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When Even Water is Not a Human Right
"Once upon a time, there was a little orphan girl ('huerfana') who had to walk over many mountains each day to fetch water ('itzu') because the water was very far away" Esperanza Garcia, a Purepecha Indian grandmother in the tiny Michoacan mountain town of Santa Cruz Tanaco tells the story that her mother told her. "One day, the huerfana made friends with a humming bird ("Tzintzun") and he led her to a secret spring right here in the forest. The women were so happy because now they didn't have to walk two mountains to fetch the water that they married the huerfana to the spring and when they plunged her in the water, a long serpent leaped up and that was the stream that brought the water to our town." Esperanza frowned at the dry littered streambed that runs by her house. "Now the stream is dead because they have cut down all the trees and again we have to walk for hours to bring water." Clear cuts in the Purepecha mountains have devastated forests and water sources.
Women in the third world walk an average of six kilometers each day to fetch water, according to U.S. environmental researcher Talli Newman. But Indian women are not just fetchers of water but its protectors. "Like the corn, we are born from the water" explains Maria de la Cruz, a Tzotzil Mayan mother and community leader from San Felipe Ecatepec just outside San Cristobal de las Casas in the highlands of Chiapas--the Mayans are the People of the Corn according to their sacred book, the Popul Vu.
De la Cruz lives a hundred meters from a Coca Cola bottler that extracts 1.7 million liters of water each year from the local aquifer, leaving 70% of the households in Ecatepec without running water. The bottler's yearly extractions are equivalent to what five indigenous villages in the highlands are allotted each year. "Yes, we are made from the water but I can't even bathe" De la Cruz laughs bitterly. Chiapas is home to Mexico's largest rivers yet 68% of its 1.3 million Indian people do not have potable water.
More
http://counterpunch.org/ross03292006.html
De la Cruz lives a hundred meters from a Coca Cola bottler that extracts 1.7 million liters of water each year from the local aquifer, leaving 70% of the households in Ecatepec without running water. The bottler's yearly extractions are equivalent to what five indigenous villages in the highlands are allotted each year. "Yes, we are made from the water but I can't even bathe" De la Cruz laughs bitterly. Chiapas is home to Mexico's largest rivers yet 68% of its 1.3 million Indian people do not have potable water.
More
http://counterpunch.org/ross03292006.html
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