Mexico water crisis in spotlight on World Water Day

But as water becomes more scarce, activists are not the only people living under threat in Mexico. Problems of water scarcity have led Courthouse News to the northern state of Nuevo León, where reservoirs nearly dried up completely last summer; to Ecatepec, north of the capital, where mafias run an illicit water trade; and to the heart of Mexico City, where sprawling mixed-use developments threaten the already dwindling water supply by using millions of gallons per day. 

Several of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s pet megaprojects also threaten Mexico’s water supplies. Environmentalists have warned of the risks posed by the Maya Train to the system of subterranean rivers and sinkholes known as cenotes. And AIFA, Mexico City’s new airport near Ecatepec, is using inordinate amounts of water and will use much more as the facility sees more traffic. 

Complaints of water scarcity are popping up in more and more places in Mexico. A hotel owner in the surfer’s paradise of Puerto Escondido, on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast, recently said her main worry is now water. She has been forced to make weekly purchases from tankers just to have enough for guests at her five-bungalow vacation property. 

And concerns over polluted water supplies can be found all over Mexico, as well. 

“Seventy percent of our water in Mexico is contaminated to some degree,” said Ricardo Ovando, an activist with the nonprofit Agua Para Todxs (Water For All). 

He and his fellow water protectors trace all of these problems back to one root cause: the 1992 National Water Law signed by then-President Carlos Salinas de Gotari ahead of the 1994 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 

“The law obviously privileged the companies that came to invest in Mexico under NAFTA,” said Ovando. “It is a law that tolerates water pollution. It is a permissive law that has led us to a serious crisis, because it also allows for the privatization of potable water, sewage and sanitation services.”

That law took the power of water service controls from local and municipal authorities to the president of Mexico. The change was an enormous boon for industry, but it has wreaked havoc on local water supplies. 

“It creates a system of water concessions based on the free market that are given on a first-come-first-serve basis,” said Ovando. 

Mexico is now paying the steep price for decades of this kind of water management. More than 514,000 water concessions were granted from 1989 to 2017, according to Ángel Martínez, an employee of Mexico’s National Water Commission (Conagua) and activist who attended a protest outside the commission’s offices in Mexico City on Wednesday.

“These concessions favored real estate developers, agricultural and pig farms, companies making soft drinks, cement, sugar and textiles, as well as the automobile industry,” said Martínez.

Conagua declined official requests for interviews.

The concessions had slowed dramatically in recent years thanks to the work of a woman named Elena Burns, a member of Agua Para Todxs who served as Conagua’s deputy director from September 2020 to October of last year, when she was suddenly and unceremoniously fired and blocked from entering the agency’s offices one morning. 

Conagua said in a press release that she had been ousted due to “a need to accelerate the granting of concessions."

Agua Para Todxs is demanding the passage of a new national water law based on human rights and the idea that water is a common, rather than commercial good. 

“The overarching spirit of the current water law is one that views water as merchandise, but the one we’ve proposed does not treat it like that,” said Carlos Vargas of Agua Para Todxs, who also attended Wednesday’s rally outside the Conagua headquarters. “It treats water as a common good that must be managed with equitable and sustainable citizen participation.”

Similar calls were made at a march in downtown Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon, but they may not have been as loud as organizers had hoped. Only around 60 of the 400 demonstrators expected by police turned up for the march.

Colorful signage and cute children in fish outfits were enough to catch the eyes of Rogelio Martínez and his wife, who were visiting the capital from Guadalajara. They said that while they had yet to see problems with their water supply in the state of Jalisco, they are indeed worried about the water crisis, because they hear horror stories from their relatives in Monterrey, Nuevo León.

“Yes, what the marchers are saying is right, we give too much water to big business like industrial beer brewers,” said Martínez.

Water issues were also among the reasons that activists from Oaxaca’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec held a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City on Tuesday to denounce U.S. Special Climate Envoy John Kerry’s visit to the region to oversee advances on another water-guzzling megaproject: the Interoceanic Corredor. 

The project is an industrial and transportation belt running between Mexico’s Pacific and Gulf coasts that the governments of both Mexico and the United States hope will give the Panama Canal a run for its money. 

Kerry did not make public statements during his trip, nor did his office answer questions sent via email. López Obrador said in February that the United States would fund four wind farms in the region.

Protesters like activist Miguel Ángel García denounced Kerry's visit, calling the project a “farce of so-called green capitalism.” Despite their eco-friendly reputation and promises to improve local economies, the wind farms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are big polluters, primarily through oil leaks, and have led to conflicts over land rights between locals and the companies that operate them. 

“Water is a serious problem for all of the megaprojects of this government,” said García. “In his delirious, messianic, pharaonic vision, López Obrador is not worried about the future. He just wants to go down in short-term history as a great hero.” 

Back in Morelos, Zapata González and other residents are feeling the effects of the president’s ambitions acutely, and the project has yet to go fully online. It remains in a limited testing phase, because there is already not enough water to operate at 100%.

“It is in everyone’s interest that the PIM does not go fully online, because if it does and Morelos rises up, the uprising will be nationwide,” said Zapata González with a boldness that must be genetic. 

“The only thing the president is achieving is making the people want to rise up, and I can assure you that if they rise up like they did for the War of Independence, like they did for the Revolution, there is no human power that will be able to stop that.”

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