Got a Water Crisis? Get More Hydraulics
How the Mexican border state of Sonora is rushing forward with more water-management projects in response to escalating water crisis. A series of articles on water crisis and water wars in the border state of Sonora.
Part Two: Sonora Revives Its Hydraulic Society
Hermosillo / Tom Barry
A
water war is getting in the way of traffic and free trade in
the Mexican border
state of Sonora. Trucks and cars come to a standstill about 350 miles south of
the Arizona-Sonora border. Yaquis have
mounted an intermittent blockade across international highway #15.
Wielding
sticks and waving the Yaqui flag, the indigenous communities of the Yaqui river
delta have since 2011 been demanding that the government stop taking water out
of the Yaqui River. Traffic backs up in both directions from the Yaqui town of
Vicam for as many as 12 kilometers before the blockade of the Nogales-Mazatlan
toll road is temporarily lifted.
As
the state government has stepped up its attempt to co-opt, corrupt, and repress
the Yaquis, including ordering the arrest of its leaders, the Yaquis have
become more militant and determined. The water war in northwestern Mexico is
gaining adherents across Mexico and among environmentalists and human rights
advocates in the United States.
It’s
a water war that Governor Guillermo Padrés Elías sparked when in early 2010 he announced
an ambitious plan to meet Sonora’s alarming water crisis with a network of
hydraulic infrastructure projects, including aqueducts and dams.
Months
after he took office in late 2009, Governor Padrés, a member of a prominent ranching
family and leader of the National Action Party (PAN), committed the state
government to construct a new phalanx of water megaprojects through an upbeat
infrastructure program called Sonora SI (Integral System of Sonora). The government
promoted the new water megaproject program as a revival of Sonora’s era
(1938-1990) of building major waterworks -- addressing the arid state’s water
limitations by damming rivers, transferring water via aqueducts, and subsidizing
the intensive pumping of shrinking groundwater supplies.
From
the governor’s first announcement of Sonora SI, it was never clear how the
indebted state government would pay for the some two-dozen new megaprojects. At
the same time, however, during his first two years in office Governor Pádres
could count on the strong backing of President Felipe Calderón, a fellow PAN
leader.
The
Yaqui water war comes at a time when the state’s future is jeopardized by the
expanding water crises in rural and urban Sonora. One view – that of Governor
Padrés and Sonora SI – is that Sonora has enough water for all Sonorenses. All
that is needed is a new network of waterworks to transfer water from water-rich
areas to water-poor ones.
Others,
however, already suffering from the ravages of climate change and diminishing
river flows and depleted aquifers insist that Sonora’s traditional patterns of
managing water are fundamentally and dangerously unsustainable. For the most
part, however, the Yaqui water war highlights how increasingly different
geographic, economic, and social sectors are determined to hold on to the water
they have and to fight for more.
The
immediate point of contention of the Yaqui water war is a new 155-kilometer
Novillo-Hermosillo aqueduct, officially known as the Independencia aqueduct.
For the past three years, the west-east aqueduct has been transferring as much
as 75,000 Mm3 of river water from the middle Yaqui River basin in higher
elevations of eastern Sonora to the state capital of Hermosillo, which lies in
the heart of the Sonoran Desert.
Although
the fight fundamentally revolves around indigenous rights and historic distribution
of Yaqui River water, this escalating conflict underscores the unsustainability
of tradition of hydraulic megaprojects in Sonora. Another contentious Sonora SI
project is the planned Pilares dam on the Mayo River to the west of the Yaqui
River – which constitutes an existential threat to the deeply impoverished
Guajiríos indigenous communities in this remote region.
Instead
of evaluating the flaws in the state’s reliance on hydraulic projects to
capture surface and groundwater, Sonora SI, Governor Padrés, together with the
city of Hermosillo, are committed to a new package of controversial waterworks
– ones that transfer and further deplete water supplies rather than conserving
water and altering water consumption patterns.
Desert Illusions
Since
the early 1940s Sonora’s demographic and agricultural boom has been largely the
product of hydraulic manipulation. Despite its aridness, Sonora is Mexico’s
second largest agricultural producer -- virtually all the result of irrigation.
No
other state in Mexico has been so dramatically transformed by the federal
government’s network of dams, aqueducts, and irrigation canals. Agriculture
accounts for 92% of water consumption in Sonora, and no other Mexican state is
intensively irrigated as Sonora. Virtually all this agriculture occurs in the
arid western plains and along the coast, where average annual rainfall is 8-15
inches, depending on the area.
Sonora
is a classically “hydraulic society.” The term hydraulic society was coined by a German scholar who found that
some of the earliest civilizations were based economically, politically, and
theologically on water management.[i]
In
ancient hydraulic societies -- such as the civilizations in China and those
that developed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the aridlands of
Mesopotamia – the central authorities were the water masters. Their power
stemmed fundamentally from their role in managing sophisticated irrigation
systems and water-supply systems. If their subjects became thirsty, their
authority and power would falter.
Closer
to home and more immediate is California, which U.S. scholar Donald Worster and
others categorize as a hydraulic society.[ii] In his paper “Damming of
Sonora,” University of Oklahoma scholar Sterling Evans wrote that Worster
described the U.S. West as a “region characterized by ‘a social order founded
on the intensive management of water,’ ‘communal reorganization,’ “new patterns
of human interaction,’ and ‘new forms of discipline and authority.’”[iii]
Any
discussion of hydraulic societies in the transborder West must note the seminal
investigation and analysis of Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. In
his 1986 book, Reisner wrote: “Millions settled in regions where nature, left
alone, would have countenanced thousands at best; great valleys and
hemispherical basins metamorphosed from desert blond to semitropic green.”
You
see the same miracle of hydraulic transformation in Sonora. Traveling south
from the border at Nogales through the Sonoran Desert and then passing through
the Yaqui and Mayo river deltas of Sonora – a nearly 7-hour trip – the fruits
of Sonora’s hydraulic society are on display.
If
one were drive the nearly 400 miles from the border at Nogales to Sonora’s
border with Sinaloa, you would cross three river beds (Sonora River, Yaqui
River, Mayo River) that for the past several decades usually run dry as they
head south and west toward the Gulf of California. Temperatures rise to 120
degrees or higher in the summer. Cactus, mesquite, creosote, and thorn trees
define the natural landscape -- except for the vineyards and farmlands that
bloom for miles around Hermosillo, Ciudad Obregón, and Navajoa.
How
is it possible that Sonora has long been one of the top three agricultural
states in Mexico? Even most Sonorenses don’t fully understand where all the
water comes from for the state’s cities, industries, and agribusiness. That’s
because most of the state’s hydraulic megaprojects lie in the isolated valleys
of sparsely populated eastern Sonora, a region known as La Serrana (mountainous
area).
Of
the state’s five major dams and reservoirs, four are to the east of Sonora’s
main demographic and farming belt along Highway 15 -- three on the Yaqui River
and one on the Mayo River, each of which feed major irrigation canals leaving
the rivers dry as they enter the former coastal deltas.
But
the hydraulics of Sonora have been breaking down over the past two decades.
Today, dams stand before empty reservoirs, hydroelectric plants stand
abandoned, and government-subsidized irrigation projects have left vast
expanses of coastal Sonora crusted with salt.
As
the Sonoran government -- with more than two-thirds financing from the federal
government -- continues with its water megaproject program, there is little
reflection of the failures and consequences of Sonora’s “hydraulic society.”
Instead most of those involved in the water wars in Sonora -- with the
exception of small circles of environmentalists and academics -- look to
inter-state and intra-state transfers of water.
Both
sides of the Yaqui water war, for example, support a federal plan for an
aqueduct that would bring water from the Nayarit and southern Sinaloa (two
water-rich states along the Pacific coast) to Sonora.
[i] Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A
Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957,
as cited in Sterling Evans, “Damming Sonora: An Environmental and Transnational
History of Water, Agriculture, and Society in Northwestern Mexico,” Discussion
paper, March 25, 2011, at: http://whae.uga.edu/evans.pdf
[ii] Donald Worster, “Hydraulic Society in
California,” in Under Western Skies:
Nature and History in the American
West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[iii]
Sterling Evans, “Damming Sonora: An Environmental and Transnational History of
Water, Agriculture, and Society in Northwestern Mexico,” Discussion paper,
March 25, 2011, at: http://whae.uga.edu/evans.pdf