Meanwhile, we are organizing Local Water Committees among communities whose right to water is not being respected. We work to defend and strengthen community water management systems, and to further the rights of workers in municipal water systems. We are promoting bottom-up processes for watershed co-management, wherever conditions will permit. We are drawing up watershed management plans and carrying out community projects, including rainwater catchment, reforestation, maintenance of streams and canals, water treatment plants, water quality monitoring.
In the midst of an adverse environment, together with other organizations, we are questioning expensive and damaging megaprojects, as well as toxic mining and fracking; we seek to end the opacity and promote public debate regarding the policies that the World Bank and other institutions are promoting in Mexico. We are struggling for alternatives to the privatization of municipal systems and we are speaking out against the violence which is being exercised against those who are defending their lands, waters and other commons. Through actions involving the courts and human rights bodies, forums, marches, caravans and presence in the public and social media, we are seeking to eliminate and overcome corruption and external intervention in the water sector.
Together we have been discovering how water in Mexico should be governed, and we are building the capacities, the legitimacy and the organizing strength to make it happen.
More information
www.aguaparatodos.org.mx.
@AguaparaTodxsMX
This article was written collectively by : Gerardo Alatorre, Omar Arellano, David Barkin, Elena Burns, Rolando Cañas, Luis Rey Carrasco, Helena Cotler, Adriana Flores, Esther Galicia, Emilio García, Raquel Gutiérrez, Rossana Landa, Diana Luque, Alfredo Méndez Bahena, Rosa Isela Méndez Bahena, Leticia Merino, Rodrigo Migoya, Pedro Moctezuma, Ana Ortíz Monasterio, Úrsula Oswald, Ricardo Ovando, Luisa Paré, Francisco Peña, Raúl Pineda, Víctor Quintana, Gloria Tobón and Alejandro Velázquez
notes:
1. The process involves indigenous peoples’, water users’, municipal workers’, urban poor peoples’, and human rights organizations, as well as community-run urban and agricultural water systems, and organizations fighting water privatization, toxic mining and toxic farming, dams and fracking.
2. The Mexican Constitution recognizes the collective rights of original peoples (Art. 2), of ejidal communal landholders (Art. 27) as well as citizens’ rights (Art. 4) to participate in water-related decision-making. Therefore both this article and the Citizens’ Proposed Water Law refer consistently to “communities and citizens” as valid actors in watershed and water system decision-making and management.
3. “Contraloría” refers to an organism which exercizes oversight, “watchdog”, auditing and other fairness and anti-corruption functions.