Water debt to U.S. rises, fuels unrest in Mexico

MEXICO CITY — Demonstrators in northern Mexico have burned several government vehicles, blocked railway tracks, and set afire a government office and highway toll booths to protest water payments to the United States.

Mexico has fallen behind in the amount of water it must send north from its dams under a 1944 treaty, but farmers in the northern state of Chihuahua want the water for their own crops.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday that the protests were being fanned by opposition politicians with their own motives. He said there was enough water to comply with the treaty and support local crops.

The president criticized “the attitude of confrontation” and the burning of federal property, and promised “the farmers, the inhabitants will not lack water.” And he noted that farther west along the border — notably in the Colorado River basin — Mexico receives four times more water from the United States than it gives under the treaty.

The protests appeared to be centered in the town of Delicias, Chihuahua, near one of the dams where water is being released to flow northward. Federal forces guarding the dam gates have clashed with protesters in recent weeks.

Photos from Delicias showed that demonstrators used heavy equipment to drag pickups belonging to the national water commission to nearby train tracks where they were flipped over and set afire. Someone, apparently demonstrators, also set fire to a building where the commission has its offices, and flames ravaged a series of toll booths on a nearby highway.

Under the 1944 treaty, Mexico owes the United States about 405,000 acre-feet this year that must be paid by Oct. 24. Payment is made by releasing water from dams in Mexico. Mexico has fallen behind in payments from previous years and now has to quickly catch up on water transfers.

The expansion of water-hungry crops has meant that Mexico has used 71% of the northward-flowing Conchos River, while under the treaty it should use only 62% of the water, letting the rest of it to flow into the Rio Bravo, also known as the Rio Grande, on the border.

In the past, Mexico has delayed payments, hoping that periodic tropical storms from the Gulf of Mexico would create occasional windfalls of water. But while the storm named Hanna made landfall in Texas earlier this month, the storm’s rains did not reach far enough inland to fill dams in Chihuahua.

The water commission noted that, “even though Tropical Storm Hanna recently reached the northeast of the country, the international dams [those involved in the treaty] did not recover the desired volume, as the increased flow occurred downstream.”