Privatization Blues.(Eletropaulo-Metropolitana Electricidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil)

When Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva was sworn in as Brazil's president in January, he vowed to uphold all existing contractual agreements that he inherited from his predecessor. That was a big promise: Fernando Henrique Cardoso had sold off scores of state companies to the global private sector, raising $103 billion from the auctions. But some of those firms are now putting Lula's pledge to the test. The U.S. conglomerate AES, for example, missed a deadline last month for paying $329 million on the billion-dollar debt it acquired with the purchase of the state-owned utility Eletropaulo. Officials of a government development bank refused to extend the deadline, suggesting they may be ready to begin foreclosure proceedings against AES, a move that would in effect restore public-sector control over the electric-power company. "Both parties are still talking," said an energy-industry insider close to the negotiations.

Could the Eletropaulo case trigger a rollback of other unprofitable, or controversial, privatization deals? Worried foreign investors hope not. Many Latin Americans will remember the 1990s as the Great Fire Sale Decade: from shipyards to steelworks, hundreds of billions of dollars in assets changed hands, remaking the skylines from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego. Out went the lumbering, money-losing dinosaurs of the state- led economy with their alphabet soup of acronyms--YPFB, Entel, Telebras. In came Telefonica, Vivendi, BBVA and other standard-bearers of a new, globalized world. The sell-off brought consumers many benefits--a new phone line could be installed within a few days instead of months, for example--but a price also had to be paid. The rates charged by Eletropaulo and all other newly privatized electric-power and phone companies have soared, creating a consumer backlash that has swept across the hemisphere. "We want to get our companies and natural resources back," thundered Bolivian opposition leader Evo Morales last year. "We can't allow them to be concentrated in the hands of a few transnational corporations." That message helped Morales finish a surprising second in the 2002 Bolivian presidential elections.

Other politicians in the region have adopted a similar stance. In Argentina, where long-suffering consumers once welcomed the sale of inefficient state enterprises, Peronist presidential candidate Nestor Kirchner has called for a revision of all government contracts with the private firms that operate the country's passenger railroads. Kirchner is responding to growing public dissatisfaction at the poor service offered by some of the private railroad operators. In Peru, former president Alan Garcia has restored some of his political clout by pointedly attacking the long-distance phone rates charged by the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica, which acquired the state phone company in 1994. A 1990 opinion survey by the Belo Horizonte polling firm Vox Populi found that about 75 percent of all Brazilians favored privatization policies; a decade later that figure had fallen to 25 percent.

What happened? When prices rise, especially for basic services, foreign owners make an easy target for angry customers. For example, in the fall of 1999, a consortium led by the California engineering corporation Bechtel won a 40-year concession to provide water to the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. Within weeks of its arrival, the company announced hefty rate increases that, in some cases, doubled or even tripled water bills. The price hikes triggered a general strike and violent clashes between police and irate demonstrators in February 2000 that left one dead and hundreds injured. The unrest was so severe that Bechtel managers fled the country. The water contract was abruptly canceled. A spokesman for Bechtel argues that the government raised the rates, by an average of 35 percent, to pay back debt accumulated by the public utility that had previously operated the system.

Experts say the street protests and campaign rhetoric do not presage a wholesale state takeover of companies that went private in the ...