The first day of an international summit on the world's water crisis ended with rage and frustration as some 10,000 demonstrators -- many of whom say their lands or livelihoods are threatened by water policies -- were blocked from marching to the meeting site.
Police stopped a massive march late on Thursday about a mile from the convention center where representatives of some 130 nations are attending the fourth World Water Forum. No major incidents were reported.
The forum pledged to focus on the world's poor, many of whom live on less than 20 liters of water per day -- one-thirtieth of the daily usage in some developed nations. But protesters said the conference represented big corporations interested in running water systems for profit.
PHOTO: EPA
Demonstrators came from the ranks of those who live daily with sewage pollution, Indians whose water is being diverted to supply big cities and farmers whose lands are scheduled to be flooded by hydroelectric projects.
"You feel rage, you feel sadness," said Delfino Garcia Velazquez, a construction worker from the town of Tecamac on the outskirts of Mexico City, where tens of thousands of new housing units have sprung up in the last few years.
Officials took over Tecamac's formerly community-managed water supply -- already over-stretched -- to supply the new developments.
"We just want to have a say over our own water and manage it ourselves, like we always have," Garcia Velazquez said.
Local initiatives and community-level projects to supply, conserve and treat water were supposed to be at the heart of the water summit, but the larger, international dimensions of the problem often overshadowed that.
The forum heard a proposal for an international peacekeeping force to deal with future conflicts over water, as well as a call for massive donations to rebuild water systems in poor nations, in part to keep people from migrating to richer nations.
"A lot of poor people are leaving their countries to go to rich countries," said Loic Fauchon, president of the non-governmental group the World Water Council.
"Isn't it preferable, isn't it cheaper, to pay so that these people have water, sewage, energy, to keep open the possibility for them to stay in their [own] countries?" he asked.
He suggested the creation of a peacekeeping force -- modeled after the UN "blue helmets" -- to intervene in water conflicts, but said "we don't want to override national governments, we just need a force that will take over."
Mexico is no stranger to clashes over water. In 2004, armed Mazahua Indians took over a treatment plant and cut off part of the capital's supply to protest water extraction from their land.
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