Cross-Border Clash Signals Growing Dispute As Mexico Drowns In Water Debt

Temperatures along the arid U.S.-Mexico border remain as hot as its perception in the debates.

Last August was the driest in 90 years, leaving Mexico unable to pay its water obligations to the superpower next door. Mexico’s deadline to pay off these obligations was October 24th. In early October, drought-hit farmers joined together at one of the control points of Chihuahua’s Dam of La Boquilla to fight the Mexican National Guard. The farmers, armed with sticks, rocks, and homemade shields, were protesting against Mexico’s decision to lift the dam. To contain the protests, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador chose to freeze bank accounts in Chihuahua, where many of the protestors live. The farmers quickly surrendered. One protestor, Jaime Torres, was grievously wounded, and his wife and fellow protestor, Jéssica Silva, was shot and killed on site.

In 1944, Mexico and the United States agreed in a landmark treaty to share the waters of the cross-border Colorado and Rio Grande rivers. Given Mexico’s late payment, as part of the agreement between the two neighbours, Mexico needs to repay the U.S. by releasing 512 million cubic meters of water annually. However, the treaty includes neither how noncompliance will be addressed nor the steps the U.S. could take if the water is not released.

But the water exchange agreement between the two nations has long been tense. Mexican farmers fear that sending the water north could dramatically devastate their livelihoods and families. “These tensions, these tendencies, are already there, and they’re just made so much worse by climate change,” says Christopher Scott, a professor of water resources policy at the University of Arizona. The endless droughts caused by a warming planet have made the shared waters along the border more valuable than they have ever been. This intensifies the stakes for both nations.

Rural Mexican farmers “are in a fight for their lives,” Scott says, “because no water, no agriculture; no agriculture, no rural communities.” Indeed, Victor Velderrain, who helped lead the takeover, declared, “This is a war. To survive, to continue working, to feed my family.”

The Chihuahua revolt has alarmed farmers and politicians in Texas. If the water debt is not repaid, farming operations in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley could be disrupted. United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was called in to persuade Mexico to make the payment, and federal forces were spotted occupying the dam to monitor water delivery in February. As a consequence, activists in Chihuahua set fire to government buildings and cars, and briefly held a group of politicians hostage. Inflexible and betrayed, farmers have refused to end their occupation of the dam. For weeks, they have blocked a principal railroad used to ferry industrial goods between Mexico and the U.S.

The protestors believe the sacrifices were worth it. Jéssica Silva, the woman murdered during the La Boquilla protest, “was defending what belongs to us,” her father, José Luis Silva said.

As population growth and climate change increase competition over drinkable water, this cross-border clash gives us a glimpse of the water wars to come.

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