La Jornada, one of Mexico City’s leading daily newspapers with a circulation of 287,000 readers, reports, “Water privatization in Mexico extends through at least five areas ranging from municipal water services and the building of sewage treatment plants to the expansive construction of dams, said Claudia Campero, a researcher at Food and Water Watch and the Blue Planet Project.”
The newspaper reports, “Campero indicates that there are other less obvious forms of private ownership of water, but just as serious, such as pollution… In this case, it becomes big business and means the development of decontamination projects and wastewater treatment plants, a policy promoted by the National Water Commission (Conagua). …The analyst says in an interview that the format being promoted in these projects is contract-operate-transfer, a procedure which called public-private participation.”
“She adds that the same goes for the dams, also built by the private sector, which have operate-transfer contracts. the Zapotillo dam is such a case… Campero is against the ownership of water, a vital resource, by private entities… Finally mentioned, in Guadalajara, …an aqueduct is being constructed from Lake Chapala, which a private company would take over in twenty years.”
To read the complete article – in Spanish – please go to http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/04/11/index.php?section=sociedad&article=047n1soc.
