ABSTRACT
Latin America was the first region to adopt neoliberalism as its hegemonic model, as well as the earliest to develop and implement explicit alternatives. In Latin America, struggles against water privatization have played an essential role in delegitimizing the neoliberal model, such as the infamous “Water War” in Cochabamba in 2000 and the constitutional referendum in Uruguay in 2004 (Kohl and Farthing 2006, Taks 2008). Thanks to these and other struggles that seek to defend water as a human right and common good, Latin America has changed from being a region in which the neoliberal model was dominant to a territory of hegemonic instability in which alternatives are being sought and contested (Sader 2009). For this reason, the world is looking to Latin America for alternative models of service delivery, which challenge the commercializing logic of neoliberal capitalism.
