Bolivia is poor. Many people have incomes of one hundred dollars a month or less. Those same people found their water bill had soared after Bechtel came in, bought and started to adminster the water system. From a $5.00 a month bill Bolivian peasants found their bills being raised to $20.00 a month for water use. Imagine paying $500.00 a month for water on a $30,000 a year income. And that water bill would not include dishwashers, lawn sprinklers and hottubs but water use that is, in many cases, restricted to one or two hours a day.

Bechtel is not so poor. They hold a 50% stake in the International Water Ltd, a British led consortium that bought the city of Cochambamba's water system from the Bolivian government for $20,000. It was a good price for a system worth millions. Revenues of Bechtel in 1998 were $12.8 billion.

Despite the good deal and the company's wealth, Cochabamba residents found their water rates being doubled, tripled and even quadrupled. A spontaneous uprising of close to a 100,000 people was the result. The spin put on the uprising by Bechtel, ran as follows:

"Several wealthy interests paid poor people - many bused in from outside the area - to demonstrate against the concession." Evidently the PR department forgot to check to see if there was bus service in and out of Cochabamba. There wasn't.

Another charge leveled was that narco-traffickers were behind it. To quote a local cabdriver:

"It's a big lie. I'm not a narco-trafficker. If I were why would I be driving a cab? The farmers aren't narcotraffickers either."

The people of Cochabamba don't have much. They don't have microwaves or dishwashers or color-coordinated decor or wide-screeen TV. But they do seem do have common sense and honesty and a grip on reality, which might, in fact, have something to do with less TV.

Bechtel has bucks, connections, and lots of spinmeisters. Still they lost.

I find that when I talk to people in the U.S. about corruption here they respond by saying things like "It's so overwhelming?" or "There's nothing I can do anyway." Maybe they need to spend their next vacation in Bolivia.