WATER POLITICS

As severe drought parched the Valley of Mexico earlier this year, news outlets began a countdown to a total failure of the water system. Reservoirs more than 100 kilometers away from Mexico City were at dangerously low levels and some areas already were facing acute shortages. Tanker trucks loaded with potable water sloshed down residential avenues to deliver emergency supplies.?

Without ample rain, “Day Zero” would theoretically arrive in June. But that darkest fear of urban planners, politicians, residents and academics never came to pass. How did one of the world’s largest cities avert all-out disaster?

What saved the metropolitan area’s 22 million residents from a calamitous water-system collapse was a combination of just-in-time rainfall, urgent political pressure and underground reserves that saw the city through the worst. The drawn-out crisis vaulted the region’s aging infrastructure to television screens and newspaper front pages, spurring everyday chilangos — as capital dwellers are known — to wonder if years of neglect and indifference by politicians would change.

“The model of water management in Mexico City is no longer functioning, and it’s important that we think of long-term solutions,” said Rodrigo Gutiérrez Rivas, a researcher focused on constitutional and water rights at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM. “Water became one of the main issues during the campaign cycle and now that it’s won by a wide margin, the government of Mexico City has a huge opportunity to transform the model.”

No water authority actually said the city would run completely dry. But you would have been forgiven for thinking otherwise after reading headlines such as “92 Days to Day Zero.” One key source — the Cutzamala System that pumps water to the capital from distant lakes — was, in fact, on the brink of a shutdown. The network of reservoirs and tunnels supplies a quarter of the city’s water, and if it ceased to function, millions would be in peril. Authorities opted to take less water from that system to ease the strain, but that led to more shortages in some areas.

On another level, the drought played into the hands of politicians looking to unseat the ruling party in June elections. The rare occurrence of empty taps in wealthy neighborhoods drew the attention of those vying in neck-and-neck mayoral and district races in the politically divided city. On Avenida Presidente Masaryk, one of Latin America’s ritziest boulevards, one newspaper noted that even the Louis Vuitton shop was short of water.

What water did arrive often repelled residents. Mayoral hopeful Santiago Taboada brandished jars of yellow water from various neighborhoods during a televised debate. “Here’s the water of Iztapalapa, contaminated,” he said. “The water of Benito Juárez, contaminated. The water of Taláhuac, contaminated. The water of Xochimilco.” He then invited rival Clara Brugada — now the city’s new mayor — to bathe in it.

It was incredible, in hindsight, for a city that Mexico’s indigenous people built in a valley of five lakes some 700 years ago. As recently as the nineteenth century, one could canoe to Mexico City’s downtown market. But as the conurbation expanded and modernized, the lakes were drained, freshwater springs were stanched, and more and more rainwater ran off concrete and asphalt surfaces.

The aquifer beneath the sprawling metropolis had been drawn upon faster than it could be replenished with fresh rains, raising the risks of worsening the sinking problem that cracks pipes. Leaks are so endemic that the water authority estimates supply losses are close to 32%. It all came to a head with the worst drought in more than a decade. Searing heat, scant rain and the weather phenomenon known as El Niño combined to stress every pressure point in the water network.

“People cannot have water day and night, day and night because it’s a resource that we now see is not infinite,” said Juan Manuel González, an emergency response specialist at the water authority Conagua.

The city sprung into action in late 2023. Authorities cleared out clogged wells, placing them back into use. Residents were told to shorten showers and recycle laundry water for mopping floors. In some neighborhoods, the government trucked in water. In January, the city decreed it would subsidize water bills in some zones to appease residents who were facing shortages, with the caveat that they couldn’t take legal action against the government.

Drought in Far-Away Reservoirs Put Pressure on Mexico City

Quarter of Valley of Mexico’s water comes from system linked to three lakes

Then-Mayor Martí Batres called for conservation, urging residents to abstain from things like watering golf courses or washing cars, while at the same time admonishing doomsayers as crass opportunists out to capture votes. “There is no Day Zero,” he declared in February, “Mexico City has diverse sources of water and other sources outside the city.”

Yolanda Mendoza, who worked part-time at a Montessori school, urged residents in El Barrio del Niño Jesús to block a major avenue that bordered their neighborhood over a dozen times after the taps went dry in November. She was incredulous about the shortage just a 10-minute drive from the Frida Kahlo Museum and 15 minutes from Mexico’s national movie theater, the Cineteca Nacional.

“You couldn’t go out to work at the hour you had to, because you had to wait for the water truck,” Mendoza said. “If it didn’t come, you wouldn’t be clean when you went to work. You couldn’t prepare food, or wash utensils. There’s a distribution system that’s elitist and classist, and when I was talking to the water authority, I said, ‘It seems like you distribute water based on the quality of citizen.’”

In a normal year, 21% of all Mexico City residents who have water pipes receive water only one to three days a week, according to government data. And 80% of low-income residents with water pipes don’t receive water daily, BBVA estimated in a report. But Mendoza never expected to be part of that demographic in an area where water had always been plentiful.

The neighborhood of El Barrio del Niño Jesús was built around a sixteenth-century church and as a child Mendoza hauled water from taps connected to natural springs. Older residents now struggled to fill rooftop tanks with hoses connected to tanker trucks. Mendoza’s 4-year-old granddaughter suffered from diarrhea while neighbors came down with skin infections. The water in the trucks sometimes had flecks of Styrofoam floating in it and exuded a putrid smell.

Mayor Batres himself agreed to meet with her and promised the neighborhood its own water well. She saw him as a hero, but other residents felt betrayed after being ignored by authorities for so long.

They were not alone. In March, residents of the Benito Juárez neighborhood began to notice a gasoline-like smell in their water and they blocked a central bus lane in protest. Tests later showed there was an oil or lubricant contaminating a single well. Batres promised a clean-up operation and the government sent in the military to hand out 20-liter jugs of water.

The crisis played out on TV and radio. Jaime Isael Mata, a borough president from the opposition National Action Party, accused Batres and his government of “lies after lies after lies.” The shortages were hitting more-affluent areas in the middle and western parts of the city normally immune to such problems. One journalist quipped that the mayor wasn’t responding to complaining residents he considered “fifís” – Mexican slang for the posh upper crust.

Batres said that his administration had spent 887 million pesos (USD$46 million) and managed to recoup 2,000 liters of water per second to address the crisis, but his office didn’t respond to further request for comment.

Mexico City appeared to be going the way of Cape Town, which in 2018 faced its own countdown to Day Zero. The South African city narrowly avoided the largest drought-induced municipal water failure in modern history with restrictions on lawns and swimming pools that in the aggregate crimped water use by 30%. A key distinction between the crises was that Mexico City residents were raising the alarm even as government officials insisted all was well, until media and political pressure forced them to respond more quickly.

“Here it wasn’t like Cape Town, where the message came directly from the government in order to call people’s attention,” said Jorge Arriaga Medina, the coordinator of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s water-management network. “The problem here is that it was generated by the media, and the government couldn’t contain the message.”\

Arriaga estimates it will cost an additional $5 billion over normal government outlays between now and 2040 to properly overhaul the water system.

The drought broke with a vengeance in June, when the skies opened and eventually deluged Mexico City and its environs. The heavy rains replenished reservoirs to more than 50% of capacity, a remarkable recovery. But they also triggered devastating landslides.

Rainfall in Mexico City’s Principal Reservoirs

Drought severely affected the water system that supplies the city

Chalco, a municipality just outside the capital, was among the hardest hit areas because it rests in a low-lying area that was once a lake. Fernando Vite plucked his 80-year-old mother from filthy floodwaters that submerged the machines he used for his printing business, along with mattresses, kitchen appliances, dressers, clothes and his mother’s flower garden.

“It was a sacrifice of too many years for it to all go into the trash,” he said. “It will be a long process, and expensive, to pick ourselves up.”

Vite placed his mother in a shelter and returned home to deter looters, sleeping on a fold-out cot. National Guard and army troopers scattered powdered lime on the patio and streets to prevent disease. Although Chalco frequently floods, Vite wondered why it took the authorities weeks to clear the area of muck and debris.

Part of what would solve the valley’s troubles, advocates say, is undoing the reliance on far-flung water deliveries and instead looking to rehabilitate local sources. One idea would involve reconstructing urban lakes. Another suggests forests outside the city should be protected from urban sprawl. The government has poured more than $1 billion into the restoration of an ecological park. Schools have in recent years been fitted with rainwater-capture devices, building on an initiative begun by nonprofit groups.

Meanwhile, private-sector actors are chipping in. Detergent giant Procter & Gamble Co. recently pledged to help replenish the valley’s water supply with the equivalent of the company’s and its consumers’ usage.

Elena Burns, former deputy director of Conagua, has argued the nation’s water authority should charge more so that it has resources to address the system’s woes. And officials also must devote their attentions to seemingly mundane tasks like repairing leaky pipes, preventing water theft, and investing in green areas that would help prevent flooding, she added.

How to Save a City Running Out of Water

“People in poverty have had to keep looking for cheap land on the city’s edge, which means areas that could recharge the groundwater are paved over,” Gutiérrez said. “The solutions aren’t simple. You have to resolve the problems of housing and water at the same time, to construct a city that’s for everyone and not just for the rich.”