GUADALAJARA, Mexico — For months, working and oppressed masses across Jalisco have opened their taps to a brown stream that some protesters have dubbed “tamarind water”— unsanitary, undrinkable, and dangerous water. On Sunday, October 11, at 11a.m., a peaceful protest of thousands began a march to the governmental palace to demand that the State be held responsible for its total abandonment of poor and working class people in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area and was met within two hours by violent State repression.
In a stroke of horrific irony, the police opened hoses upon the protesters, hitting them with huge, high-pressure jets of water amid chants that “water is life, you can’t privatize that!” The Old State continued its attack by launching tear gas, which some courageous protesters successfully fought back at the police. Two protesters have been made political prisoners, and activists across the city have called for them to be freed after the information was shared by the anti-imperialist Guadalajara Palestine Solidarity Network.
In Guadalajara, as in many places across Mexico, Latin America, and the globe, exploited and oppressed masses must pay for water due to a water crisis caused by privatization, austerity, and the capitalist class’ control and unconscionable management of the water supply. Residents in Jalisco have, in recent times, reported not only a brown color in the water coming out of their taps but also a smell of excrement, leaving them unable to bathe before going to work. Locals who can afford it turn to bathing with bottled water. Those who can’t are left with no recourse but to take to the streets and fight.
The events in Guadalajara have transformed a prolonged public health crisis into a broader struggle over accountability and repression. Months of foul, discolored water followed by tear gas, high pressure water jets, and mass arrests have made clear that the struggle over clean water is also a struggle against the semi-colonial, semi-feudal country, bureaucratic-capitalist State, and its response when the masses struggle for their necessities.
[Image Source: Photo by Rafael del Río @rafadelriofoto]
