Shell casings of bullets fired by municipal police atop plat map showing illegal wells
in Flores Magón region / Tom Barry
Tom Barry
(Published in The Desert Exposure, April 2013, at: http://www.desertexposure.com/201304/prt_201304_water_wars.php )
“Mennonites got up like medicine show rubes in their straw hats and bib
overalls and a row of children…”—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1995)
Mexican Mennonites are a curiosity.
Always the same peculiar appearance: the men in bib overalls
invariably leading the way, their women forever a step or two behind in
flower-print dresses that drop down to dowdy black shoes, and a brood of
children invariably in tow.
They are a people apart—set apart from Mexican society by
their Old World attire but also by their skin color (Northern European white)
and by their Platt-Deutsch language (a Dutch-influenced Low German dialect).
It’s as if they came from another century, another hemisphere.
When shopping at Costco in El Paso or when visiting the Pink
Store in Palomas (or most anywhere in Chihuahua), you may, on occasion, see
these Old World farming families, and then turn your head to stare and wonder:
Where did they come from, where do they now live, and how have they managed to
stay so exclusive and removed from our rapidly modernizing society?
Unlike the Mormon settlers (famously the Romneys) in
Chihuahua, Mennonites don’t intermarry outside their ethnic and linguistic
communities), don’t proselytize, and normally don’t interact socially with
non-Mennonites.
While most
Mennonite men speak Spanish at varying levels of fluency, Mennonite women
generally aren’t conversant in Spanish—or any language other than their sect’s
German dialect. Education beyond sixth grade is rare, healthcare is primitive,
and medical conditions caused by inbreeding are widespread.
Lately, part of the curiosity about Mexican Mennonites is
how these fundamentalists now stand at the vanguard of a revolution in land
management in Mexico’s arid north. Over the past decade, Mexican Mennonites
have been changing their style—not how they dress or interact socially but
their traditional farming patterns.
Once forbidden as a transgression of God’s natural laws,
irrigated agriculture backed by increasingly deep wells and the most advanced
farming machinery has become the norm. Mennonite farmers are meeting—and taking
advantage of—the challenges of climate change and intensifying drought cycles
by embracing the most unsustainable practices of capital-intensive,
resource-depleting agribusiness.
With large families—typically six or more
children—Mennonites in Chihuahua routinely outgrow their original colonies,
obligating them to establish new farming colonies. Leaving the original
colonies, they are converting barren rangeland and desert expanses into
agribusiness plantations by tapping groundwater reserves with new wells
descending to unprecedented depths.
Nowhere is this phenomenon so evident as in the new
Mennonite colonias that lie directly along the Chihuahua-New Mexico border.
“Curious and curiouser,” you might observe.
Recently, Mennonite expansionism into new areas of Chihuahua
has set off what could well be described as the first water wars of the
climate-change era. The Mennonites are not alone in buying up abandoned
rangeland ravaged by unprecedented drought and turning desert into lush
farmland, but they account for an estimated 95% of the new agribusiness
operations in Chihuahua.
For the past nine decades, the relations between the
Mennonites and the Mexicans have been largely amicable—in part because there is
little direct interaction with the Mennonite enclaves, in part because
Mennonite agriculture has boosted the regional economy (and been an important
source of seasonal farm labor for surrounding communities), and in part due to
awe of Mennonite productivity and their intense work ethic. The modest,
unassuming and pacific behavior of the Mexican Mennonites has also won the respect
of Chihuahuenses.
Police approaching to stop me taking photos / Tom Barry
Over the last year, however, the traditional
Mennonite/non-Mennonite coexistence has started to shatter. As the Mennonite
colonies have expanded to previously uncultivated areas of the state, the
proliferation of hundreds of deep wells for irrigation is rapidly depleting
aquifers and basins as neighboring farmers and ranchers see the yields from
their shallower wells dramatically diminish.
Mennonite colonization has long been driven by the hunger
for new lands to support ever-growing families and communities. Echoing a
common story, Sara, a teacher at an elementary school in the border colonia of
El Camello, told me: “Ten years ago we moved north from Cuauhtémoc because
there wasn’t any more land or water.”
For four centuries,
land hunger and escaping the sprawl of Babylon have driven a Mennonite global
diaspora. Over the past few years, as Chihuahua suffers a drought at levels not
experienced since the 1940s, there is widespread acceptance among Chihuahuenses
that climate change is intensifying and prolonging traditional drought cycles.
One result has been escalating demands by small farmers and
members of ejidos (government granted
land), along with environmental organizations, that the federal and state
governments halt and reverse the proliferation of deep wells, leading to heated
and sometimes violent incidents.
The most tragic and ominous was the Oct. 21 assassination of
a leader of the small farmers’ organization El Barzón and his wife. They had
been organizing against the illegal and unsustainable pumping of groundwater by
a Canadian mining company and new agribusiness operations in central Chihuahua.
The murdered couple had also been associated with the newly formed Colectivo de
Defensores del Agua del Desierto Chihuahuense.
Several months previously, on July 2, the first shots of the
new water war in Chihuahua were fired by rogue police in an unsuccessful
attempt to end the mobilization of more than 300 small farmers who had gathered
to prevent the drilling by Mennonite farmers of yet another illegal well south
of Flores Magón. Wielding semi-automatic weapons, the police barged into the
gathering of unarmed farmers and forcibly attempted to confiscate the camera of
a reporter/photographer—me—who was chronicling the Barzón-organized action.
Matín Solís confronts government ministers and Conagua officials
at ad-hoc meeting in Palacio de Gobierno that night / Tom Barry
When the farmers pushed closer to prevent the police from
successfully seizing my camera, the uniformed gunmen began firing up in the air
and into the ground—a confrontation that is now regarded as the first skirmish
in the new water wars.
At a late-night meeting in the Palacio de Gobierno in
Chihuahua City, top state and federal officials met with the frightened and
indignant farmers and agreed to form a collaborative working group to identity
and shut down illegal wells in that water basin. In response, a few days later
a quickly organized small group of Mennonite farmers declared that they would
protect their wells and their livelihoods, taking up arms if necessary despite
their religiously professed pacifism.
Over breakfast, the morning of the fateful mobilization,
Martín Solís, the Barzón leader who in June had launched the initiative to
identify illegal wells and work with the government to shut them down, told me:
“Look, the main problem is climate change, which is increasingly affecting
Mexico’s arid northern regions. As we see it, these dramatic changes in the
climate are intensifying the droughts we have always had here.”
But it is more than nature gone awry, he added, “There is
the underlying and persistent problem of corruption and bad governance,
specifically in this case the failure of the government to apply the laws and
regulations about water use.”
While government institutions like Conagua (National Water
Commission) are primarily responsible for the proliferation of unsustainable
well-drilling and irrigated agriculture, “the main beneficiaries have been the
Mennonite farmers who have the money to bribe and pay for illegal permits,” he
said.
“We are now cultivating 200,000 more hectares (494,210
acres) than the subsurface water basins can sustain,” Solís said, “This has
mostly happened in the past five years, principally by Mennonite producers, 95%
by our calculations, as cattle ranches are converted to agribusiness operations
without anyone really knowing how much water is available.”
The new year has brought little improvement in the water
crisis across the border and no diminishment of the tensions. In an attempt to
assuage rising tensions with the Mennonites and to allay the rising fears that
climate change and the continuing drought will destabilize the society and
economy of northern Mexico, President Peña Nieto did what Mexican governments
always do.
On Jan. 13, Mexico’s new president announced the creation of
a new bureaucratic initiative, called the Programa Nacional Contra La
Sequía—basically a crop and cattle insurance program to compensate select
farmers and ranchers from losses suffered from the continuing sequía (drought).
“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a peculiar
people.”
—Peter 2:9, King James Bible
Mexican Mennonite insularity is largely self-imposed and
self-defined.
Like the Mormons who established their first colonies in
Chihuahua in 1885, the Mennonites regard themselves as special, chosen and
undeviatingly righteous. The Mexican Mennonites, who emigrated from Canada to
Chihuahua in the 1920s, believe that they are literally God’s people, the true
tribes of Israel.
Mennonites are followers of Menno Simons (1496-1561), an
Anabaptist leader who was a contemporary of the Protestant Reformers in the
first half of the 16th century. Search for land to establish their self-reliant
communities led the Mennonites across Europe and eventually into Russia. Their
Biblical fundamentalism mandated that these chosen people continually flee the
new Babylons: “Come of here, my people that ye be not partakers of her sins,
and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4).
In 1870 the ancestors of today’s Mexican Mennonites
emigrated from Russia to Canada, bringing with them a religious determination
to transform frontier territories into productive farming districts. But the
insistence by the Canadian provincial governments that the Mennonite children
attend public schools spurred yet another emigration—this time to the sparsely
inhabited valleys, basins and intermontane plains of Mexico’s largest and least
populated state, Chihuahua, in the 1920s.
The roughly 80,000
Mennonites—known commonly by other Mexicans as menonitas or menones—who
currently live in Chihuahua are Mexican citizens—as Mexican as the next
Mexican. Their pickups have Mexican plates, they hold Mexican birth
certificates, and they vote (usually as a bloc) in local and national
elections.
But unlike other
Mexicans they benefit from a Privilegium—an agreement between Mennonite
colonizers and national governments that bestows special status and privileges.
In Mexico in 1921,
President Alvaro Obregón granted the archly conservative Altkolonier Mennonites
from Canada the right to establish agricultural enclaves in Mexico—with
sparsely occupied Chihuahua being the principal destination.
The Privilegium,
modeled after similar agreements around the world, specified that the Mexican
government would allow the emigrating Mennonites to satisfy their “desire to
establish yourselves as agricultural settlers in our country.” And the
government agreed that the Mennonites would not be obligated to serve in the
military, swear oaths or attend public schools.
What is more, the revolutionary-era Mexican president agreed
to allow that “you may administer your properties in any way or manner you
think just” and “may establish among yourselves economic regulations.”
More than nine decades later, it seems—at least at first
glance—that little has changed. The Mennonite women continue to bundle their
long hair in black, blue or green headscarves. Straw hats still remain common
headgear for Mennonite men and boys, although increasingly they sport baseball
caps (always cap forward, though).
Most of the men speak functional and sometimes fluent
Spanish, but the girls and women are still largely monolingual. That keeps them
eerily restricted to their enclaves, where men set all the rules—religious,
social, cultural and economic—outside the kitchen.
Mennonites still live in self-contained colonias (divided
into numerous campos) in remote
areas, virtually hidden from the mexicanos—the common term Mennonites use to
identify non-Mennonite Mexicans. The government continues to honor the original
Privilegium, and the Mennonites have prospered and multiplied under its
provisions.
“The wilderness and
the dry land shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom
as the rose.”—Isaiah 35:1, King James Bible
Over the past two decades, the Mexican Mennonites have left
behind their wooden plows and horse-drawn buggies and threshers. Except for the
rare Mennonite colonia, like Sabinal,
the modern Mexican Mennonites largely left behind their history (and ethic) of
nonmechannized agriculture. Mennonite farmers now enthusiastically embrace the
high-tech, capital-intensive, chemically saturated, and bioengineered habits of
US and Canadian agribusiness.
With endless work,
religious fervor and no worldly distractions, the Mennonites have transformed
the Chihuahuan Desert and grasslands into an agribusiness apex: no desert, no
mesquite, no birds, no natural flora, no fauna, nothing but laser-defined rows
of crops, rotary irrigation systems spraying a bounty of water onto cash crops.
In sharp contrast to the Mexican towns, there is absolutely
no street life and no bright colors. But an exaggerated sense of order prevails
over these antiseptic communities of gray homes, gray warehouses, and gray
schools and community centers.
The community patriarchs govern the settlements, but the
lords and idols of the society and economy are the ubiquitous agricultural
implements and machinery. The Mennonite men and women live to work, yet the
lifeblood of these agricultural realms comes from the machines, the electricity
grids, the omnipresent wells and pumps, all working day and night to make the
desert bloom.
You might, if you are a nonbeliever, think you have stumbled
upon an agribusiness Babylon—where man, machines and chemicals have turned the
desert an unnatural green.
The new agribusiness boom is not dependent on annual
rainfall or snow melt but on a proliferation of new wells that plumb
groundwater that has accumulated over the millennia in closed basins under the
desert landscape.
Private ranches and especially the government-granted ejidos have been devastatingly
overgrazed, and the ongoing drought has made continued cattle ranching all but
impossible. There’s nothing left to forage—precipitating a massive sell-off of
ranch lands to Mennonites and agribusinesses that tap groundwater to irrigate
the arid landscapes.
In the mid-1990s, when a three-decade period of high
precipitation was coming to a close, Mennonite farmers began organizing new
colonies to transform desert lands to farms. In part, the shift by the
Mennonites from traditional to more capital-intensive farm practices explains
this new colonization of remote tracts of desert. The high birth rate among
Mennonite families and the consequent need to expand also help explain this
agricultural expansion.
As drought conditions became more common in Chihuahua,
overgrazing by ranchers and ejidatarios became
increasingly unsustainable. Massive cattle deaths—an estimated 400,000 in the
last two years—persuaded many ranchers to sell their rangelands, mostly to
Mennonites abut also to enterprising agro-capitalists from Sinaloa.
While the lack of rain combined with traditional unsustainable
land management practices made ranching a losing proposition, these same nearly
barren rangelands could be turned into farms by tapping aquifers with deep
wells.
As Chihuahua and other northern states enter their third
year of intense drought, tensions are building between those with relatively
shallow wells (most ejidatarios and
small individual producers called
pequeños proprietarios) and the
Mennonite communities that persist in drilling hundreds of new wells at
unprecedented depths. The Mennonites, while leading the charge to convert
overgrazed and drought-devastated rangelands in agricultural estates, are not
alone.
Farmland is edging out the desert and grasslands throughout
Chihuahua. Along the main highways and between the mountain ranges that divide
it, the arid state is turning green with alfalfa, corn, sorghum and cotton, as
well as new cash crops such as potatoes and chile.
Along toll highways that connect the cities of Juárez,
Chihuahua and Cuauhtémoc, forsaken expanses of Chihuahuan Desert are now in
bloom. When descending from mountain passes, formerly arid landscapes take on
the appearance of agricultural enterprises in the US Midwest.
Neither the 2000-2004
drought nor the recent drought (considered the most severe in modern Mexican
history) has stymied this rush to make the Chihuahua desert blossom with cash
crops. Instead, drought has fostered the spread of agribusiness-type farming.
Over the past two decades, paralleling the expansion of the
rural electric grid, deep irrigation wells have mushroomed in Chihuahua. Most
of the new wells are three to five times the depth of the older wells, tapping
the subterranean water basins at depths regularly exceeding 800 feet and often
reaching 1,200 feet.
Most of the wells drilled for new agricultural projects can
at best be characterized as “irregular”—meaning essentially that they are
illegal either because the well permits don’t exist, were the result of bribes,
or are forged, cloned or copied. Although no one knows for certain, there are
at least 1,500 illegal wells sucking water from rapidly shrinking water basins.
Farmers and water
experts in Chihuahua say that on average the level of groundwater has dropped
5-10 feet annually in the areas of new agricultural production over the past
couple of decades. In Chihuahua, the lack of reliable information about the
size and depletion rates of the aquifers also complicates an assessment of the
severity of the current crisis, as does the systemic corruption and lack of
transparency and accountability at all levels of government.
Yet the figures that do exist are alarming, although mostly
ignored by government and producers alike.
Carlos “Chacho” Ramírez is president of the COTAS water
committee in Ascensión, a border municipality that includes Palomas and three
new Mennonite colonias.
“There is no life without water,” he says, “and the
frightening reality here is that we don’t know how much longer our groundwater
will last.” Given the rapid drop in the water table, as much as six meters
(almost 20 feet) annually in areas around the Mennonite settlements, Ramírez
says he wouldn’t be surprised if the intensely exploited aquifer ran dry in
five years.
This vast border municipio
(county) of Ascensión is emblematic of the water crisis facing most of Mexico’s
north, including the states of Sonora, Coahuila, Zacatecas, Durango and
Chihuahua—and by extension into the border states of Arizona, New Mexico and
west Texas.
“The problem, of
course,” says Ramírez, “is the increasing lack of water—both in the form of
surface flows and groundwater, and realistically there is nothing to stave off
the crisis, only mitigate it perhaps as part of a new survival strategy.”
The severity of the
water crisis in Ascensión is directly related to the proliferation of deep
wells for irrigated agriculture. Back in 1979 the federal government declared
that Ascensión was already unsustainably exploited—meaning that the annual
recharge didn’t compensate for the annual exploitation of groundwater.
At that time, this vast border municipality had some 350
wells. Today, the area has an estimated 1,750 wells. And the depths of the new
wells are at least 400-500 feet, according to Ramírez, while the average well
depth was only 80 feet 35 years ago.
According to the Mexican federal government, the aquifer
beneath Ascensión is one of the 15 in Chihuahua that is dangerously
overexploited. It is only a matter of time—most close observers estimate 5-10
years—before it will be completely drained of accumulated water reserves.
The drug-war crisis in Chihuahua seems likely to be
overshadowed in the near future by the escalating water crisis and accompanying
water wars.
Most everyone bemoans the increasingly arid environment,
echoing the common observation that never before have they seen such an intense
drought: “Not in my life.” “Never before in our history.” “The mountains no
longer bring the rain, and the land is dead.” Over and over I have heard these
and similar laments.
In his 2011 book A
Great Aridness, author William deBuys contends that the North American
Southwest—which he defines as including northwestern Mexico—promises to be the
“center stage for the continent’s drama of climate change.” Most models of the
impact of climate change predict that this transborder Southwest “will outstrip
other regions in both the rate and the amount of change,” observes deBuys.
Although human-induced climate change is a widely accepted
fact in Chihuahua, there are exceptions. Chatting with a Mennonite farmer in
the new border colonia of El
Berrendo, before crossing into the New Mexico Bootheel at the Antelope Wells
port-of-entry, the lifelong farmer, one of the founders of the new colony,
explained, when asked about his views about God, the natural world and climate
change: “We don’t know about the sun. We don’t know about the moon. We don’t
know about the water beneath us. These are the things of God, and we are only
here to use these natural resources the best we can to be productive.”
Like so many other
close observers of rural development and environmental conditions in Chihuahua,
however, Martín Solís is preoccupied by the frightening acceleration of the
region’s crisis. “The future of Chihuahua is at risk,” he said. “Rural
Chihuahua especially is threatened, and in as few as five years the rural
economy—ranching and farming—might shut down if we don’t do something now.”
Wherever one travels—through the heart of the great desert,
past the parched and rapidly disappearing grasslands, into the sierra, and off
the traffic corridors into the colonias
of the capital city and Juárez—life in Chihuahua is threatened.
The essential aridness that has defined the region—giving
rise to the Páquime civilization a thousand years ago and birthing the Mexican
Revolution a hundred years ago—is threatened by a still greater aridness that
is marked by higher temperatures, more severe droughts, and rapidly depleting
aquifers.
----
Tom Barry, senior policy analyst at the Center for
International Policy in Washington, DC, is author of many books, including The
Great Divide, Zapata’s Revenge and,
most recently, Border Wars (see the
November 2011 Desert Exposure) Barry, who lives in Pinos Altos, has been
writing on border issues and US-Mexico relations since the late 1970s. He blogs
at
borderlinesblog.blogspot.com.
