by GUILLAME BEAULANDE
Anything but blue: drawing water from a well at a Paraguayan landless peasants’ encampment on the banks of the Ñacunday River east of Asunción PHOTO/Norberto Duarte/AFP/Getty
The country has more water than anywhere else in Latin America, but its huge underground reserves are threatened by over-exploitation and worsening pollution.
The tap in Odina Moreo’s garden was dripping, and a few more drops sputtered as she tried to tighten it: ‘I can never turn it off completely — it’s such a waste. I only use it for washing and washing up, or to wet a cloth for the floor.’ She lives in one of 400 asentamientos or shantytowns round Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. In Paraguay’s Central department, rapid population growth, rural exodus and a failing public water supply system have led to a flourishing private market in water. As in neighbouring settlements, the residents of Moreo’s shantytown, where some houses are more than 30 years old, get their supply from private companies known as aguateras.
It’s relatively cheap, at 22,000 guaranis (around $3.70) for 8,000 litres a month, though that’s still twice what the state water company Essap (Sanitary Services Company of Paraguay) charges in the capital itself. However, Moreo said, ‘there’s often red sand in it. I have two children, and there’s no way I’m going to let them drink it. You can’t trust it.’ So out of her meagre pay as a seamstress, (around $175 a month) Moreo, like many other Paraguayans, buys bottled water. It costs 180 times more than the aguatera’s tap water, but is supposedly safe, meaning that it contains no pathogens; the aguatera’s water sometimes has to be treated at home before it can be drunk.
Paraguay’s underground water reserves, supposedly better protected than its surface water, are tested only intermittently. ‘The water quality monitoring people came by yesterday. They come once a year,’ said an employee of Santa Clara, the small family-owned aguatera that supplies Moreo. ‘The rest of the time, we pay a private lab to check it,’ said her colleague. Santa Clara, which is based a few hundred metres from Moreo’s house, draws its water from a welldrilled into the huge Patiño aquifer.
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