Bechtel's Ugly Ecuador Water Adventure

[Judi Lynn]

Bechtel's Ugly Ecuador Water Adventure
Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:10:04 -0600


Bechtel's Ugly Ecuador Water Adventure

Before sunrise on Monday, November 7, 2005, I joined members of the Observatorio Ciudadano de Servicios Públicos as we erected a blue tent in front of the Palacio de Justicia in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Volunteers readied vote deposit boxes, paper ballots, and signature pages in anticipation of the crowds of people who pass by this centrally located building on a daily basis. The 1,550 ballots and corresponding signatures collected over the course of the day marked the start of a two-week “consulta”, to gather the opinions of Guayaquil’s citizens regarding the water and sewage services provided by Interagua, a local subsidiary of the U.S. Bechtel Corporation.

During those weeks in Guayaquil, I spoke personally with dozens of citizens who expressed their deep problems with the water and sewage services they received from Interagua. The local municipal government was not friendly to the “consulta” project and city police tried to remove local volunteers/activists from several polling locations. Nevertheless, more than 41,000 local citizens participated in the two-week survey, and 92% of them declared that the Bechtel subsidiary was not fulfilling its contractual obligations to Guayaquil’s consumers.

Interagua’s arrival in Guayaquil followed years of inadequate water and sewage services. In 1993 the municipal government began considering contracting out water and sewage services to a private company. Soon after, in 1996 and 1997, the municipality began to receive loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, aid that provided crucial funds for improvements, but which also required privatization to take place as soon as possible. International Water Services, a subsidiary of Bechtel, won the concession in 2000 as the only bidding company. The services were transferred to Bechtel’s newly incorporated subsidiary, Interagua, in 2001.

The contract provided no recourse to Guayaquil’s citizens to demand improvements projects, nor did it stipulate any minimum investments or measurable improvements in service quality.

After the 2005 citizen consulta, both Interagua and Guayaquil’s government refused to acknowledge any validity to the results, deeming them unscientific and statistically insignificant. Interagua also dismissed the Observatorio’s investigation conducted in June of 2005 of a Hepatitis A epidemic in a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of they city. That outbreak resulted in 85 confirmed diagnoses in children, all living within a several block radius.

More:
http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/2008/02/bechtels-ugly-ecuador-water-adventure.html