Report of the Latin American meeting of the Water workshop Tiquipaya, close to Cochabamba (Bolivia) June 9-12, 2001

Placed under the aegis of the "Consorcio Cordillera", the meeting gathered allies and friends of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru as well as intervening parties of Mauritania, Tunisia and Canada. The set of their interventions, their documentation and the videos of quality they presented underlined the extreme complexity of the situation, the traps of the water law in gestation and the politician devices around it, the "pangs" between city and mountain, irrigants and city-dwellers, the altitude peasants and the electric Chilean company, as well as SEMAPA successes and difficulties in a city where 57% of the population has access to current water and where purification only concerns 54% of the people, with a foreseeable unfortunate consequence: the threat of the layer organic contamination.
During the discussions, the participants appropriated the proposal paper and insisted in including their concerns in it, it has even been proposed that the text on "water Governance" elaborated by the workshop be the starting point of a Code on Water. And, before all, they insisted with energy on the fact that water is a political question. It is true that over there, the political adherence is a major characteristic of the people. Besides, water cannot be separate from the territories, nor water from the users, given the strong indigenous fact, of course. Then comes the necessary respect of the habits and customs for water, that no parliament could replace by a legislation.