THE GUIDE - The Rough Guide to Bolivia - page 317

COCHABAMBA AND THE WATER WAR
Referred to by its inhabitants as “La Llacta”, the Quechua equivalent of the Spanish word
pueblo , meaning at once city and people or nation, Cochabamba is the centre of a vigorous
regional identity , and throughout Bolivian history has enjoyed a reputation for political
independence and rebelliousness, a tradition that continues to this day. In 2000 the city's
watersystemwasprivatized andsoldtoaconsortiumofinternational companies whichim-
mediately doubled or even tripled water rates. In response, Cochabamba erupted in a series
of spontaneous protests that became known as La Guerra del Agua - “the Water War”.
Thousands of citizens from all social classes took to the streets to demand rates be lowered,
blocking roads in and out of the city. The Banzer government responded in familiar fash-
ion:astateofsiegewasdeclared,protestorganizerswerearrested, armed troops weresent
in and plainclothes snipers opened fire on protesters, killing one and injuring many others.
Despite this oppression, the demonstrations continued, and the water consortium eventu-
allybackeddown-apopularvictorythatwaswelcomedbyanti-globalization campaigners
around the world. The excellent 2010 film Tambien la lluvia (“Even the Rain”) , starring
Gael Garcia Bernal, is set during the Water War.
Brief history
The Incas were quick to spot the region's agricultural potential when they conquered it in the
mid-fifteenth century, moving Quechua-speakers here to cultivate maize. Inca control of the
area was ended by the Spanish , who founded the city of Cochabamba on January 1, 1574,
originally naming it La Villa de Oropeza in honour of the Conde de Oropeza, father of the
Viceroy Francisco Toledo, who ordered its settlement. Locals soon reverted to calling it by
the indigenous place name Cochabamba, a combination of the Quechua words for lake and
plain, though all but one of the shallow, swampy lakes that once stood here have now been
filled in.
The Spanish established haciendas to produce grain for Potosí's silver mines, and so im-
portant was their agricultural work to the colonial economy that the valley's indigenous pop-
ulation was exempted from having to work in the mines under the mita system. When the
mines went into decline towards the end of the colonial period and the early republican era,
much of the hacienda land was rented out, and the region saw the emergence of a class of
small but independent Quechua-speaking peasant farmers , very different in culture and out-
look from the rather closed Aymara ayllus of the Altiplano. These peasant farmers played a
central role in the emergence of Bolivia's radical peasant political organizations in the 1950s
and 1960s and, as migrants to the Chapare, have assumed a key role in the coca-growers'
movement of recent years.