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Water
Shortages Threaten to Increase Violence and Disappearances in Mexico The U.S. government must fund water-saving efforts in Mexico
if it wants to quell the nation’s drug violence ·
By Jordan Kinard on February 15, 2023
 A farmer scuffles with a member of Mexico’s National Guard during a protest against the decision of the Mexican government to divert water from La Boquilla Dam to the U.S. as part of a 1944 bilateral water treaty between the two countries on September 8, 2020. Credit: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo In 2006, Mexico declared war against drug traffickers in the wake of escalating inter-cartel warfare. Since then, there have been more than 300,000 murders in thecountry, a death toll escalated by violence between law enforcement, the military andthe cartels. An official list of the missing has risen to over 100,000 people, called losdesaparecidos—the disappeared. Many of them are presumably among the roughly52,000 unidentified bodies in Mexican morgues. The disappeared are, legallyspeaking, neither alive nor dead; they include people whose remains are undiscoveredor unidentified, and others who may be still alive and held in captivity. In 2021 and 2022, with the No Están Solas project, I worked with Mexican human rights advocates who were trying to locate and identify the remains of some of the disappeared. I learned the crisis in Mexico is one with many faces: cartel violence, forced migration, and clashes between the Mexican government, its people and the drug traffickers who offer jobs, protection and resources, often through coercion. I believe the violence will worsen if we do not address a powerful new factor: climate change and its effect on Mexico’s water supply. Changing weather patterns, the failure of government institutions to accommodate growing and moving populations, and the realities of decaying infrastructure are reducing the availability of usable fresh water in several parts of Mexico. This, I believe, is adding to crime, civil unrest and migration, as people search for more habitable or safer ground. In the first half of 2021 Mexico had an average rain shortfall of 20 percent, and by2022 several states experienced shortfalls greater than 90 percent compared to expected levels. The loss of rainfall is putting greater stress on already over exploited aquifers and depleted reservoirs. To make matters worse, the government has mismanaged the water supply, failing to crack down on illegal pumping by cartels and farmers, and preferentially allotting scarce public water supplies to large companies. This has inflamed the water crisis and caused the brunt of drought to be endured by Mexico’s poorer and marginalized communities. From what I’ve seen, I believe that climate change will increasingly lead to the kind ofviolence that has defined the country’s drug war, much in the same way researchershave linked climate change to the Syrian Civil War. And here is where I think the U.S.can make a difference. The U.S. government has committed billions of dollars in aid toa war on drugs that has failed, with drug seizures at the US-Mexico border remaininghigh and drug-war related murders soaring since 2006. If the United Statesreallocated some of its drug war funding from militarized aid and law enforcement towater collection and distribution projects, this could reduce water’s role as a driver ofviolence and displacement. It was during my work cataloging mass graves and helping spread legal information topeople affected by disappearances that I saw how the distribution of violence was notrandom and saw how the disappearance crisis and the murder epidemic are extensionsof one another. It seems to me that disappearances and confirmed murders aredisproportionately concentrated in areas where water reserves are strained. Water access has long driven conflict in Mexico. Shortages of drinkable water create anew market for drug cartels who capitalize on soaring water prices by siphoning andreselling water from public utilities. At the same time the urban poor and farmers ,desperate for water are increasingly resorting to theft, kidnapping, and sabotage, alongwith peaceful protest in an effort to save themselves and their livelihoods. Governmentcrackdowns on these escalating disruptions pose a growing threat to Mexican civilians.Though long ignored by Mexico’s federal officials, state-sponsored violence isresponsible for many of Mexico’s unsolved deaths and forced disappearances. In 2020, Chihuahuan farmers occupied a dam in protest of Mexico’s treaty-obligedwater diversions to the United States while in a drought. In response, the Federalgovernment deployed the National Guard, which killed at least two people. More recently, disgruntled citizens in the states Nuevo Leon and Coahuila burned PVC pipestransporting water from their regions to more influential areas like Monterrey. Whileit’s hard to know if any of the people involved in this civil unrest were disappeared, itwould not surprise me. The water crisis is intensifying civil unrest in an already chaoticsituation, and I fear the ranks of dead including the disappeared will swell as cartelsexpand their influence and state-sponsored violence continues. According to the World
Bank, Mexico’s murder rate surged from eight per 100,000people in 2006 to 28 per 100,000 in
2020.
All this despite the fact that by 2016, theUnited States had given more than $1.5 billion in militarized aid for
Mexico’s drug war.Quite simply, if the goal of the U.S. in rendering aid was
to reduce
violence whilestrengthening
the rule of law, it’s made a bad investment. Indeed, the
U.S.government has acknowledged a need to change its approach to combat
violence andcartels in Mexico with the announcement of the Bicentennial Framework; however,the new framework
notably neglects water specific environmental factors.Additionally, in 2021
alone the United States increased by nearly $200 million itshumanitarian assistance to
Mexico and Central America to provide basic access tofood, water and shelter.
That is commendable, but if the water systems of these areas are left
unchanged then we can only hope for a sort of stable poverty with
millions always on the edge of water scarcity. Not only does the U.S. have the resources to aid Mexico’s water crisis, but it has the know-how. The Biden administration has given $1.7 billion to Southwestern Indigenous tribes near the U.S.-Mexico border to help them improve water infrastructure. These efforts could be repeated in the geographically similar areas of Mexico, as the Environmental Protection Agency, through the Border Water Infrastructure Grant Program, already does in a limited area. The EPA bankrolls Mexican water projects, but only if they occur within 62 miles of the U.S. border and directly affect human and environmental health in the United States........................... READ MORE AT:
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