Using qualitative method of research, it is sought to analyze the public policies of water supply and the sewage treatment of the city of Manaus, from the year 2000, when these public systems were privatized. Through the methodological strategy of the Case Study one aims to discover why and how such policies get a dissatisfied performance, frustrating the expectations anticipated in the privatization process. Through discourse analysis, the information acquired through participant observation, interviews and documentary records is analyzed, bringing to light the contradictions of the private concession and the challenges of the universalization of water and sewage services in the city. Throughout the analysis we observe the interaction between several social actors, making sanitation policies an arena of conflicts, where divergent interests reside. The State, by granting private initiative the provision of water and sewage services, performs an important paper in the public policy in question. In this sense, we highlight the condescension of public power with inertia and lack of compliance of companies, benefited over the years at the expense of the suffering of the population, especially of those who live in the northern and eastern zones of the municipality. Concessionaires, in order to maximize their profits, do not prioritize the needs of the community, but carry out many practices that bring to light the exploitive character of the concession. The actors of the Civil society actors represent the initiatives of resistance to mercantilization of water, struggling for it to be taken as a common good and social right and pressing, even in a fragmented way, so that all the people from Manaus are recognized as citizens, being guaranteed the essential for their existence, regardless of the social class to which they belong. Facing this conflict, it is necessary to recognize the hegemony of the forces of capital that advance the natural resources of Amazonia, promoting the accumulation of wealth in the hands of small social sectors and arresting expressive population segments in conditions of deprivation and subcitizenship.