Mónica Cerbón: Water is above the law in Mexico
A Mexican journalist investigated corruption in Mexico's water sector.
Since 2010, the proportion of Mexican households without access to drinking water has doubled. By the 2020 national census, the figure was roughly 22%. In that same year, two thirds of the country was experiencing drought, ultimately leading the Mexican government to declare a state of emergency in 2022. People’s taps ran dry, and protests erupted in northern Mexican cities.
But not all of Mexico’s water stress was a result of natural drought. In 2020, Mexican journalist Mónica Cerbón joined eight other journalists participating in the award-winning “Water Exploiters” project, a journalistic investigation by Mexican watchdog organization Mexicans against Corruption and Impunit
y that exposed rampant corruption and mismanagement in Mexico’s water sector. Cerbón and other journalists discovered that government officials and powerful companies were hogging Mexico’s water resources while common people were lining the streets to fill buckets for household use.
“There are companies and people who have so much water at their disposal that it would be possible to serve entire communities,” the investigation’s front page reads. Large manufacturers, politicians, and industrial farmers count among those listed as self-interested water hogs.
For Cerbón, who frequently covers corruption in the area surrounding her home state of Aguascalientes, the project exposed an old story of natural resource corruption in Mexico. One in which the law is subservient to profit.
“It is an issue that is known – the authorities themselves know about it and the authorities themselves have fed it … Natural resources in Mexico have always been a political and economic treasure chest that has caused serious problems of human rights violations without the Mexican State paying attention to it, without there being a matter of justice. Why? Well, because it is a lot of money moving around.”
But with water, this system strips people of their most precious resource. It sucks them dry.
Legendary Mexican journalist and editor Thelma Gómez Durán organized the “Water Exploiters” investigation because, as Cerbón puts it, she wanted to “put a name to the big exploiters of water – who were they, what were they doing, how had they managed to amass and possess such quantities of water in states suffering from drought, where there was no equitable distribution of water.” She wanted to find the truth.
Gómez launched an all-out investigation. She sought out a team of journalists who “knew their regions well” and asked them to investigate these regions through a lens they had rarely considered.
“With Thelma, we learned to review the [water] files – where the important things were, where there were discrepancies. To be honest, it was the first project where I learned those processes in greater depth. And she let us talk with communities that had been suffering from this discrimination.”
Gómez recruited a team of three investigators for accessing government water records; the team made over 500 information requests to the Mexican government. Sometimes, when the government held out, they had to petition Mexico’s governmental transparency department to intervene.
And their digging paid off – the “Water Exploiters” team exposed startling truths about corruption and overuse in Mexico’s water sector. The investigation’s homepage lists the major discoveries:
• Groups and individuals who were legally required to use their water for agriculture were using the water for other purposes and still receiving governmental subsidies for farming.
• Mexican law requires all water rights holders to meter their water use, but only 11% of the country’s water users had meters.
• Only 37% of the water users who should legally pay taxes on their water use were even registered in the national water manager’s payment system, and only two thirds of those users actually made regular payments.
• The National Water Commission was grossly understaffed: each of its 115 inspectors was responsible for monitoring over 4,300 water concessions. For each inspector to visit each concession-holder once a year, they would have had to make 82 visits per week.
• The National Water Commission had a backlog of around 130,000 procedures that had not been addressed. This backlog had led, among other things, to litigation: across the country there were 2,477 ongoing lawsuits directly involving the Water Commission.
• An illegal market for water concessions (Mexican law allows water rights to be transferred, but not sold) was so profitable that water users were selling falsified water rights documents.
• As companies and certain individuals amassed thousands of cubic meters of water per year, more than eight million households in the country received water only three days per week or less, and 2.85 million only obtained water by carrying it to their homes from natural, untreated sources.
• Mexico's Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, Víctor Toledo, personally recognized that Mexico is home to “indiscriminate and ‘antidemocratic’ [read ‘inequitable’] water use”.
Clearly the letter of the law was not the principal force running Mexico’s water management system.
Investigators also reported stories of the people who have been harmed by this corrupt system. In both of Cerbón’s two feature articles written for the project, she met people whose taps and wells had run dry because of corruption and/or lax law enforcement in Mexico’s water sector.
In one article, “Water for the Mine”, Cerbón spoke with villagers in San Juan de los Cedros, Zacatecas, where one of the country’s largest gold mines was using so much water it nearly dried their wells. The mine, operated by an American company called Newmont, had secured a permit to use its water based on a hydrological study that it conducted. Years after the mine acquired its permit, researchers found that the mine was unsustainably draining the village’s aquifer.
In the village, Cerbón met people who were struggling to find alternative water supplies. Unable to rely on the local well, a woman named Gloria told Cerbón she bought bottled water for drinking. But the bottled water was expensive, so for other uses, like cooking and bathing, she had to rely on irregular water deliveries provided, ironically, by Newmont. And residents said that water was giving them health problems.
“[Gloria and her children] were visibly sick”, Cerbón said. “Both children were visibly sick. They had lesions on their skin, they had stomach problems … That someone would pay with their health so someone else can make money … is terrible to me.”
At the end of her article, Cerbón quoted another resident in San Juan de los Cedros, Alicia, who had concerns about the future of the village after the mine closes: “Who is going to be responsible for the damage? The mine is leaving without a problem, and the ones left with all the problems are going to be us. How are we going to survive without water?”
“That angers me a lot”, Cerbón says. “It could be any company, including one from Mexico, but to come from another country with much more development and much more money – so in your country clearly you have good policies, but outside your country what are you doing? Outside your country you are exploiting the resources of other people. That just seems reprehensible to me.”
And this phenomenon of a powerful actor with government permission leaving vulnerable people stranded without water would turn out to be a trend.
In her second article. “Real Estate with Watery Foundations”, Cerbón covered the story of a housing development in Aguascalientes that has no running water. The developer who built the project received their permit on the condition that they build a new well to service residents. The developer never built the well, but they were allowed to sell the units anyway. Then, they declared bankruptcy.
Cerbón spoke with Sandra Urrutia, who had recently bought a house in the development. Urrutia told Cerbón that when she realized the house had no water, she abandoned it and moved to a rented apartment in town. Even though she owned a home, she had no way to comfortably live in it.
“Imagine you buy a house,” Cerbón says, “maybe the most important investment of your life – and you put in a lot of effort because in Mexico it is generally very difficult to own a home, and in Aguascalientes housing is expensive for people’s average income, and then you buy the house, and it doesn’t have water. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
Cerbón writes that in Aguascalientes, the name of one of these developments, Barlovento, has been turned into a local saying that means to “take advantage” of someone.
Already, Cerbón says water is becoming a bigger topic for dinner table conversation in Mexico. She says it’s causing a growing sense of anxiety for Mexicans in many regions of the country.
“Now [water] is discussed with more nervousness because our water is running out, and governments keep making bad decisions”, she says.
While she says some changes in Mexico’s actual laws will be necessary, it is the systems outside the laws that need to be addressed. Going forward, Cerbón says communities and civil society groups will have to continue fighting powerful interests for their well-being.
Already, she says some community activists and groups are giving her hope. The villagers in San Juan de los Cedros, for example, have protested the overexploitation of their water, and the mine has agreed to reduce its use.
“There have been several fights won. Several communities have suddenly obtained justice in some way … and it helps you have hope, that there are people fighting.”
And as these stories continue to play out, Cerbón says that journalism will continue to share them with the world.
“I believe these communities have their voice – they have it, and they have asserted it. What journalism does is make these problems visible.”