Author: Alberto Acosta

  We reprint here a translation of an article written by the eminent Ecuadorian economist and activist Alberto Acosta to celebrate the recent victory of a popular referendum on water rights in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Acosta uses the occasion to develop a trenchant and stirring account of what is at stake in the struggle to secure the rights to and of water, a struggle synonymous, in his telling, with the defense of democracy, nature, and life itself. In addition, he uses the occasion to trace the successes (and failures) of a specific tactic for securing water rights,...