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H16816

Headlines : Corporations

Summary:

An independent study funded by the United Nations concluded that 6 years after privatization less than half of Guayaquil’s residents have sewage services, a decrease from the percentage provided with services prior to the privatization in 2001. Hundreds of consumers have come forward to demand that water and sewage services that have been cutoff be reconnected. In short, the permissive silence that once surrounded water and sanitation services has been broken.

...International attention and action in response to Bechtel’s Bolivian adventure did serious damage to its corporate reputation, and forced the corporation to drop a $50 million legal action against Bolivia in a World Bank trade court. Today it is the citizens of Guayaquil who need the attention and help of the international community, to keep up the pressure on Bechtel and assure that the company is not able to flee the scene and ignore the damages it has inflicted over the past six and a half years.

[Posted By Szamko]

By Emily Joiner
Republished from The Democracy Center

Shades of Cochabamba as Bechtel has fleeced the citizens of Guayaquil, and now faces resistance

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.

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