Water and Revolution: The Bolivian Revolution and the Nationalization and Redistribution of Water Resources in the Cochabamba Valley

This paper views the National Revolution of 1952 from the perspective of water. One of the most significant popular demands in the revolutionary period was water access, especially in the Cochabamba Valley. In the countryside, colonos and smallholders pressured the government for both land and water distribution while in the city the population organized to demand water—residents of the center protested rationing and limited service hours while neighborhoods on the periphery petitioned for water service to be extended and improved. Urban agitation, peasants’ needs, and the revolutionary government’s own desire to stimulate agricultural production and urban and industrial development led to a radical challenge to private ownership of water in the early years of the revolution. While observers have lamented the lethargic pace of Cochabamba’s development in the revolutionary period and the national government’s neglect of Bolivia’s “second city,” there was one area in which the governing party was committed to radical reform in Cochabamba—seizing water from its owners and directing it to peasants, industry, and city dwellers. Under the new revolutionary water policy, urban residents and rural small producers were to share the region’s water resources free of hacienda control for the first time. At times this led to remarkable water-sharing agreements between the city and rural small producers. At others, competition and conflict reigned. Close examination of agrarian reform cases of Cochabamba haciendas with important water sources and urban efforts to gain access to these sources demonstrates that water reform favored rural producers over urban consumers, thereby setting small producers and urban residents against each other and contributing to the breakdown of the peasant-urban alliance and the erosion of revolutionary hegemony by the early 1960s.