Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water

II. Buenos Aires, Argentina

To Buenos Aires P ilots follow the coast, flying this ethnographic nomad from Salvador to São Paulo and then on to Buenos Aires,1 where fieldwork begins anew in March 2007; this political ecology of water enters its second arc. Salvador’s unforgivable violence recedes except for zigzagging Internet communiqués. In July, news of Antonio’s assassination would pierce the cozy apartment in Palermo Zoo, but everyday life was already elsewhere. Intercity Commonalities Commonalities provide a framework for regional intercity comparisons. Blessed with bounteous freshwater, contemporary inhabitants of Buenos Aires, like those of Salvador, exhibit an understandable if oft-destructive extravagance toward water in all its forms. The ancestors of many if not most of the people living in both cities are not descendants of original peoples. Most came by ship from Europe as adventurers, missionaries, immigrants, anarchists, technical experts, and investors or from Africa, kidnapped and forced into slavery. Both Buenos Aires and Salvador were founded in the early 1500s and have marched in and out of step with globalization ever since. After federal legislation of the 1990s, both cities privatized and upgraded their ports to accommodate container shipping and all the associated multimodal transport and telecommunications technologies that boost transport efficiencies and corporate profitability. In the oldest, most central parts of the cities, beside the unused and derelict warehouses ripe for­ revitalization, new port zones were erected. Everything in the zones is II Buenos Aires, Argentina 90 / Part II modular: cement platforms and moving steel assemblages scaled for easy, robotically assisted coupling and decoupling in tandem with circulating information and currencies. Out on the verdant coastline, Salvador and Buenos Aires experience states of aquatic abundance and pollution under the rubric of harmonized legal traditions. In both cities, decorative fountains, humble taps, and grandiose waterfront monuments draw on the evocative power of water to make the state legible, the nation real. In the late 1800s both cities built European-financed centralized water, sewage, and drainage infrastructure that was mostly modeled on British infrastructure (for Buenos Aires, see Chapter 5). In the 1990s privatization wave, both ceded aspects of water management to multinational corporations, at least for a time, to better or worse effect. At the moment, Brazil’s economy appears in the midst of a boom, after facing a currency crisis in 1999; Argentina faced a currency crisis between 2001 and 2002 that led to governmental collapse and slow recovery. On the national level, both cities are part of Mercosur (in Portuguese, Mercosul), a trade agreement of four contiguous nations (including Uruguay and Paraguay), paradoxically divided and united by its rivers. Commodities are transshipped to, from, and between Mercosur’s cities and interior provinces through the Paraná-Paraguay inland waterway and along the ocean coast (see Figure 1). Increasing domination of genetically modified soy production for cattle feed and biofuel in these export economies is undoubtedly a boon to some and a crisis to others. For example, the recent expansion of the genetically modified soy of Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Monsanto into farmlands accessible to the inland waterways has led to increasing pesticide and herbicide contamination , expropriation of small-farmer land holdings, popular uprising, and violent oppression, including assassination of campesino leaders (Tana 2010). And thus the rubric of harmonized legal traditions brings little social harmony. The most recent national constitutions of Argentina and Brazil explicitly protect water rights as human rights, defined in terms of access to potable water and healthy habitats. Indeed, defining water rights and environmental protection in the constitution lends form and voice to the forces of democracy that triumphed over the most recent phase of military dictatorships, supported by the United States. These rights and protections potentially serve as an armature for social and ecological transformation; constitutional ideals tend to wish all things for all people. However, the full force of law, when wielded in practice, and pressure from lending institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund cause economic models to be prioritized, which means progress and development for some, hope and suffering for most. Centralization of wealth and power, founded on a faux-democratic process of decentralizing responsibilities without allocating financial means to fulfill them, leads to mandates that are susceptible to manipulation and obliteration and have mixed, often negative effects. In short, the decoupling of constitutional ideals Buenos Aires, Argentina / 91 from ­ implementation and enforcement threatens the waters in both cities (though more...