Water Wars in Sonora; Yaquis, Mining, and Megaprojects
Tom Barry
August 10, 2015 | Report
By Tom Barry
The Mexican border state of Sonora is expanding its hydraulic society in the face of climate change, an escalating water crisis, and indigenous opposition.
This Center for International Policy investigative and policy report examines Sonora’s water crisis and the faltering condition of the state’s hydraulic society—a society largely shaped by and dependent on governmental water projects. A close look at the controversy over a new aqueduct pumping water from the Yaqui River illustrates the new water tensions that societies on both sides of the border are experiencing and underscores problematic and unsustainable responses to the water disaster developing across the transborder West. The first part of the report examines the issues directly associated with the Yaqui water war, while the second part examines the mining boom and impacts on the Sonora and Yaqui Rivers.
Conclusion: Losers and Lost Opportunities
Through northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States, temperatures are rising and drought cycles are becoming more intense and prolonged. Water conflicts are breaking out across the transborder West—a region roughly reaching south from Idaho and eastern Colorado through the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur and west to the Pacific from west Texas. Throughout the region, societies and economies are paying the price of unsustainable consumption of surface water flows and groundwater.
The reverberations of Yaqui water shortages have spread across the entire transborder West, whose states all face water crises as a result of population growth, declining water reserves, and climate change. Sonora’s attempts to address water shortfalls in the desert city of Hermosillo have implications that extend to other arid regions on both sides of the international border. Like other water conflicts in this immense arid region, the Yaqui water war has been a struggle of competing special interests and water needs.
It is a water conflict that raises inevitable questions about the viability of hydraulic societies, the prioritization of water rights, and the future of desert cities and desert agribusiness. This bitterly fought water conflict has set the Mexican border state of Sonora on edge. There is no end in sight, in part due to the array of special interests involved and in part because the fundamental causes of the war—rising water demand and rapidly decreasing water supply—were not directly addressed by either side in the aqueduct conflict.
As climate change raises temperatures and depletes water supplies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, this water war may also presage the type of complicated water conflicts and escalating social tensions that will likely dominate the future of politics in the U.S. West and arid regions worldwide. Old Strategies for New Problems Apart from the battles between the pro- and anti-aqueduct forces and attempts to manipulate the aqueduct controversy for political gain, the Yaqui water war was more about continuity than change. Neither the supporters nor the opponents of the aqueduct questioned the basic premises of Sonora’s hydraulic society.
The anti-aqueduct campaign was narrowly focused on stopping the transfer of water to Hermosillo and didn’t broaden the debate to include questions about the value of the three dams on the Yaqui River, their impact on the riparian and coastal ecologies, or how agricultural economy’s dependence on irrigation water has killed the river as it enters the Yaqui Valley. Instead, Sonora SI argued that Sonora’s past economic and population growth was the product of water infrastructure projects.
The state’s network of dams, aqueducts, and water pumping fields enabled the emergence of Sonora’s thriving agribusiness centers, half-dozen desert cities, tourism sector, and export-oriented industries. The continuity of such growth depended on still more water megaprojects, in which the government together with private sector investors launch major megaprojects to meet the needs of the state’s most powerful political and economic interests. Furthermore, the dams and aqueducts sponsored by Sonora SI mirrored the federal government’s own vision of Mexico’s water future, including inter-basin water transfers. The Independencia aqueduct was, they argued, simply following the model of other federally financed aqueducts (such as in Monterrey and Mexico City) that transferred water from relatively healthy water basins to consumers living in depleted water basins. In the face of increasing water shortages throughout this arid state, the decision by Governor Pádres and CONAGUA to ramp up Sonora’s hydraulic infrastructure ostensibly made good economic and political sense -- albeit in complete disregard for indigenous rights, impact on the Yaqui Valley agribusiness sector, environmental consequences to Yaqui River habitats, among other concerns. Winners and Losers Traveling through Mexico’s arid north is a trip into the pre-revolutionary past where latifundia-like agribusiness ventures fed by unprecedentedly deep wells while small holdings and ejidos lie abandoned.
A rapacious mining boom, ill-considered water megaprojects including an array of dams and aqueducts, reckless exploitation of groundwater by agribusinesses, and narrow-minded water management practices are increasing land concentration and accelerating a national water crisis. The opposition alliance’s failure to stop the Independencia aqueduct highlighted the enduring power of the hydraulic society and the continuing marginalization of the Yaqui people.
As groundwater reserves shrink and surface water flows diminish, even as the demands for water increase, the Yaqui may not be the only losers in Sonora’s bet on the viability of hydraulic society. However successful at first, hydraulic societies eventually face limits posed by the availability of water, population growth, and societal tensions over distribution priorities. Instead of narrowly focusing the water war on one water megaproject, either side could have used the controversy over the aqueduct proposal to open a more comprehensive debate about water in this new era of climate change.
The Yaqui opposition failed, for example, to explain how Yaqui communities would benefit— either immediately or over the long term— in any fundamental way if Yaqui River water stopped flowing through the Independencia aqueduct. Even in the event that Novillo-Hermosillo aqueduct is shut down, the Yaquis would remain without drinking water and access to the Yaqui River. And even with the water from the aqueduct, the residents, industries, and agribusinesses of Hermosillo remain urgently in need of more water. As the smoke from the water battlefield starts to clear and the rhetorical battle cries fade, it is becoming increasingly clear to both the Yaqui and Hermosillenses that Sonora is quickly reaching the limits of hydraulic fixes. Hydraulic societies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border are breaking down under social and environmental pressures.
Expanding awareness about Mexico’s increasingly scarce water supplies was also a major factor in the federal government’s new effort to pass the first national General Water Law (Ley General de Aguas). If the ruling PRI party succeeds in pushing through the controversial “modernization” of Mexico’s water systems, the law will, among other things, certainly result in increased business involvement in all phases of the water use cycle, including drilling, pumping, transfer, distribution, and treatment. The proposed law echoes the pro-aqueduct arguments that the Mexican government has the obligation to supply potable water to all Mexicans and that privately constructed but publicly financed water megaprojects can help the government meet this guarantee.
The political, social, and economic dynamics that have shaped the Yaqui water war and continue to determine water politics in Sonora and throughout Mexico are aggravating the country’s deepening water crisis. As a result, social tensions are rising most everywhere as more Mexicans are seeing the first signs of a future without access to the most basic necessity of life.
Close observers warn that, unless the federal and state governments change course, Mexico faces a future where desert cities such as Chihuahua City, Juarez, and Hermosillo are no longer livable, except for those who can pay a premium price for water. It’s a water-determined future where the rural population in the vast arid regions of northern and central Mexico will abandon countryside to seek refuge from a precarious existence of dry wells and cisterns in overcrowded cities and across the northern border.
At the very least, the controversy over the Novillo-Hermosillo will likely be remembered as a lost opportunity for Sonora. By more frankly addressing the core issues all Sonorans are facing, more long-terms solutions might have become more apparent. As water supplies diminish and as Sonora persists in its commitment to traditional water-management frameworks, even the apparent winners of the Yaqui water war will surely also become losers.