fire wrought the conditions from which the post-war intensified water conquest would emerge. Indeed, the turbulent but lean years of the 1940s were followed by the banana bonanza decade of the 1950s. The United States’ fruit corporations, their plantations struck by Panama disease, moved their centre of operations from marginal Central American and Caribbean exporters to Ecuador. It was not only a cheap location, but the Panama disease had not yet moved that far south. In addition, President Galo Plaza Lasso used his excellent relationships with the US United Fruit Company to promote banana production in Ecuador (Nurse 1989). The spiralling demand for bananas from the US fruit companies converted the coastal area of the country (La Costa) into large banana planta tions with their associated socio-ecological relations (Armstrong and McGee 1985: 114; Larrea-Maldonado 1982: 28–34; see also Schodt 1987). While in 1948, banana export receipts amounted to only US$2.8 million, this figure reached US$21.4 million in 1952 and US$88.9 million in 1960, accounting for 62.2% of Ecuador’s total exports (Hurtado 1981: 190; Grijalva 1990; Cortez 1992). By the mid-1950s, the country had become the world’s leading banana exporter. This manufactured ‘banana bonanza’ was organized through a new political economic and ecological transformation.

Water, Power, and the Andean City: Situating Guayaquil

There is no aggregate shortage of water in Latin America. The Amazon’s output into the Atlantic Ocean is about 150,000 cubic metres per second and a whole host of smaller rivers—the Magdalena, Orinoco, San Francisco, Uruguay, and Usumacinta rivers, to name but a few—all carry more than 1,000m3/sec of water into the ocean at their outlets. In contrast, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and São Paulo, the three largest cities in Latin America, consume around 50 to 80m3/second, clearly a very small amount when compared to total available regional water resources (Anton 1993: 163). However, Mexico City is situated in an extremely water-scarce area, and other cities such as São Paulo, Brasilia, Guatemala City, Quito, and Bogota are located far from plentiful sources of water. Elsewhere, though, large cities and abundant water sources are in close proximity, yet large parts of their population still suffer from a lack of clean, cheap, and convenient water, a situation of scarcity in the midst of abundance. This chapter will examine the problems faced by the urban poor in Latin America in accessing potable water, and will examine the problems associated with its delivery. Although it contains some very arid areas such as the Atacama Desert, Latin America is a humid region. Until recently, water was regarded as an abundant resource, and justifiably so: Latin America’s annual precipitation is 60% above the world average and the average annual run-off of 370,000m3 is 30% of the world total (Biswas 1979: 16). A glance at water consumption levels in Latin American cities indicates no aggregate shortage of water. Table 3.1 suggests that average daily water consumption in Latin America’s big cities is comparable with that of cities in the developed world, and significantly higher than is the case in African and some Asian cities. Given that the very minimum amount of water deemed necessary to sustain life has been estimated at 5 litres per capita per day (LCD) (World Bank 1976), and that under most circumstances 30/40 LCD is deemed sufficient for a reasonable level of personal and community health (Kirke and Arthur 1987: 125), even the city with the lowest consumption level would appear to have a plentiful supply of water.

Introduction: The Power of Water

Water is indispensable ‘stuff’ for maintaining the metabolism, not only of our human bodies, but also of the wider social fabric. The very sustainability of cities and the practices of everyday life that constitute ‘the urban’ are predicated upon and conditioned by the supply, circulation, and elimination of water. The complex web of the ‘Metabolisms of Cities’ (Wolman 1965: 179) relies on the perpetual circulation of water into, through, and out of the city. Without an uninterrupted flow of water, the maelstrom of city life and the mesmerizing collage of interwoven practices that constitute the very essence of urbanity are hard to imagine. It is difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to even think about living without water for drinking, washing, bathing, cooking, or cleaning for more than a few hours. Indeed, like food, water is both a biological necessity and a key economic commodity, as well as being the source of an intricate and rich cultural and symbolic power (see Bachelard 1942). But while the supply of food, clothing, and durable goods can be handled through local, decentralized, individual initiative, the supply of water is routinely— although by no means necessarily or exclusively—organized by means of large bureaucratic and engineering control systems, collective intervention and action, and centralized decision-making systems (see Wittfogel 1957;Worster 1985; Lorrain 1997; Donahue and Johnston 1998). Such centralized and hierarchical systems, whether privately or publicly owned, enable monopoly control and, given the commodity character of water, permit the extraction of monopoly profits in addition to the powerful social and political control that goes with monopolistic control over vital goods. Contrary to the rural realm where—at least under non-arid conditions—water of a reasonable quality is easily and often readily available, urban water supply and access relies on the perpetual transformation, mastering, and harnessing of ‘natural’water. Urban water is necessarily transformed, ‘metabolized’ water, not only in terms of its physico-chemical characteristics, but also in terms of its social characteristics and its symbolic and cultural meanings.

The Urban Conquest of Water in Guayaquil, 1880–1945: Cocoa and the Urban Water Dream

The problems outlined in the previous chapter evolve from particular historical political ecological processes. As the urbanization process is predicated upon the mastering and engineering of nature’s water, the ecological conquest of water is an integral part of the expansion and growth of the city. At the same time, the capital required to build and expand the urban landscape is itself, at least in the case of Guayaquil, generated through the political ecological transformation of the city’s hinterland. In this and the following chapters, we shall explore the historical dynamics of the urbanization process through the lens of this double ecological conquest. The city’s growth created the need for water systems, which stretched further and further from the city in order to tap additional water resources. Foreign capital had to be generated to finance the imported technology of these projects. This necessitated a sound export-based economy, initially driven by cocoa (until the early twentieth century), bananas (from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s), and oil (from 1973 onwards). The urban process was consequently embedded in a double ecological conquest: ever greater flows of water became urbanized, while the city’s hinterland was socially and ecologically transformed. The latter conquest, in turn, plugged the Ecuadorean economy into the international division of labour. Guayaquil was the arena and medium through which those circuits of transformed nature and money were organized. The contemporary social struggle around water is evidently the result of the deeply exclusive and marginalizing ways in which political, economic, and ecological power have been worked out. The current water system and water politics exemplify the wider socio-economic and political processes that characterized Guayaquil’s urbanization process. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Guayaquil was just a large port village on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, surviving in the shadow of the political and former colonial centre of Quito and the economically dominant Sierra (Andean highland) hacienderos. In 1780, Quito had a population of 28,500 compared to 6,600 in Guayaquil, and by the mid-nineteenth century these figures had risen to 36,000 and 25,000 respectively.