The Attempted Revival of “Free Market” Water Politics in the Late Twentieth Century

This chapter addresses the context and strategies that characterized the attempt to revive the old “free market” water regime. It examines how this attempt was planned and implemented in a context of multiple global crises and took Latin America during the 1970s–80s, starting with Chile, as the experimental ground to test the neoprivatist water regime, and later replicate it worldwide. The chapter discusses the global context at the time, characterized by what the governments of the leading capitalist countries termed a “crisis of democracy”, consisting of a presumed overloading of democratic governments unable to cope with increasing demands for the expansion of basic rights, including the provision of essential services like water and sanitation. Latin America had already been chosen in the mid-1950s as a region of interest for political or military intervention, particularly by the United States, to counter the increasing pressures for substantive democratization in the countries of the region. The chapter examines the interlinkages between democratization processes and water politics in this period, marked by the implementation of a radical “free market” water regime during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, deemed to become the template for the global expansion of neoprivatist water politics. It explores the combination of fake scientific arguments and truths with undemocratic, violent dictatorial interventions in the region to impose these politics and successfully lay the foundations for the global expansion of these politics in later decades. The chapter scrutinizes the attack on the historical principles that considered water a common good, and the access to basic water and sanitation services a public good and a social right of citizenship. The erasure and negation of these rights would become structural components of the neoprivatist water regime that emerged from these processes.