Failed water privatization in Bolivia: the state, corruption, and the neoliberal effect
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.1192Keywords:
State, market, corruption, neoliberalism, privatization, globalization, water, BoliviaAbstract
In 1999 the bolivian government sold the municipal water project in Cochabamba to a consortium of local and foreign investors. Only three months after the contractual agreement was signed, an unprecedented popular uprising took place. People mobilized against the dramatic increment in water rates, the intimate (and underground) relations between the state and the corporations, and the forms of wealth that were appropriated by state and private enterprises’. This essay studies the intersections between the state, the market, and corruption under the new contradictions of jurisdiction opened up under neoliberal conditions. I propose that Neoliberalism should be seen as a process that blurs the frontier between the state and the market, generating a simulacra of social order in which corruption and graft do not challenge the state, but on the contrary, make part of it.
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