By Reilly Capps

CUSCO, Peru — They stop trucks, these women, with their knitting needles.

For two weeks, they’ve been knitting sweaters by the side of one of Peru’s main highways, the one that connects this city with much of the rest of the country — protesting the Peruvian government’s plans to dam a nearby river and build a hydroelectric plant, which they say would divert water away from their farms.

The road is barricaded by a pile of rocks, and the women urge the trucks and cars piling up behind them to flip a U-ey. They won’t throw rocks at your car, the women say sweetly. They would never do that. But, they ask: notice how you don’t see any men around here? Well, the men are down the road a bit. And Peru has plenty of rocks.

The protest here — which also concerns mining revenues — is like similar protests that rock the world from Thailand to Brazil, in that they’re all about the question of who owns land and water, and what they should be used for. It often comes down to a nasty decision between water and juice.

Water and life, of course, are virtually the same thing. (The Mars probes don’t have a loudspeaker yelling “Hey, any little green men round here?” They sniff around for water.) But as developing economies advance — powered by electricity — dams seem more and more necessary as a reliable power source for a world that’s got to wean itself off oil and coal.

But hydroelectric plants don’t seem necessary to these little women, dressed in native skirts and bowler hats, who are losing money every day they aren’t working their farms. “It’s worth it,” one woman tells me. If they don’t have water, they’ll never work their farms again. They’re scared that the government is coming to rejigger the whole natural system, to divert the ancient hydrological cycle of snows that fall on the peaks then melt into streams then trickle down the valleys to their farms. To shove a dam in the middle could be like clamping down an artery.

How serious are these people about their water? Peruvians have battled over water for centuries. But recently, groups of protesters shut down the main square of Cusco, and they burned the small town of Tacna, and they promise to spread the protests throughout Peru. Already, three protesters have been killed, dozens of demonstrators and police have been sent to the hospital, civil liberties have been suspended, and the army may be coming to shut it all down.

Protesters in Cusco called for socialism — “Years of capitalism,” one sign read, “brings centuries of misery” — and of course socialism isn’t the answer, but when you squat near the wheel well of a huge truck, hearing these weather-beaten, world-weary women list their complaints about dams that divert their water, mines that snatch the gold from under their feet, and politicians in the capital who don’t give a flip, it’s impossible not to think a socialist thought or two:

People own land and water — not the government, not the power companies, not the politicians, and you can’t suck the life out of one community to send juice to another, and in any event there’s no excuse for treating people this badly.

The protesters are almost certainly doomed to some level of failure, if only because their demands are so sweeping: they want the president removed and the constitution rewritten. But at least these remote villages are angry enough to stand up, and the other day the government said it was willing to rethink the dam project in light of this disturbance.

Will that change things? Not sure. Protests continue. And after we turned our van around and traveled the next day, on a Peruvian bus that took the back roads around the protest, a small boy picked up a rock and hurled it at the side of our bus, and not just because he’s not a great knitter.

– Reilly Capps recently wrote more about his travels at the Washington Post Web site.