Interview • Dawn Marie Paley • June 8, 2023 • Leer en castellano

While sipping his usual yerba mate on a Friday afternoon in early May, Diego Castro noticed something strange: it was salty. "The taste was very strong," Castro recounted in an interview from his home in Montevideo. By the following Sunday there was no longer any bottled water available in his neighborhood. It had all been bought up. 

Castro quickly realized that the horrible taste of the water coming through his pipes was not just a problem in his building. Over two million people living in Montevideo’s Metropolitan Area were also lacking safe drinking water.

Today, what comes out of the faucet throughout the city is salty water that smells strongly of chlorine. This is a result of a change implemented at the beginning of May by state-owned State Sanitary Works (OSE), which began to mix freshwater from the traditional reservoirs of the Santa Lucía River with saltier water pumped downriver, near the mouth of the La Plata River.

Popular mobilizations began immediately.

Since the second week of May, local groups from different neighborhoods in Montevideo have been autonomously convening mobilizations in the streets of the city center. Protests have taken place in front of government offices, at the OSE and in front of the offices of the soya, paper and livestock companies whose activities are at the root of the current drinking water crisis.

The ongoing mobilizations for water are drawing on a tapestry of historic struggles for water in Uruguay. They’re partially linked to union struggles, and nourished in particular by the knowledge, practices and forms of feminist struggles that have expanded over the last seven years. 

Previous popular organizing against the advance of water privatization in 2004 succeeded in bringing forward a plebiscite that reformed Uruguay’s Constitution. Water was established as a human right, and the responsibility of the state to manage water was enshrined, as was the participation of society in said management.

Two days ago we spoke with Castro, who teaches at the University of the Republic in Montevideo and is editor of the independent news portal Zur. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dawn Marie Paley: At the most basic level, what is happening with Montevideo’s water supply?

Diego Castro: The version that the government immediately put forward is that the cause of this problem is drought and allusions were made to climate change. It’s true that in Uruguay there has been a severe drought for the last three years; it has rained at about one third of the average rate.

But the extractive companies that are making use of our water are also responsible. Their activities make it impossible for us, today, to access enough good quality water for human consumption.

Approximately 30 days ago, as there was not enough fresh water to pump into the metropolitan area from the Santa Lucia River, water began to be pumped from further down, closer to the La Plata River. That water has much higher sodium levels.

At first, the government justified the increase in the amount of salt in our water—which we still believed to be drinkable—by saying it was only risky for people with kidney disease or high blood pressure. Later, it became clear that it is water that is not safe to drink. It tastes of salt and there is no way for us to reduce the sodium content ourselves.

There was zero warning that this was going to take place. The government recognized the salt was above permitted levels only when people noticed the tap water was salty. That’s when the public water company began to make ambiguous statements: that the water is not for drinking, but it can be drunk (que el agua no es potable, pero si es bebible). Within 24 hours, the Ministry of Public Health released sodium and sodium chloride results that showed double the maximum permitted levels.

All this generated a great deal of outrage. There was no warning on the part of the government, on the part of the state water company, on the part of the Ministry of the Environment or the Ministry of Public Health. This led to a series of rapid reactions, which initially were autonomously convened mobilizations.

DMP: Tell us about these mobilizations in defense of drinking water.

DC: In the first moments there were street mobilizations almost every day, now we are in a hybrid moment of mobilizations and neighborhood assemblies. 

There are assemblies, meetings, educational talks and other activities taking place in various places at any given time. We’ve been amazed at the rapid understanding of the relationship between what is taking place with our water and the dynamics of extractivism in Uruguay.

There is a detailed understanding of what’s taking place, a pointing of fingers at companies and capital in general as well as at successive governments, as those responsible for the fact that we have lost access to drinking water. 

These mobilizations were initially led by young people, and in particular those connected with feminist movements. Most of the participants are women. There is also a lot of participation by people linked to artistic and corporal expression, dance and music, which is something that is not very common in other struggles.

In the neighborhoods today, participation is becoming more and more diversified. Other, more traditional social organizations have also begun to mobilize. 

Last week the union movement called a mobilization that was quite large, which was positive. For now the more traditional organizations—unions and others—are taking a different tack, focusing on the fact that there has not been enough investment in the public water company, which is understaffed.

These groups do not explicitly connect what is happening with our water to the logic of extractivism. This is basically due to the fact that trade unionism here has supported extractive corporations together with the progressive left. Today this framework is falling apart and its limits are becoming apparent, so they have nothing new to add.

DMP: Do you see any efforts, amid this multiplicity of mobilizations that aim to increase coordination and deliberation?

DC: Articulation and coordination is already taking place. New organizational spaces have emerged, in addition to the traditional National Commission for the Defense of Water and Life, which emerges from the [2004] plebiscite. 

The Coordinación por el Agua is a space that brings together younger people, but in reality, what have been called the "marches of autonomously convened people" are places where people from different spaces like feminist collectives are connecting. The Coordinadora Feminista is also actively participating. 

There is a generalized attempt at coordination and it seems to me that the assemblies—in neighborhoods and schools—could become increasingly important organizational spaces.

There is an expanding sense that "that’s it, this can no longer be tolerated." It seems to me that the limit that is being installed now, as a shared common sense, is similar to how the feminist movement installed very clear limits against macho violence. 

DMP: In Uruguay, water was recognized as a human right. So what happened?

DC: The water reform is from 2004, it took place as the [left coalition] Frente Amplio won their first election. That year Frente Amplio won with 50.5 percent of the vote and the reform had the support of 65 percent of the population in a direct vote. 

After that came a whole process of regulating the use and management of water, which took a long time. The reform was in 2004 and regulations were adopted in 2009, but the mechanisms for participation and social control were not activated until 2011. 

In the specific case of the river that provides drinking water to Montevideo and the metropolitan area, the Santa Lucia River, there were no social management mechanisms in place until 2013, and their implementation since has been weak. From 2004 to 2013 there were 10 years of unfettered commodity boom in Uruguay. As a consequence, our watersheds were contaminated. 

The dilution of social control mechanisms and the lack of political will to implement and oversee caring for watersheds has a lot to do with what is happening now.

DMP: What are the interests behind extractivism that most affect water?

DC: The major agro-exporting sectors here—soya, cellulose, meat and rice—are based around exporting water, given the large volume of water used for the production of the commodities they produce.

Here, for example, the world's largest pulp production company is being inaugurated today. It is the third pulp mill here in Uruguay, and it’s owned by a Finnish company. These types of corporate activities use massive amounts of water.

For this reason, now that we’re dealing with the issue of salt water, those of us who are mobilizing have begun to connect the [shortage of fresh water] with large extractive enterprises. There is, for example, a data processing center owned by Google that uses drinking water to cool its servers.

There really is a clear, very direct awareness that all these productive activities intended for export, commodity production and services are, at the end of the day, exporting a massive amount of water.

DMP: What has surprised you up until this point?

DC: It is really an exceptional moment in Uruguay, at least from the point of view of social struggle. I’ve been surprised that it has been possible to maintain daily mobilizations in an autonomous manner and that these mobilizations are still going strong almost 30 days later.

I am also surprised by this very nuanced and very radical politicization, we’ve avoided getting trapped talking about the fact that there is a drought, but rather, we’ve connected the issue with the extractivist dynamics and the corporate plunder I’ve been telling you about.

In very few days a generalized common understanding was established that water is worth more than anything we can be promised or offered in terms of jobs, economic growth, or whatever.

There is a very interesting kind of politicization taking place that allows us to understand our connection with nature. We know that the problem isn’t a drought, it is theft, and we are determined not to allow this to continue.