U.S. Water News Online
SUNLAND PARK, N.M. -- Ruben Segura, mayor of tiny Sunland Park, N.M., looked through a chain-link border fence into this city of shacks, where thousands of people live without running water, and he had an idea.
Why not give them some water?
Sunland Park is a blue-collar community of 13,000 where many people live in mobile homes or modest ranch houses and everyone has access to running water and flush toilets.
Anapra, filled with Mexican migrants who work in factories and live in tin shanties, has no running water or sewers. Instead, people here get by on trucked-in water and endure open pits of human waste and the constant threat of water-borne disease.
To Segura, the son of a Mexican mother and an American father, sharing with Anapra seemed no more radical than passing the water pitcher at the family dinner table. But the idea soon succumbed to a web of complications of the kind that arise every day along the border where two large countries are trying to share a small supply of water.
Conflicts over access to a clean, cheap and sufficient supply of water are becoming a defining feature of life along the 2,100-mile U.S.-Mexico border and of relations across it. While for many outsiders the border is synonymous with drug trafficking and illegal immigration, when people who live here talk about confrontation between Mexicans and Americans or tension between urban areas and farmers or cooperation to solve problems, the dominant subject is water.
Thousands of factories and millions of people migrating to both sides of the border in recent years have put intense pressure on the water supply. Drinking-water supplies are running dangerously low. In the cross-border megacity of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, officials say the main aquifer is in danger of being exhausted in the next 25 years. Water is so precious that builders of a new El Paso high school were criticized for planting too much grass.
Human and industrial waste have polluted water and raised disease levels to much higher than national averages in both nations. A dispute over agricultural water rights in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, on the eastern reaches of the border, is threatening to explode into a diplomatic confrontation between Mexico and the United States at a time of unusually warm relations.
"Fresh water is going to be the key resource challenge of the 21st Century on the border," said David Lorey, a border specialist at the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif. "People are going to wake up to this very fast. Within the next decade it's going to be front-page news every day."
Water has always been a prime concern along this vast stretch of land, some of it empty as an echo and some of it poisonously overcrowded, at the intersection of the world's richest nation and another struggling to lift itself out of poverty.
The border area gets precious little rainfall and draws water from a few key rivers -- mainly the Colorado in the west and the Rio Grande in the east -- and a few groundwater aquifers. Even before the current growth, the region had barely enough water and inadequate infrastructure, especially on the Mexican side where such basic services as sewage treatment were virtually nonexistent.
Now Mexican and American workers are flooding to the border at gold-rush pace, with about 1.8 million new residents in counties and cities on both sides in the last five years. Paul Ganster, of the San Diego-based Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy, said the border's current estimated population is about 12.3 million, with about 6.5 million on the U.S. side and 5.8 million on the Mexican side. Those figures are expected to double in the next 20 years.
In the ragged hills of Anapra, across the border from Sunland Park, water is trucked in by the city and pumped into open 50-gallon drums sitting in dirty front yards. Between 10,000 and 25,000 squatters -- no one is sure how many live here -- are willing to manage without running water for jobs in the plants assembling televisions and CD players.
The jobs are bringing people like Braulio Munoz, who lives in a one-room concrete shack in Anapra. His drinking water comes from a concrete cistern foul with dirt and debris. To relieve himself, Munoz walks across a plank to a shared outhouse perched over an open pit of stinking human waste.
"We breathe the same air, and we drink the same water," said Segura, the mayor. "We cannot shy away from the reality that they are living in a desperate situation."
But Munoz, 53, a father of eight, has what he wants. A month after leaving his village in southern Mexico where he was a farmhand, he now works in a brand-new factory that makes appliance motors, where he has air-conditioning, a five-day work week, free lunch, a free bus ride to work, and double his old salary.
"It's like a dream for me; it's wonderful," said Munoz, proudly showing off his laminated employee ID. "I would like to have water to take a shower. But I have work, and that's what I care about most."
Water shortages are causing havoc for Mexican and American farmers working at least 2 million acres of land in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Farmers say water scarcity has cost them at least $2.5 billion in the last five years. They are planting fewer acres and switching from more lucrative fruits and vegetables to plants such as cotton and sorghum, which require less water.
Officials in Washington and Mexico City are currently sparring over a water dispute in the valley.
Mexico has withheld more than 450 billion gallons in the past seven years that it was supposed to give to the United States through controlled releases from a series of dams and reservoirs under a 1944 treaty splitting up the waters of the Rio Grande. Mexico argues that a drought has made it impossible to deliver the water, but the Americans contend that Mexico is simply withholding it to provide for its own fast-growing industry.
Compounding the problem, the region has suffered a drought for the last six years.
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