Battle against border brewery pops top on question of shared underground waters
AMLO is pictured at the National Palace during his March 20 morning daily news conference, in which he encouraged Mexicali residents to vote in the federal consultation that rejected permitting for foreign brewery. Photo: Courtesy Presidency of the Republic
MEXICALI
In Baja California's drought-stricken Mexicali Valley, farmers and other residents oppose the U.S.-owned Constellation Brands beer maker's construction of a massive export brewery, a facility that would use Mexican water to satisfy U.S. tastes. Constellation Brands is the producer of the Corona, Pacífico and Modelo beer brands sold on U.S. shelves.
Alfonso Cortez, researcher for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Mexicali, has calculated that a brewery the size of the proposed Constellation Brands facility could increase the water depletion rate of the Mexicali Aquifer from its current annual pace of 0.6-0.8 meters per year to 0.8-1.05 meters per year.
The long-running conflict has reached the ears of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO); drawn a critical report on the Baja California state government-supported brewery project from Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), which cited climate change as a consideration; touched Mexican courts; and most recently, inspired a controversial citizen consultation backed by the federal government to gauge citizen opinion on whether the planned billion-plus-dollar brewery should proceed or not.
Held in the Mexicali Valley against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the March 21-22 citizen consultation produced nothing short of a political earthquake. According to Mexico's Interior Ministry, 27,973 voters (76.1 percent) said “no” to Constellation Brands, while 8,547 (23 percent) gave their approval.
At President López Obrador's March 23 press conference, Diana Alvarez, Interior Ministry undersecretary, said the results mean the National Water Commission will deny permits for the brewery.
Following Alvarez's statement, López Obrador elaborated on the Mexicali verdict, saying he was not against investment but that the popular will and environment must be considered. "It's not about growth for growth's sake, but growth with well-being and respect for the environment, because that is the inheritance we are going to leave future generations...," he stated.
The president also said he would reach out to business leaders in an effort to find a site for the brewery where more plentiful water supplies are available.
Mexico's Financial Executives Institute, as well as the powerful Business Coordinating Council, condemned the Mexicali consultation, contending the vote not only threatened jobs and investment but public health in a time of crisis.
"Water is not for sale. Say No! to the Constellation Brands brewery construction. Defending water is defending life". Click to enlarge. Banner: courtesy Mexicali Resiste
The balloting ranked as one of the big news stories in Mexican media between March 21 and 23.
Alfonso Cortez, who has meticulously studied the brewery-water question and detected "dozens of irregularities" in the Constellation Brands project, noted the CNDH's recent report and recommendations that concluded the brewery threatened the local population's human right to water.
"The CNDH considers that one cannot act with a short-term vision," the autonomous federal agency said in a statement. The right to water prioritizes personal and domestic consumption, not private and industrial uses. Probably there will be water in Mexicali for beer production during the next 50 years, but at the cost of personal and domestic consumption...."
For Cortez, the fundamental issue at stake was an enterprise that would negatively impact already overexploited groundwater deposits and threaten further reduction of precious Colorado River water.
"We can't risk the base resource of regional development to give it to a business whose profits are private and whose product goes to another country," Cortez said during a March 23 interview on AristeguiNoticias.
Underground water is underlying issue
The upheaval draws attention to a growing matter of vital importance: the future of aquifers along the U.S.-Mexico border. It begs the burning question of whether Mexico and the United States can find common ground on jointly managing a shared resource. Yet this critical issue remains glaringly absent as a priority on the binational agenda.
Unlike the shared waters of the Tijuana, Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, whose flows and apportionments are contingent on agreements between the U.S. and Mexico, the subterranean resources of the two nations are not subject to bilateral governance, with the exception of an agreement that covers a small section of the Sonora-Arizona border.
The sustainability of transboundary aquifers that are tapped by the two countries is an imperative to deal with boomtown levels of population growth, competing demands for precious water supplies, adverse climatic impacts on groundwater recharge, and mounting reports of aquifer depletion in different sections of the borderlands.
So, while Mexico City and Washington are fixated on Covid-19, immigration, drugs, security, trade and investment, an increasing awareness of the cross-border aquifer issue is developing among mid-level government officials, some elected representatives, scientific researchers and border residents.
After all, not only Mexicali, but also other border cities like Nogales in Sonora, Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua, and Sunland Park in New Mexico, depend on transboundary aquifers for their water, while farmers on both sides of the international line utilize wells to water their crops, especially in times of drought.
Groundwater is at the core of several sharp conflicts in the border region. For instance, Texas and New Mexico are locked in a legal battle at the U.S. Supreme Court over Texas' contention that over pumping of groundwater in southern New Mexico's Mesilla Valley is affecting Texas' share of Rio Grande water, an issue that likewise touches on the water delivered to Mexico under a 1906 agreement.
In Chihuahua state, a copper mine a Canadian-owned company proposes for the fragile Samalayuca sand dune ecosystem, which includes a National Protected Area located about 30 miles southeast of Ciudad Juarez, has sparked public demonstrations, litigation and debates in state and local governments in recent months. Opponents in both Mexico and the United States contend the mine would diminish and contaminate groundwater that traverses the border with El Paso County, Texas.
Assessing the aquifer challenge
The U.S. and Mexican governments laid the groundwork for addressing transboundary aquifer issues in 1973 when the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), approved Minute 242, which placed a limitation of 160,000 acre feet per year on groundwater pumping in the area of San Luis, Arizona, and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora. The binational agency tasked with managing U.S.-Mexico border water agreements also called for joint consultations, "with the objective of avoiding future problems," around any new developments or modifications that could impact the surface and groundwater resources in the neighboring nation.
A step forward in greater binational cooperation was realized in 2006, when the U.S. Congress passed the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Act, a law sponsored by former U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, which initially authorized funding of up to 10 years.
Resulting in the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program (TAAP), the measure backed research on two aquifers, the San Pedro in Sonora-Arizona and the Conejos Medanos or Mesilla Basin in the Chihuahua-New Mexico-Texas sphere of influence. Parallel investigations of the same aquifers were launched by Mexican scientists.
Yet TAAP represents only the beginnings of a binational collaboration that will have to be greatly expanded if adequate attention is given to the transboundary aquifer question, according to experts.
First off, it's not entirely known how many cross-border aquifers exist and, precisely, which country is drawing the most water out of them.
In a 2019 email to this reporter, the U.S. section of the IBWC pegged the current number of known U.S.-Mexico transboundary aquifers at 36 but acknowledged that "we don't have an exact number of how many are transboundary," pending further research.
"There still isn't a certain answer, because the work of evaluating all the aquifers hasn't concluded, much less the manner in which groundwater moves and interacts with the different environmental components on both sides of the border," said Gonzalo Hatch Kuri, a National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) researcher and the author of a seminal book on the shared groundwater resources of the Paso del Norte region of Ciudad Juarez, El Paso and Dona Ana County, New Mexico.
According to Hatch, researchers have so far focused on the geological formations or "the rock" of the aquifers underlying Mexico and the United States. Save for scattered nuggets of information, Hatch said no border wide quantification of groundwater supplies exists for the U.S.-Mexico frontier.
"There's a lot of information we just don't know about the characteristics of the aquifers, the water quality, how it's changing, how use on either side is affecting aquifer levels or aquifer quality,” concurred Holly Brause, a research scientist at the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (NMWRRI). Based at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The institute takes part in the TAAP program.
"So when (U.S. and Mexican researchers) come together and start to exchange that kind of data it helps us to start to know what we do have there, what do we have to work with, because it's of great importance to urban centers and to agricultural activity, industrial activity on both sides of the border," she said.
Cross border gatherings
Two important events took place in the Paso del Norte within the past year, shedding additional light on the breadth and scope of the border groundwater question.
Sponsored by the IBWC, last spring's Binational Summit on Groundwater the U.S.-Mexico Border in El Paso attracted scores of water researchers and water managers from the United States, Mexico and even Canada.
Among the highlights were presentations that reported on the continued depletion of the shared Mexicali Valley and Imperial Valley aquifers, a binational collaboration on assessing geology and water resources in the San Diego-Tijuana area, the dropping water levels of the Santa Cruz Aquifer shared by the two Nogales, and a tour of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant operated by El Paso Water Utilities.
Beyond the technical talk, two important themes that reverberated at the summit were establishing the prerequisite of "trust" between potential partners and "stakeholder engagement" in addressing common aquifer concerns.
Stakeholders along the U.S.-Mexico border include indigenous peoples, irrigators, municipal water utilities, industrial enterprises and everyday citizens.
"The summit was undoubtedly historic because it was the first time both governments via the IBWC recognized the existence and importance of the issue," said Hatch. For the Mexican border water expert, nonetheless, the gathering also revealed an "enormous asymmetry" in the research funding and investigative reach between better-resourced U.S. universities involved in the TAAP program such as the University of Arizona and New Mexico State University and their Mexican counterparts.
Hot on the heels of the El Paso summit, concerned parties convened in Las Cruces for the Two Nations U.S.-Mexico Border Water Summit staged by the NMWRRI and co-hosted by New Mexico State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Texas A&M University. That event featured the participation of members of New Mexico's Congressional delegation, academics, the IBWC, water utility managers, and others.
"I think the value for the institute of those type of meetings is really forming relationships with people from across the border and having a chance to exchange data and exchange experiences and really getting to know what each other are working on both sides of the border, so we can continue collaboration or form new collaborative studies between the two sides of the border," Brause said.
"I think its pretty amazing how much people are really coming together and trying to work across national boundaries, work across state boundaries, reach across kind of the agricultural-environmental divide, so that's something I found very encouraging about our prospects going forward."
According to Brause, the NMWRRI has a mandate to complete its obligations under the TAAP program, as well as serve the different stakeholders of New Mexico groundwater resources, which encompass farmers, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, urban entities like Las Cruces, residential consumers, and industrial users.
Building on the momentum of last year's Paso del Norte gatherings, NMRRI was involved in organizing another binational conference originally set for mid-April in Ciudad Juarez. However, the Covid-19 coronavirus made its ugly appearance and the meet was cancelled. Brause said organizers hope to reschedule the event for later this year.
From study to action?
Transitioning from study to action, however, is the million-dollar question hanging over the border groundwater issue. For Hatch, the fundamental question at stake is "Which country is extracting more water from the transboundary aquifers, and consequently, who will put more order toward the care and effective protection of an element as vulnerable as groundwater?"
As a way of moving the ball forward, he proposed establishing an aquifer conservation program between Mexico and the United States that "could be a focus that builds trust between the two countries."
Hatch further advocated an "early alert system" that would allow either nation to have "tools for controlling the extraction or irrational usage of border groundwater so as not to affect the neighboring country."
He stressed that the adverse consequences of unilateral decisions can be seen in the case of the U.S.-built All-American Canal bordering California and Baja California. Back in the early 2000s, controversy erupted after the U.S. government relined the canal, an action which impaired the recharge of a transboundary aquifer also used by Mexican farmers. According to Hatch, "This issue has not been resolved with success for Mexico."
Complicating any future binational agreements are the different water governance regimes in Mexico and the United States. In the former, the federal government via the National Water Commission holds power over the exploitation of groundwater resources, while in the latter, individual states have jurisdiction over aquifers. For groundwater advocates, this means navigating through and negotiating with various agencies and interests.
In Mexico, Hatch and his colleagues are reaching out to federal lawmakers and organized three forums last year in the Mexican Senate. At one forum, attendees heard about the "scientific manipulation" of official studies that indicated "an abundance of groundwater" in Saltillo, the capital of the northern border state of Coahuila. At another forum, a draft groundwater law promulgated by Hatch and friends received a cool reception from the head of the National Water Commission, according to the Mexican academic.
Although Sen. Salomon Jara (Morena-Oaxaca) has been actively engaged in raising the profile of the aquifer issue, Hatch maintained that most lawmakers still lack a "systemic vision" of the country's groundwater situation.
"In this sense, we believe it is necessary to continue producing more evidence and communications about this, so the importance of groundwater is more visible in Mexico. We hope to have a modification of (the proposed groundwater law) this year, with the goal of having a more robust document by the end of 2021," he said. A positive development toward consensus, Hatch added, are recent discussions also involving the UNAM Water Network and representatives of the Mexican Geohydrological Association and the Mexican chapter of the International Association of Hydrogeologists.
Given the knot of stakeholders and decision-making bodies in the United States and Mexico, as well as the varying physical characteristics of aquifers, cross border groundwater experts generally view the possibility of reaching a comprehensive binational accord along the lines of the standing river agreements a difficult proposition at best. Instead, talk increasingly revolves around the potential of achieving binational agreements on individual aquifers, somewhat like the Minute agreement system of the IBWC.
At last year's El Paso summit, Raul Morales of the Mexican Geohydrological Association proposed forming binational work groups focused on particular aquifers, composed of U.S. and Mexican water officials, NGOs, professional associations, and others. Joint management, he argued was the "only way" of guaranteeing the future of transboundary groundwater resources.
Integral management should also protect surface waters that may be connected to aquifers, Morales added.
Taking an example from another border region, the U.S. Geological Survey's Nicole Herman-Mercer spoke about the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council of Canada and the United States. Comprised of members of 75 tribes, the Council has a long range goal of drinking water directly from the river like the ancestors did; trains citizen scientists; engages in bi-weekly water sampling; and conducts community based-water quality monitoring using a modified U.S. Geological Survey protocol, Herman-Mercer reported.
Citizen participation is also a central concern for the University of Arizona's Jacob Petersen-Perlman, a TAAP collaborator who's also been active on stakeholder engagement in southern Arizona. Echoing Herman-Mercer's contention that citizen participation is citizen power, Peterson-Perlman said, "Environmental decision-making is increasingly seen as a democratic right."
This story is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend, Miguel Angel Torres Guerrero, who always unraveled the threads of the border’s fabric to expose the transcendent issues of our day.
Research for this article was made possible in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.