Sonora Chronicles
Introduction to Border Water Crisis Report
from Center for International Policy
View of water-short Hermosillo (top), and of the empty Abelardo Rodríguez reservoir on the city's eastern edge. Photos by Tom Barry
Across the arid
U.S. West and Southwest, enthusiasm for traditional hydraulic solutions -- from
damming rivers, pumping diminishing groundwater reserves, and delivering
distant water -- through aqueducts, is waning.
Higher
temperatures, prolonged droughts, and the long-term dysfunction of hydraulic
infrastructure make radical reforms in water policy necessary. Community and
government planners are advocating for more sustainable solutions to the
spreading water crisis, including voluntary and enforced conservation,
groundwater pumping regulation, and more efficient water-distribution systems
in the city and countryside.
The
transboundary region of the North American Southwest is
a mostly arid or semi-arid region that hosts North America’s four major deserts—
the Chihuahuan, Great Basin, Mojave, and Sonoran Desert.[1] The great arid lands
and deserts of North America don’t stop at the boundary line between Mexico and
the United States, with the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts extending deep into
Mexico. Similarly, the transboundary water basins and rivers, including the
Yaqui River, flow across the international border.
Northern and
north-central Mexican states face the same threats and fears regarding their
water future. To varying degrees, most Mexican cities and rural areas are
seeing traditional supplies of water become less reliable. Yet despite warnings
by environmental organizations and scientists, politicians and governmental
officials are meeting water crises with the traditional solutions of hydraulic
societies, or societies that have been traditionally reliant on water transfer
techniques.
Nowhere is this retrograde response as evident as in the border
state of Sonora.
Small farmers and ejidatarios see wells go dry and formerly watered land turn to dust as Hermosillo and agribusiness suck all groundwater and river flows. Photos by Tom Barry
Temperatures
in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, and the Yaqui Valley are regularly rising
to record highs. Water basins, notably the Sonora River Basin on which
Hermosillo has traditionally depended, are severely depleted. To the west of
the city, great extensions of the coastal plains that for four decades were
dedicated export-focused agribusinesses now lay abandoned— poisoned by salt
residues, and subsiding and cracking as the result of grossly unsustainable
groundwater extraction.
For the past five
years, a conflict over water has divided Sonora into contending alliances. In
2010, Sonora’s newly elected governor, Guillermo Padrés Elías, with financing
from the National Water Commission (CONAGUA), proposed an array of water
megaprojects supervised by a new bureaucracy, Sonora Integrated System (Sonora
SI). The most controversial project was the Novillo-Hermosillo aqueduct, also
known as Independencia, a 155-kilometer project that is transferring water from
the Yaqui River in the mountainous west into the heart of the Sonoran Desert.
The Independencia project has ignited perhaps the most prominent of the water
wars in the transborder West.
Many indigenous communities have
been adversely affected by these government-supported megaprojects. The
Independencia project would displace and contaminate parts of the desert inhabited
by the Yaqui, an indigenous tribe that fiercely resisted Spanish and Mexican
occupations. After the governor’s proposal, the Yaqui took their place at the
vanguard of the “No al Novillo”
opposition campaign. Their intermittent blockades of Highway #15— western
Mexico’s main north-south highway— attracted national and international news
coverage. The government’s disregard for the rights of the Yaqui sparked a
national solidarity campaign on behalf of the Yaqui that included other
affected communities, dozens of nongovernmental organizations, and Mexico’s
left, including the Zapatistas in Chiapas.
Meanwhile, the Pilares dam being constructed across
the Mayo River by Sonora SI and CONAGUA threatens a less-known indigenous
people. The Guajiríos are among those most adversely impacted by the Pilares
dam. This diminishing group of deeply impoverished native people inhabit small
settlements along the western Sierra Madre in southeastern Sonora and
southwestern Chihuahua.
Mexico would do
well to look how the breakdown of hydraulic solutions is playing out to its
north, given how much it has modeled the modernization of its own arid frontier
territories on the U.S experience. Despite the fortified border, U.S. society
and economy remain intricately linked to Mexico, especially the border states
like Sonora— a principal source of minerals, produce, and industrial products
(like Ford vehicles manufactured in Hermosillo) and home to hundreds of
thousands of U.S. residents.
A closer look at the contributing causes of the Yaqui water
war may point out ways to avoid other water wars and possible ways to resolve
the lingering issues left unresolved by this complicated dispute over the
remaining water resources in the border state.
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