Cochabamba 2004

Olivera, Oscar, and Tom Lewis. 2004. Cochabamba!: water war in Bolivia. Cambridge, Mass: South End Press.


Oscar Oliveira  "Privatization" 7-24

• (11-12) "we were--and still are--tremendously worried by the fact that the Bolivian government evidently prefers to follow the dictates of the World Bank instead of taking into account what the population views as in its best interests"
• disconnenct between government and people, either in reality or in perception..."why don't they (the government" listen to us, help us??
• (14) describes selling mineral rights as "stripped of our material inheritance"
• (15) external debt was contacted "undemocratically--in our name, but without our consent"...and now Bolivia is hostage to its external debt, resulting in terrible conditions for the people
• (16) external debt is "a complete loss of sovereignty

Oscar Oliveira "Organizing" 24-32

• (27 28) offered office of the union for the Coordinaria en Defensa del Agua y de la Vida
•  a group formed by the union and a previous civil society org. interested in water issues (27)
• the Coordinaria spoke in the name of the people who felt ignored (28)
• hoped that the water issue would unite disparate factions, urban and country, etc etc, and it worked (30)
• in one protest Oliveira and Morales snared traffic, busted windows, were repressed by police when government promised (and failed to show up to) negotiations (31)

Raul Gutiérrez-Aguilar 2004 "The Coordinaria: One Year after the Water War" (53-64)

• the coordinaria movement differed from trade-union movements in the past in that it focused on basic, universal needs, not just individual proposals (55)
• the coordinaria used assembly-style poolitics, not internal institutions (56)
•  the coordinaria assembly became a place for other civil groups to discuss with each other more specfici problems, neighborhood to neighborhood, as well as a mass-mobilizing movement
• the coordinaria has had toruble in times of calm due to "the atomized society" and stretching of the social farbic by neoliberalism (58) -- people are lazy
• coordinaria hopes to poltiicize the people, and the working class, who have been under-political since the demise of the trade unions (64)

 
Álvaro García Linera 2004 "The 'Multitude'" 65-86

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• idea that unoins are being replaced by political parties as the means of negotiation between the state and society...is this surprising? (69)
•  this has looked more like clientelism, in this authors view
• "union" form of collective organizing is being replaced (in Bolivia) with the "Multitude" form (70-71)
• since the unified workplace has been diffused (often ino the niehgborhoods and homes), geographic groups and collective action organizations are more important now (71-73)
• Coordinaria members are uniting under an identity created through the struggle, but it is vauge, something like "ordinary working people" (78)  <<The breadth of this identity is an important weakness of it>>
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