The Water War: how Cochabamba defied the Washington Consensus-and won

The Water War: how Cochabamba defied the Washington Consensus-and won

In the year 2000, in a remote Bolivian city most of the world had never heard of, ordinary people did something extraordinary — they took on a multinational corporation, defied their own government, resisted Washington Consensus and won. The Water War of Cochabamba, Bolivia, was not just a local revolt against unaffordable water bills. It was the first crack in the wall of neoliberalism that had been suffocating Latin America for fifteen years, a warning shot heard from Montevideo to Milan, and the opening chapter of a global struggle to reclaim water as a human right.

To understand why it happened, one must first understand what had been done to Latin America by the Washington Consensus.

In the 1980s, many Latin American countries emerged from decades of repressive military dictatorships. The newly elected governments were attempting to consolidate their fragile democracies while watching the military barracks in their rearview mirrors.  At this insecure time of democracies, Washington DC struck Latin America with the imposition of neoliberalism in the form of Washington Consensus. The Latin American countries were forced to open their markets to Wall Street capital, privatize assets of public sector and cut down expenditure on healthcare, education and social welfare policies. These policies inevitably lead to increased poverty and inequality causing what is called as the Lost Decade of the 1980s.

On the twenty- fifth anniversary of the Water War, the book "Echoes of the Water Wars: Legacies of Cochabamba, Bolivia ” was published in 2025. It brings together contributions from Bolivian activists as well as writers and analysts who supported the movement from outside the country. 

Here is the story of the water war: 

In June 1999, the World Bank issued a report on Bolivia that addressed the water situation in Cochabamba. The city and its surrounding region with about a million inhabitants had long faced water shortages for drinking and farming. The World Bank, along with the International Development Bank, had made privatization a condition for loans and recommended that there be “no public subsidies” to offset increases in the price of water services.

In September 1999, the Bolivian government signed a contract with a company “Aguas del Tunari” granting  control of the water resources and distribution in Cochabamba area. Registered in the Cayman Islands, it was a consortium of International Water of US, Abengoa of Spain, and four Bolivian companies. International Water, which held the majority interest in the consortium, was part of the vast holdings of US-based Bechtel Corporation,

In October 1999, the government enacted Law 2029 to regulate water and sanitation. It restricted long-standing traditional communal water practices and removed protections for rural systems based on collective management and local sharing arrangements. 

At that time, only half of Cochabamba’s population was connected to the central water system. Many others obtained water from cooperative water houses built to meet local needs. Yet, Law 2029 declared that, within the territory covered by a privatization contract, such systems were illegal. Only the contracted company could distribute water. The law thus demanded that the autonomous water systems be handed over without reimbursement or compensation for the people who had invested their own labour and resources in building them. The law extended even to wells installed in peoples' own properties. The law also restricted peasants from collecting rain water without official permission. For many critics, this amounted to the privatization of rain itself.  

The forty-year contract awarded to Aguas del Tunari proved even more controversial than Law 2029. It specified that at the end of each year, rates would rise annually in line with the consumer price index in the United States, in effect “dollarizing” water payments. The contract guaranteed the company an average 16 percent rate of return per year on its investment regardless of management performance or service quality. There was a clause in the contract stating that the contract itself superseded all other contracts, laws, and decrees.

Once Aguas del Tunari began operations, it took advantage of its exclusive rights under Law 2029 to assert control over existing water networks. In some cases, household’s water bills skyrocketed as much as 300 percent. A pensioner, or a teacher who made $80 a month, might see a bill jump from $5 to $25 a month. The consortium had been assembled quickly after no other company bid for the privatization contract. Its capital base appeared limited. Many observers concluded that the company intended to finance investment largely through payments collected from Cochabamba’s residents themselves. 

The people of Cochabamba rose in revolt against the commodification of water for the profit of a private company at the expense of the rights of the citizens and traditional local practices. In November 1999, they formed a community organization called as "Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida” (Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life) with citizens, farmers and workers. Protests began in January 2000 and continued for four months. Demonstrators blocked roads, organized marches, occupied government offices and eventually took over the office of the water company itself. The government responded first with police repression and later with military force. They even resorted to cutting off supply of food and other goods to the city. Ultimately, the popular resistance proved stronger than the government’s resolve, so the latter had no choice but to terminate the private company contract and repeal Law 2029 in April 2000. 

The victorious water activists, along with supporters from Canada, US, India and Brazil, issued the Cochabamba Declaration on 8 December 2000. The Declaration stated that water belongs to the earth and all species; is sacred to life;  and it is a fundamental human right and a public good.

The privatization of water in Cochabamba was not the first  privatization initiative in Bolivia. Nor was Law 2029 the first legal measure designed to facilitate privatization. Both were part of the neoliberal policies pursued since 1985. At the same time, this economic model was not simply an  external imposition. It was also supported by part of the local business oligarchy which wanted to benefit through collaboration with foreign firms. 

Following the Water War, Bolivia entered a new period of resistance to neoliberal policies, particularly through mobilizations led by Indigenous and popular sectors. This broader wave of struggle helped create the conditions for the rise of Evo Morales, who was elected president in 2005. He was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president and the first to be elected in Latin America.

The Bolivian activists also carried their message about water rights of citizens to other countries of Latin America, Europe and even India. They helped inspire the formation of the Inter-American Network for Water Defense and Rights, REDAVI. Subsequently, other networks emerged, such as the European Water Movement, the African Network for Water Justice and KrUHA in Asia (People’s Coalition for the Right to Water”) based in Indonesia. It came up in 2002 during debates over Indonesian water laws influenced by the World Bank. The People’s Forum for Water encompasses all these networks of the world.

The historic Water War of Bolivia became a major point of reference for movements across Latin America and beyond. In Uruguay, a 2004 referendum was approved by  64% of the voters for water rights of citizens. After the constitutional amendment, Uruguay became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize access to water and sanitation as a fundamental human right. 

In 2010, the United Nations formally recognized access to safe drinking water and sanitation as a human right.

In Italy, voters rejected water privatization in a 2011 referendum, in a major popular rebuke to the government of Silvio Berlusconi's neoliberal economic policies. The Italian referendum became one of Europe’s largest anti-privatization mobilizations. 

In Chile, the social uprising that began in 2019 intensified pressure to reform the ultra-neoliberal Water Code of Pinochet regime established in 1981.  The reforms enacted in 2022 gave greater priority to human consumption and environmental protection. 

India witnessed its water-rights movement in 2002 in Plachimada in Palakkad district of Kerala. The villagers complained that the Coca Cola bottling plant established in 1999 extracted massive quantities of ground water which affected the wells of households and water sources of farms. The local panchayat  refused to renew Coca-Cola’s license, arguing that groundwater belonged to the community and that extraction harmed public welfare. The plant was closed in 2004.

The people of Cochabamba who blocked roads and braved soldiers in the high-altitude cold of Bolivia did not just win back their water. They inspired struggles across the Global South against the Washington Consensus and sent a simple message: citizens can win even when their own governments stand  against them.

The unfinished search for Mexican identity in the novel "América del Norte"

 The unfinished search for Mexican identity in the novel "América del Norte"

The novel “América del Norte” by Mexican writer Nicolas Medina Moro is an intellectual exploration of Mexican identity as part of North America which is overwhelmingly dominated by the United States. The novel reads like a fictional counterpart to Octavio Paz’s non-fiction “The Labyrinth of Solitude” the foundational meditation in which Paz analyses and interprets Mexican identity from psychological, cultural and historical angles. Paz concludes that the search for Mexican identity remains unfinished. Medina extends this inquiry into the era of the right-wing politics of Trump and the upending of Mexican politics by the leftist ex-president Lopez Obrador.

The author acknowledges that his editor at Soho Press, who instead of steering him toward convention, encouraged him to make the novel weirder, longer, funnier, and riskier. The result is visible throughout the book. Medina has taken full advantage of this editorial encouragement to be more provocative, adventurous and unconventional including challenging the English language readers with all the subtitles and some texts fully in Spanish without translation. 

Sebastian Arteaga y Salazar, the protagonist, is the descendant of an elite Mexican family who studies at Yale and then enrolls in a Master’s program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. During his job as teaching assistant he gets caught in the crossfire in the ideological polarization of the American academic world following Trump’s assault against woke culture. 

Sebastian has the familiar American Dream to settle in the US. He has been 'conditioned to desire America and Americanness even in the face of heartbreak'. His repeated attempts for Green Card end up as failure after Trump’s policy of increasing restrictions against immigration. When he returns finally to Mexico, Sebastian finds that his conservative wealthy family is at the receiving end of the leftist agenda of President Lopez Obrador. He feels out of place in Mexico too. He realizes that he belongs fully to neither Mexico nor US. He was not white enough for Trump's America, yet his family was not brown enough for Obrador's Mexico 

Sebastian is acutely uneasy with his creole (descendent of the Spanish colonizers born in the Americas) identity and privileges within Mexico. He defines creole as "That colonial subject who benefits more than he suffers from the colonial situation. The creoles are to imperialism as the professional and the manager are to late capitalism; their function, like those of the overseer and the comprador, is to mediate between the ruling class and its subalterns—or, what is the same, to administer the colony for the benefit of the metropolitan ruling class. This is why the so-called 'revolutions of independence' of the various Latin American colonies were not conflicts between imperialists and anti-imperialists, but between imperialists and aspirants to imperialism”. It was the creoles of Mexico who had invited and crowned the Austrian prince Maxmilian Van Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico in 1864. The Mexicans were able to defy the notorious Monroe Doctrine at this time since the US was mired in their internal civil war. Sebastian says, “ Emperor Maxmilian was eventually killed by the Mexican revolutionaries but the Mexican creole rulers have all shared an Austro-Hungarian temperament: a vulnerability to zealous passions, a predisposition to the fevers of ambition and a weakness for fantasy.”. 

In an interview about the novel, Medina remarks that “the creoles served the same social function: translating, informing on, explaining the colonies to the imperial elite. Translators are often lovers, but they’re also always traitors”. He adds, “I am far from the only Mexican writer to betray his country by translating it into the language of the empire. The origins of Mexican literature are to be found in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Letters of Relation, the prose chronicles that inform the Spanish court of what was going on in the colonies. Nothing much has changed since then”.

Like every colonial elite, the creoles of Mexico resented their metropolitan cousins, whose laws excluded them from the highest spheres of wealth and power. Betraying their underdeveloped sense of proportion, they began to identify with the grandeur of the pre-Columbian past—though never, tellingly, with the Indigenous present—sincere in their conviction that the fact the Spaniards treated them as second-class citizens brought them close to the people their grandfathers had massacred. As their resentment mutated from self-pity to self-regard, they saw their creole condition as an addition rather than a subtraction from their Western identity.

Sebastian falls in love with an American musicologist who is attracted to Latino men and Mexico. Yet his love for her gets complicated by his constant questioning of his own identity against the American attitude of subtle superiority and casual condescension.  He finds that his "American classmates treat Mexicans nicely not because they see them as equals but because they are light-skinned curiosities in well-cut suits, distinguished guests from a quaint but insignificant country. With Indigenous people and mestizos, it was a different story. The Chicago Boys’ belief in individual freedom didn’t extend to people with dark skin. Their economics was not the objective science they claimed it to be, but a political instrument designed to justify imperial expansion—a postmodern American equivalent of sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism".

Sebastian is equally clear-eyed about the structural role he was groomed to play: "The Americans had let me go to Yale because they wanted me to become a translator, a go-between. I was supposed to go back to the capital, leverage my last name into a position in the highest levels of government, and advocate for American interests. For better or worse I was a child of NAFTA which realigned Mexico along a north-south axis and created incentives to move all valuable commodities toward the United States. At the same time, the treaty forced Mexican farmers to compete with the industrialized agriculture of the Middle West, which, despite the US government’s breathless celebration of free markets, remained subsidized. Millions of Mexicans, many from Michoacán, were forced to emigrate to the North, where they found themselves marginalized by the law and excluded from lucrative work. Predictably, some turned to the drug trade. When they returned home, they discovered that the collapse of the old state apparatus from the days of one-party rule had left a vacuum of services and therefore authority. It’s no surprise they decided to fill the gap".

Mexico is home to the largest and most vital native Indian population in the Americas. Mexican intellectuals and artists celebrate the Indian mix of their culture to distinguish themselves from the Europeans and Americans. 

This backdrop of dispossession and displacement gives the novel its deepest resonance. 

Mexico had lost half of its territory to Trump’s predecessors in the second half of the nineteenth century. A well-known joke captures this historical wound which still haunts the Mexican psyche. A US Border Patrol agent tells a Mexican “Mister, you have crossed the border” The Mexican replies, “señor I did not cross the border. The border crossed me”. The border crossing is not just geographical but persists in economic, political, racial and imperial terms. As a result, the search for Mexican identity remains an unfinished and continuing journey. 

Marquez, Maradona, Marx and Mathew Kodath: Malayalee links to Latin America

The Malayalees share common passions for the Triple M of Latin America: Marquez, Maradona and Marx. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “one hundred years of solitude” was the #1 bestseller in Kerala at one time.The influence of Latin American literature in Kerala has been unusually deep and enduring compared to most other parts of India. Writers, translators, political activists, students, and publishers in Kerala have embraced Latin American fiction, poetry, and political thought with remarkable enthusiasm.Malayalam authors discovered in magical realism a form that resembled Kerala’s own storytelling traditions: rooted, local, political, emotional, and mythic at the same time. Malayalees consider O V Vijayan as the Marquez of Kerala.

The poetry of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz has been  widely translated and discussed in Kerala. Neruda especially became immensely popular because he combined love poetry with revolutionary politics. The People’s Poet’s  poems on workers, miners and common people as well as hisanti-fascist and anti-imperialist themes resonated with Kerala’s Left culture. While in many Indian states, Latin American literature remained as an elite English-reading phenomenon, it entered ordinary vernacular reading culture in Kerala. 

Maradona

Maradona’s visit to Kerala in November 2012, a landmark event in the sports culture of the state, was celebrated with great fervor. The hotel (Blue Nile Hotel) room in which he had stayed in Kannur has become a museum/shrine. Memorabilia including the cutlery and other items he had used, are preserved in the room named as Maradona Suite.  

The Malayalee fascination with Maradona has later passed to Messi and other Latin American players. RivalFans of Argentina and Brazil put up banners, flags and cut outs of players during World Cup games. 

Marxism            

The Left in Kerala had drawn inspiration from the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. During a trip to Munnar in 2014, I saw posters of Che, Castro and Chavez put up in Idukki district in Kerala during a district-level conference of CPM.

           

A Marxist government of Kerala in the past took the initiative and funded the establishment of a Centre For Latin America Studies in the University of Kerala. The Centre has hosted lectures of Cuban diplomats and signed Agreements for cooperation and exchanges with Cuban and other Latin American universities.

Kerala had its first elected communist government in India and the world in 1957. After that the Communists had come to power seven more times till the 2026 election when they performed poorly. Shashi Tharoor, in his article “The Left needs to find a new vocabulary for ‘New India’”, has argued that the decline of the Communists was not just an electoral setback but a deeper ideological and social crisis. Tharoor wrote that the 2026 defeat of the Left Democratic Front might represent the closing of a historical cycle that began with the 1957 Communist victory. He called it a possible “Red Sunset” for Indian Communism. 

In this context, let us see what has happened to the Latin American Left, which has been an inspiration for the Communists in Kerala.  

In Latin America, the Left is alive and kicking, clothed in moderate democratic socialism. Brazil, Mexico and Colombia are ruled by leftist Presidents Luiz Inacio de Lula, Claudia Sheinbaum and Gustavo Petro. 

Lula is in power for the third time after coming out from the corruption scandals and imprisonment. He defeated the pro-Trump rightwing extremist Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. He is contesting in the election in October 2026 trying for an unprecedented fourth time in the Brazilian history of modern times.

The Left came to power for the first time in Mexico in the 2018 election with Lopez Obrador as President. His charisma and Inclusive Development policies had helped the election of his chosen successor Claudia Sheinbaum, who has high approval ratings. She is a pragmatic, sober and mature social democrat. 

Gustvao Petro, who was elected as the first-ever Leftist President of Colombia in 2022, was a member of theurban guerrilla movement M-19 in his youth. When his term ends this month, he is likely to be succeeded by another Leftist Iván Cepeda Castro, who is leading in the poll ratings for the next election due on 31 May 2026. The Left in Colombia had been  marginalized in the last several decades because of the stigma attached to their perceived association with guerilla groups who had waged wars against the governments.The end of thewar withFARC after the 2016 Peace Agreement has sincethenopenedthespace in the political discourse for left-wing movements and leaders.

The Left has been alternating in power regularly with the conservatives in Chile. The last president of Chile from 2022 to 2026 was the young leftist Gabriel Boric. In the first round of presidential election held in November 2025, Jeannette Jara, a card-carrying communist, got the largest number of votes with 26.8% against the conservative runner-up Antonio Kast who got 23.9%. But in the second round, she lost to Kast who managed to get the support of other centre-right candidates. Although Jara is a communist (but moderate and pragmatic), she was the candidate of the larger leftist coalition. Going by the trend in the last three decades, the Chilean left could come back to power in the next election.

Pink Tide

The Latin American Left had its moment in the first decade of this century with the so called Pink Tide, when leftist leaders swept to power in many countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela,Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, besides some Central American Countries.  

The Leftist Presidents in the region had succeeded in reducing poverty and inequality with their pro-poor policies.  The region had witnessed remarkable economic growth and prosperity in the first decade of this century. The economists called it as the “ Decade of Growth” and "Decade of Latin America”. President Lula had emerged as a role model with balanced mix of pro-poor and business- friendly policies. Lula believed in giving adequate space for the private sector business to flourish and create wealth and employment to complement the development policies of the government. This development model is known as Lulaism or Brasilia Consensus, as against the neo-liberal Washington Consensus. Latin America had experienced the “Lost Decade” in the 1980s when Washington Consensus was imposed on many countries of the region.

Setbacks to the Left

Unfortunately, the extremist leftist presidents like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador) had stigmatized the Left in the region with their hubris, polarization and anachronistic rhetoric. The Chavistas in Venezuela have mismanaged the economy and damaged democracy. The country has suffered seriously with high inflation, devaluation of currency, shortage of foreign exchange and day to day needs of the people. The country became an easy target for Trump’s intervention and kidnapping of President Maduro, who is in an American jail.

The leftist government of Cuba has been strangulated and crippled by the illegal American sanctions in the last seven decades. President Obama admitted the failure of this unjust policy and started opening towards Cuba. But President Trump has resumed the hostile policies and has threatened to take over the country. He has imposed cruel blockade of fuel imports hurting the economy and making life miserable for all the Cubans. This is the most challenging time for Cuba, which has so far survived numerous American attempts of subversion, intervention, invasion and assassination attempts against Fidel Castro.

The leftist government of President Ortega has betrayed the noble Sandinista Revolution and has become a pathetic dynastic family dictatorship filled with corruption and scandals.

Evo Morales  became the first-ever indigenous president of Bolivia and remained in power from 2006 to 2019. During this time, he emancipated the native Indians who were marginalized by the oligarchs of European origin since colonization. The Bolivian economy became stable, growing and prosperous while millions of indigenous poor joined the middle class. But he had succumbed to hubris and self-destroyed his legacy, leftist political party and the process of empowerment of the indigenous population. He wanted to stay in in power indefinitely and did not allow his successor to govern. Now the power has gone back to the same old oligarchs. 

Future of the Left

Given the large number of poor people (over a quarter of the 600 million total population) and extreme disparity in wealth, the Left will continue to have space in Latin American politics. Of course, there is no scope for hard core communism. The leftists need to be moderate and pragmatic within the democratic framework. There will be reaction from the right, as it has been there historically. Besides, Trump has inspired and emboldened the new hard right leaders like Bolsonaro and Javier Milei. The oligarchic ruling and business elite will continue to resist leftist reforms and engineer right-wing rule whenever they can. . But they will not be durable. The cycle of Left vs Right will continue in the future, for sure.  

MN Roy

While talking about the Left in Latin America, it is interesting for Indians to note thatMN Roy, the Bengali revolutionary, was a co-founder of the Communist Party of Mexico during his stay in Mexico from 1917 to 1919. Roy had left India in 1915 to seek German assistance for armed revolt against British rule. He travelled through Southeast Asia, Japan and the United States. When the US entered the war in 1917, Indian revolutionaries linked to the Indo-German conspiracy came under surveillance. Roy fled to Mexico with his American wife Evelyn Trent. Roy’s political outlook changed profoundly in Mexico which had just come out of the historic Mexican Revolution. Itwas one of the most important revolutions of the 20th century. It transformed Mexico politically, socially and culturally, and deeply influenced later movements across Latin America. It began as a revolt against dictatorship but evolved into a massive social revolution involving peasants, workers, intellectuals and reformers.

Roy moved away from purely nationalist revolutionary politics toward international socialism and communism.He learned Spanish and wrote articles for the Mexican newspapers. In 1917, Roy and Mexican socialists founded the Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero). After seeing the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, they renamed it as Mexican Communist Party in 1919. This was the first communist party founded outside Russia.Roy’s activities in Mexico attracted the attention of Vladimir Lenin and the Communist International (Comintern). In 1920, Roy was invited to Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern. Lenin personally received him.The Mexican government had given Roy a diplomatic passport for his trip to Moscow. They gave the passport in the false name of Roberto Vila Garcia to avoid the British and American surveillance and harassment. Roy came back to India and gave up on communism in his later years. But he was so attached to Mexico and called it as 'the land of his rebirth’. Roy’s land of birth, Bengal has also given up on Communism. The Marxists who ruled West Bengal for 31 years from 1977 to 2011, have now been wiped out from the state.  

Mathew Kodath

While Malayalees have been getting inspiration from Latin America, Mathew Kodath, a Malayalee entrepreneur, has inspired Latin America with his films focussing on socio cultural issues. He has migrated to Honduras and is settled there with his Honduran wife. He is a prominent film maker in Spanish. Two of his successful films are: Amor y Frijoles (Love and Beans-It was Honduras’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film) and Quien paga la cuenta ( who pays the bill). In these films he has explored issues such as migration abroad, unemployment, remittances, cultural identity and emotional attachment to homeland which resonate with the people of Kerala besides Latin Americans. Hondurans have an American Dream like the Gulf Dream of Keralites. About 1.3 million out of the total population of 10 million Hondurans live in US. Their remittances are an important source of income for Honduras as it is for Kerala.

Mexico's Gender Parity Revolution

                                                       

Mexico has emerged as one of the world’s leading examples of gender parity in politics, with women occupying nearly half of the country’s positions of political power.

President Claudia Sheinbaum’s 22-member cabinet includes 11 women. 

Women hold 64 of the 128 seats in the federal Senate and 251 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. 

Nearly 44 percent of Mexico’s states — 13 out of 31 — are governed by women.

The growing centrality of women in Mexican politics was symbolically evident in the 2024 presidential election, when Sheinbaum’s principal opponent was also a woman, Xóchitl Gálvez.  While Claudia Sheinbaum is a distinguished climate scientist, Xóchitl Gálvez comes from the world of technology entrepreneurship. Their campaign debates and public exchanges were notably civil, substantive and mature, marked by dignity and mutual respect.

This is in sharp contrast to Trump’s lies, fake news, insults, vulgar language and hate speeches. Mexicans, who are the objects of ridicule and abuse by Trump note that he has shown respect to their President Sheinbaum, which is unusual and rare in Trump theater. He has even expressed admiration for her. On her part, Sheinbaum has handled Trump diplomatically, pragmatically and quietly without getting provoked by his shouting and screaming. She has shown discrete flexibility giving in to some of the demands of Trump but has refused to budge on fundamental sovereign issues of concern to Mexico.

In 2009, over 93 % of Mexico’s governors were men, as were 72.4% of federal deputies and 80.5% of senators.

Women are also strongly represented in the judiciary, with five women serving on Mexico’s nine-member Supreme Court.

This remarkable transformation has been driven largely by a landmark constitutional reform passed in 2019 known as “Paridad en Todo” (“Parity in Everything”). The reform amended several articles of the Mexican Constitution to establish gender parity as a constitutional principle across the state apparatus.

The law mandated equal representation of women in:

• the federal executive branch,
• the national Congress,
• state legislatures,
• the judiciary,
• autonomous constitutional bodies,
• municipal governments,
• and political party candidate lists.

The reform went far beyond conventional quota systems by embedding parity into the constitutional structure of governance itself. One striking aspect of Mexico’s reform was the broad political consensus behind it. The measure received support across ideological and party lines, transforming gender parity from a partisan demand into a question of democratic legitimacy.

Mexico’s electoral authorities and courts actively enforce parity provisions. Political parties can have their candidate lists rejected if they fail to comply with gender requirements.

Under the reform:

• political parties must nominate equal numbers of women and men for legislative elections,
• cabinets and senior executive appointments are expected to reflect parity,
• judicial and administrative appointments are required to move toward balanced representation,
• and the reform applies at both federal and state levels.

All the political parties of Mexico follow these constitutional guidelines. In the House of Deputies, Morena, the ruling party, has the highest female representation (57.7%) with 146 deputies out of 253 total in the House.

Mexico’s reforms emerged within a broader Latin American movement toward what is often called “parity democracy.” Countries such as Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Costa Rica have also adopted significant gender quota or parity laws during the past two decades. Argentina was the first country in Latin America — and one of the first in the world — to institutionalise a national legislative gender quota in 1991, a year before India introduced one-third reservations for women in local governments. 

What makes Mexico distinctive is the comprehensive nature of its 2019 constitutional reform. Unlike many quota systems that focus mainly on legislatures, Mexico extended parity requirements to executive and judicial institutions as well. Mexico’s reforms emerged through a combination of feminist mobilization, judicial activism, electoral reform and inter-party negotiations. This is remarkable given the fact that Mexico had been considered as a macho society.

Compared with weaker quota frameworks elsewhere, Mexico’s constitutional approach is considered more durable and structurally embedded. In many countries, quota systems stagnate or weaken when political conditions change; Mexico’s model enjoys greater resilience because parity has been elevated to a constitutional principle.

Mexico today ranks among the countries with the highest levels of female parliamentary representation in the world. The reform is frequently cited internationally as one of the most ambitious constitutional gender-parity measures enacted anywhere in the world. 

Mexico’s example could be studied by India which has recently tried and failed to pass a law for greater representation of women in the parliament. Female representation in Indian parliament is less than 15 percent. Of course, India’s socio political conditions, history, electoral system and political structure are different and more complex. Mexico’s proportional representation system and party-list model make parity easier to implement because parties can be legally compelled to alternate male and female candidates on electoral lists.

Mexico has also become the first country in the Global South- and in Latin America- to officially adopt a Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) in January 2020. The policy seeks to place gender equality, and women’s rights at the center of Mexico’s diplomacy, international cooperation, trade and multilateral engagement. At the COP25 climate negotiations, Mexico helped push for a Gender Action Plan related to climate policy.

On Earth As It Is Beneath - Brazilian Novel

 On Earth As It Is Beneath - Brazilian Novel 

It is a novel written by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, considered as one of the distinctive voices in contemporary Brazilian fiction. The book has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. 

One of the reasons why I was tempted to read it is the name of the translator, Padma Viswanathan. I had earlier read her translation of another Brazilian novel "São Bernardo" by Graciliano Ramos. Padma herself is a writer besides being a translator. 

 The story of “On earth as it is beneath” is about a prison in a remote part of Brazil. The prisoners, condemned to this hell hole have no hope for release or life-after. The warden of the prison Melquiades follows a macabre ritual during full moon nights. He lets a prisoner escape and then chases and hunts him with his gun, killing without fail. He justifies this action to himself on the logic that the convicts who themselves had killed and committed horrible crimes deserving the deadly punishment. He had inherited this sadistic nature from his father who was a policeman and later turned into a free-lance killer.

It is a short novel but leaves a powerful impact on the reader. It is deeply unsettling with its raw description of violence, cruelty, and mental decay. I was relieved that it ended quickly in 106 pages. 

America, América: A New History of the New World - Book by Greg Grandin

America, América: A New History of the New World - Book by Greg Grandin

“somos más americanos,
que el hijo de anglosajón

Quiero recordarle al gringo:
yo no crucé la frontera,
la frontera me cruzó.

We are more American than the sons of the Anglo-Saxons.

I want to remind the Gringo:

I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.

This song "Somos más Americanos" by the Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte is a common refrain from Mexicans who are subjected to the cruel shaming and abuse by Trump. The US annexed half of Mexican territory in the mid nineteenth century and has usurped even the name “America” from the hemisphere, while it is “América" for the Latinos.

Prof Greg Grandin of Yale University, the author of this book, says that his objective in writing this book is not to fuss over names but rather to explore the New World’s long history of ideological and ethical contestation. It is a long book of 743 pages which reads like the "one hundred years of solitude” the Magical Realism novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Grandin has given an elaborate account of the interaction between the US and Latin America, starting from colonial days until the second Trump administration.  The book, published in April 2025, has come at an opportune time when Trump has reasserted the US hegemony of the hemisphere with his “Donroe Doctrine” (Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine). Trump’s actions have reconfirmed yet again the famous prediction of the South American Liberator Simon Bolívar “The United States seem destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of liberty.”

Grandin has dug up history deep and come out with a number of interesting anecdotes and vignettes of the US-Latin America interactions. Some of them are predictable and others surprising. One of the incredible stories in the book is the mediation between US and Mexico by ABC Powers.

The US invaded Mexico on 21 April 1914 and occupied the port of Veracruz on the pretext that it was to prevent the shipment of arms by Germany to the Mexican military dictator Victoriano Huerta.  On 24 April, the ambassadors of the ABC Powers (Argentina, Brazil and Chile) offered mediation to resolve the conflict between Mexico and the US. This was, surprisingly, accepted by President Wilson. The negotiations started in Niagara on the Canadian side on 20 May. The ABC powers tabled three proposals: Mexican military dictator Huerta should resign; the US should withdraw its armed forces from Mexico; and a neutral candidate should succeed Huerta. The conference ended on 1 July. Huerta resigned on 15 July and went on exile to Europe. In September, Carranza from the democratic faction of Mexico took over as President. In November, US withdrew their forces. In March 1915, the US Congress passed a resolution thanking the ambassadors of the ABC countries and recommending award of Presidential medals of honor to them. After a series of meetings with Latin American delegates, the US joined with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Colombia, and Costa Rica in a collective recognition of Carranza as provisional president.  President Wilson hailed the innovation, saying that the collective recognition of Carranza showed that the cooperative relations of the Western Hemisphere could serve as a model for other regions and the world. An amazing story, indeed, at this turbulent Trump times.

Trump is not the first American President to use objectionable language against Latin Americans.  President Roosevelt ridiculed Venezuelan President Castro, calling him an “unspeakable villainous little monkey.” The US press painted the Venezuelan leader in extreme racist terms, creating a new standard of dehumanization of foreign leaders, especially leaders who threatened the property rights of foreign (American) investors. The diplomat Francis Huntington Wilson, Yale educated, described another economic nationalist, Nicaragua’s president José Santos Zelaya, as “unspeakable carrion.” Roosevelt thought Colombians were “contemptible little creatures” for opposing his Panama grab. 

In the late 1800s, the US and European corporations and banks started economic exploitation of Latin America. The United Fruit Company regularly overthrew governments in Guatemala and Honduras. The US banks financed many of the arms sales to Latin America. At least a third of all loans made in the years following World War I to Latin America was spent on arms. National City Bank floated a bond on behalf of Peru to pay for weapons. But Lima soon ran out of revenue with which to make its payments, so it worked out a deal with United Aircraft and Electric Boat Company to sell guano in the United States to pay off its debt. Freighters sailing to Peru dropped off TNT and weapons and picked up guano. Bombs floated south. Bird shit went north. 

Bolivia in 1908 had no foreign debt and had a small army. Two decades later, the country owed forty million dollars, much of it to Rockefeller’s Chase National. A significant portion of the loaned money had been used to supply arms to Bolivia. By 1929, 37 percent of government revenue went to service debt, and 20 percent went to the military. As the military grew more politically powerful within Bolivia, civil politicians were increasingly subordinated to its edicts. Standard Oil, which by 1921 had taken control of fifty million acres of Bolivian land, instigated the country to fight a border war against Paraguay in 1932-35, claiming falsely that the area had huge oil reserves.  Paraguay was supported by the British Royal Dutch Shell. The war ended in a stalemate with hundreds of deaths and the discovery that the surveyors’ reports were wrong and there was no oil below the ground. 

British merchants and banking houses also joined in the fatal game of loans and arms through extending credit and collecting debt; financing weapon purchases; advancing loans to feed armies. Then the bill came. London suppliers began presenting staggeringly high invoices for materiel they said they had shipped on credit during the early years of the war against Spain. Debt piled up, requiring the securing of more loans to service interest. British warships carted off millions of pounds of Potosí silver as interest payment. 

Not one Spanish American republic in the decades after independence could keep up with interest payments. Nations that couldn’t pay back what they owed weren’t so much denied credit as forced to accept ever more onerous terms. France had leveraged a dispute over a bond issuance to justify its 1861 invasion  of Mexico. Napoleon III, the French emperor installed Maxmilian I as the emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867.

Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany owed Latin American nations a significant amount of money for the wheat, beef, and nitrates they had purchased on credit during the four-year First World War.  They paid off this debt by offering, at cut-rate prices, all their leftover war materiel, arms and ammunition. Flooding the continent with weapons sparked political extremism, especially on the right, facilitating the rise of paramilitary organizations and inciting violence within and between nations.

While Trump has been using force and violence for deportation of immigrants, President Abraham Lincoln considered sending out the African Americans into Central America. On August 14, 1862, one year into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln received a deputation of free Black leaders at the White House, where he suggested Central America as a place they might go. Lincoln was committed to finding some spot, preferably not too far away, where the nation’s emancipated could live in peace. Upon taking office, Lincoln asked Secretary of State William Seward and Montgomery Blair to sound out the governments of Mexico and Central America to see if any might be amenable to taking in the United States’ population of African Americans. Lincoln named Reverend James Mitchell, who headed Indiana’s American Colonization Society, to run the federal Office of Emigration, which oversaw various schemes to encourage the self-deportation of free people of color. But Lincoln had to abandon this scheme after resistance from the Afro- Americans. 

The book reconfirms the reality that Latin America is condemned to be subjected to US hegemony, interventions and destabilization. The South American countries have some wiggle room to play the China card since China has become the largest market for their agricultural products and minerals, the largest trade partner, investor and infrastructure builder. But the Central American countries and Mexico which are more dependent on US for trade, migration and remittances have no option but to be on the receiving end of US domination. Despite this challenging constraint, it is admirable to see that the Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has managed Trump with her calm, intellectual and pragmatic manner showing firmness on issues of greater stake and flexibility on other matters. Trump has even expressed admiration for her and said that Mexico should be proud to have her as President. Her mature conduct and sophisticated style offers a stark contrast to the polarizing, extremist, uncouth and offensive words and actions of Trump and company. She is a climate scientist while Trump demonizes scientists.

In contrast to the Epstein-tainted US, Mexico has achieved gender parity by giving almost fifty percent share to women in the top executive, legislative and judicial positions, as mandated by a 2019 law. The Supreme Court, the Senate, the Lower House and the cabinet have almost fifty percent representation of women. The President is a woman. Her leading rival in the Presidential elections was also a woman. 

Grandin’s book is free from the usual bias and condescending attitude of US writers. He is objective and neutral in his observations and comments. His book is a valuable and comprehensive resource for Latin America studies.

Lula!: The Man, The Myth and a Dream of Latin America - biography by Richard Lapper

 Luiz Inazio Lula de Silva is not just another President of Brazil. He is the first one to rise from abject  poverty, breaking a long tradition of leadership dominated by political and economic elites.

The oligarchic business families could not imagine the country being ruled by a leftist trade unionist from a poor family without college education. Their reaction is brought out poignantly in this story. During his first election campaign, Lula was passing by the side of an elite school in a rich neighborhood. One of the students shouted “vote for Lula”. Taken by surprise, Lula thanked the boy but asked him why was a boy from a rich family support a leftist candidate. The boy replied, “Señor Lula. My father is a wealthy businessman. He says that if you get elected, you will ruin the business and the country with your leftist policies. He has promised to shift the family to Miami, if you were elected as president. I Love Miami”.

Lula has become president for the third time, overcoming the initial apprehensions of the businessmen. In fact, he has become a darling of the business community by promoting their interests both within and outside the country by including large delegations in his state visits. There were over 300 businessmen who had accompanied President Lula during his latest visit to India in February this year.

Richard Lapper, the author of the book, brings out vividly the long and incredible journey of Lula from a dirt poor family in the backward, arid and remote north east part of the country to the presidential palace in Brasilia. Lula’s journey starts in an old beaten up truck through 2500 kms of rough roads from his native village Caetés in the impoverished region of Pernambuco to São Paulo. Lula was seven years old during this 1952 journey along with his six siblings and mother as well as other emigrating neighbors.  Desperate to escape the poverty that had been exacerbated by two years of drought, his mother Dona Lindu was eager to rejoin her husband Aristides Inácio da Silva, who had made the same trip seven years earlier and got a job in Santos port near São Paulo . She sold the family’s plot of land, the primitive shack, the cow and the donkey to make the trip and join her husband. The difficult back-breaking journey, mainly over dirt roads, was an epic of endurance that would take 13 days. 

On arriving at Santos, Dona Lindu found that her husband was living with a new wife. He was angry with the surprise arrival of his family. While he gave some financial support, he became abusive and started beating up the first wife and her children. So she moved away from the husband and started a new life with her children who started working. Lula, joined one of his brothers in selling peanuts, oranges, and a coconut sweet called cocada on the streets in Santos. After a few years of schooling, he found a part-time position as an office boy in a small company.

Lula became a lathe operator after training in a public apprentice scheme and gradually got involved in a growing labour movement during the late 1960s, persuaded by his older brother Frei Chico who was a Communist Party member. After founding and then leading the trade union-based Workers’ Party (PT), Lula stated his political career. He stood in the election for membership of the São Paulo state legislature in 1982 and lost. In 1986, he got elected to the Federal Congress. He ran for president three times in 1989, 1994 and 1998 unsuccessfully. After this, many had written off Lula, dismissing him as an old-style labour unionist, out of touch with the new, more liberal and market-friendly public mood. But Lula surprised his critics. He moderated his goals, dropped the rabble-rousing tone that had marked his first forays into politics, and then surged to success. After winning the presidency twice successively in the 2002 and 2006, Lula left office in January 2011 with his popularity sky-high and as something of an international star. His success in maintaining economic stability, reducing poverty, and improving living standards was applauded by the Brazilians. He had evolved his own governance and development model called as Lulaism or Brasilia Consensus which was a balanced, pragmatic and mature mix of pro-poor and business friendly policies. He believes that the country needs a vibrant private sector to create wealth and employment to supplement the government’s efforts. He stood out as a role model for Latin America, polarized by the confrontation between left and right. 

Since the Brazilian constitution does not allow more than two consecutive presidential terms, Lula had got Dilma Rouseff elected to succeed him in 2010 and 2014. But she let him down by her naive and arrogant political style and mismanagement. She was impeached by the right-wing members of the Congress on a an insignificant budget management error. Lula was put in jail on some trumped up charges by the judges and prosecutors with a political agenda to discredit Lula and PT.  This created an opportunity for Bolsonaro, the extreme rightist, to come to power as president in the 2018 elections.  Bolsonaro went on to deepen political polarization and tarnish the country’s image, with his Trump-like combative, coarse and divisive policies..After spending 580 days in jail, Lula got exonerated and returned to politics . He won the presidency again in the October 2022 elections and has announced his intention to contest in the October 2026 election. 

But Lula is now a fading star and his political party PT has lost lot of voters. While Lula won in 

the last election, the PT suffered losses even in their strongholds. There have been some corruption cases in recent years recalling the public memory of the notorious Car Wash scandal. But Lula’s image got a boost after his successful stand against Trump’s tariffs and bullying.

The country has changed drastically with the rise of the Bible, Beef and Bullet constituencies which control the Congress and move the political agenda of the country. The poor who voted earlier for Lula have been hijacked by the new Evangelical churches, who have increased their sway over nearly one third of the population. The powerful unions of the manufacturing industries have been overshadowed by the service workers of the digital economy. Lula’s rhetoric does not appeal to the young population as it did to their parents. On the contrary, the new generation has gone right consumed by the false narratives and fake news in the social media dominated by extremist rightists and influencers.

So it would be challenging for the 80 year-old Lula to win in the coming election in October this year. But he might defy the odds, as he had done many times in his life.

Lapper has also give a detailed account of the rise of Marina Silva who has a similar story like Lula. Born in a poor rubber tapper family in Amazon, she rose to become the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change for the first five and a half years of Lula’s presidency. She even contested the presidential elections on her own in 2010, 2014 and 2018 but was unsuccessful.

Lapper has narrated the journey of Lula in the larger context of the history of Brazil, starting from the colonial period to the current situation in 2026. 

He has given a fairly objective and balanced portrait of Lula in this book. I found his earlier book Bible, Beef and Bullets: Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro”(published in 2021) also as informative and non-partisan. My review of the book in https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2021/06/bolsonaro-bible-beef-and-bullets.html

Lapper’s perspectives are refreshingly free from the typical western prejudices. This is because of Lapper’s own long journey. As a British student he was fascinated by Marxism and the sociopolitical situation in Latin America. He took to academia, and left-wing activism before becoming a journalist. He had learned Spanish and worked as a correspondent for nearly two years in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, attracted by the excitement of the revolutions sweeping through those countries. He was the Latin America editor of Financial Times for 10 years and had lived in Brazil between 2003 and 2011. Most importantly, he is married to a Brazilian. He had gained first hand knowledge of the Brazilians through interaction with the extended family and friends on his wife’s side. Since leaving the FT, he has continued to visit Brazil regularly, spending up to a quarter of the year there. 

Lapper’s book, which has just been published in February 2026, is a valuable additional source for those following Lula, Brazil and Latin America. 

Siamara: Tango of Argentine and Indian Fashion

Siamara, the founder of the Argentine Fashion brand this year, starts with this story, ”The brand reflects my personal story and the intersection of the cultures that shaped me. Through Siamara, I combine Indian textiles, craftsmanship, and color with Argentine silhouettes and contemporary style. The result is a collection of distinctive pieces that celebrate cultural fusion, individuality, and the beauty of textile traditions".



The young up and coming fashion designer says, "My story is deeply shaped by two cultures. My father is Indian, originally from Kerala, and my mother is an Argentine diplomat. During my childhood, my mother was posted in New Delhi as the Deputy Chief of Mission, and our family moved there together. I

lived in India for six years, between the ages of 10 and 16. Those years were incredibly formative for me and played a major role in shaping my aesthetic and creative perspective. Living in India opened my eyes to a world of textiles, color, and craftsmanship. I became fascinated by the richness of Indian fabrics, embroidery, and traditional techniques. What struck me most was the diversity of personal style that coexisted in the same place. In a single city street you could see women wearing vibrant sarees and embroidered kurtis, while others walked by in jeans and a T-shirt. Fashion felt expressive, layered, and deeply connected to culture. During those years I developed a deep appreciation for textiles and the stories they carry.

After our time in India, I returned to Argentina and finished high school in Buenos Aires in 2020. Coming back after living in such a colorful and textile-rich environment made the contrast in fashion very noticeable. In Buenos Aires, I observed that many women dressed in more neutral tones—mostly black—with simpler silhouettes. Compared to what I had experienced in India, personal style often felt more restrained and less experimental.

However, after the pandemic, I began to notice a shift. Following long months of lockdown, people seemed eager to express themselves again through clothing. There was a renewed interest in dressing well and exploring personal style, which made the fashion landscape feel more dynamic.

In 2021, I moved to the United States to study Fashion Business Management at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. The program gave me a strong foundation in the business side of fashion, from brand development and merchandising to marketing strategy and retail management. At FIT, I learned how creative vision can be translated into a sustainable brand and how to build a fashion business from concept to market”. 

With the above story, Siamara Fashion has taken off blending Indian ingredients and Argentine creativity.

Siamara’s website is https://siamara.com.ar/

Siamara’s father Thomas Francis, born in Thrissur, Kerala, calls himself as an Indo-Argentine artist. He went to Buenos Aires for textile business where he fell in love with Georgina Fernandez Destefano, an Argentine diplomat. 

This is yet another example of my joke, “The biggest risk of doing business with Latin America is…falling in love”. I have dozens of such examples I quote in my lectures to Indian businessmen to motivate them to take the Latin American market more seriously. 

After the marriage, Thomas left his business and became a painter. 

He has held exhibitions in Denmark, US, Argentina and India during the postings of his wife in different countries. Thomas says, “My first painting, titled “Prisoners of Paradise,” reflects that stage of my life, when I felt trapped despite having a happy personal and family life. The idea developed through long conversations with other husbands of my wife’s colleagues who were experiencing similar circumstances”. Thomas has used Indian and Argentine themes such as Rangoli and foot ball in his paintings. 

The young Siamara is following in the footsteps of two other Argentine fashion designers whose Indo-Argentine fusion labels have become success stories.

Monica Socolovsky of Argentina ran a Sathya Fashion brand business. As an ardent Sai Baba devotee, she had named her daughter and her brand as Sathya. She visited India three times a year to source Indian fabrics and accessories and had done over 100 visits. She exported her branded clothes to Latin America, Europe and the US. Her brand was part of the Argentine fashion scene for over four decades, I had organized an Indo-Argentine Fashion Show in 2010 ( when I was ambassador to Argentina) with her collection along with those of two Indian designers Nachiket Barve and Anita Dongre from Mumbai. Monica had passed away in 2023. 

My blog on her https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2009/03/from-faith-to-fashion-story-of-monica.html

Sayana Gonzalez of Argentina, married to an Indian businessman Gaurav Gupta, has a fashion brand “deWar”. She lives in Delhi and is a member of The Fashion Design Council of India. Sayana had worked as an assistant designer, a print designer and as a production manager for a high end manufacturer in Delhi. She had inherited the brand from her grand mother who lived in Paris.  https://dewarworld.com/.

I call Siamara, Monica and Sayana as the Tres Marias (in Spanish Three Marys) of Indo-Argentine fusion fashion