The municipalities of Armação dos Búzios, Arraial do Cabo, Cabo Frio, Iguaba Grande and São Pedro da Aldeia, belonging to the so-called Região dos Lagos, a coastal and tourist region in the state of Rio de Janeiro, had their water privatized in 1998. Since 1998. then, water management was carried out by Prolagos, a company belonging to AEGEA Sanitation – a sanitation holding that includes companies operating in forty-nine municipalities in eleven states in five Brazilian regions. Brazilian economic policy is once again dominated exclusively by neoliberalism and in this context, water (and sanitation) is once again one of the main neoliberal targets in Brazil. Specifically in the case of Rio de Janeiro, which is going through a severe economic crisis, the privatization of its sanitation company, the State Water and Sewage Company of Rio de Janeiro – CEDAE, was given as a guarantee to the federal government in a loan of 2.9 billions of reais. After two decades of Prolagos' activities, this article seeks to consider the importance of maintaining the supply of sanitation services by the public authorities, confronting the neoliberal discourse with the reality of the localities that privatized their water, demonstrating through official data that the management based on making profits, which is the case of Prolagos, makes universal access to water difficult, promoting a new type of scarcity for those who cannot pay for it, and that favors another example of environmental injustice in the state of Rio de Janeiro.