WATER POLITICS

Some three hundred farmers bushwhacked up a steep hillside through the desert thornbush. Scrambling on all fours, they had to avoid the sharp stones wedged into the sunbaked earth, though some of them collected the rocks to use as weapons. The unforgiving September sun felt close to their backs as they pushed up the slope for more than an hour. On the other side were hundreds of armed soldiers.

Víctor Velderrain, the group’s unlikely ringleader, used the sleeve of his red pearl-snap to wipe sweat from his eyes. He was closer to a PTA president than a platoon sergeant. He had a gentle affect; in the evenings, he and his three young kids often flew kites over his fields. He had grown up nearby, in the city of Delicias, Chihuahua, roughly one hundred miles from the Texas border, southwest of Big Bend country. “I never imagined I’d go into battle,” he said. 

As he neared the top of the hill, Velderrain could feel the adrenaline coursing through his body. He could see the edge of La Boquilla dam, and he knew that although there were many soldiers guarding the massive concrete structure, only a few dozen were positioned along this northern rim. The troops were guarding a cache of automatic weapons.

Velderrain and the other farmers were armed only with sticks and the rocks they’d gathered. Below, they could hear the echoes of tear gas being fired—and also the sound of flowing water. In the desert before them, a river churned out from the dam’s gates and carved a serpentine path north, disappearing into the bright horizon. It was the Rio Conchos. 

Far to the west of Chihuahua’s vast deserts, the razored peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental funnel rain from annual monsoons into the Conchos, which eventually feeds into the great, meandering border river up north: the Rio Grande. Of all the goods and resources that cross the U.S.-Mexico border—cars, vegetables, drugs, guns—the water of the Rio Conchos is one of the most important and most fought over. The Conchos is by far the largest and most crucial tributary of the Rio Grande, which supports $1 billion in agriculture and is the only source of drinking water for over 1.7 million Texans downstream. But before the Conchos travels to the border, it’s collected behind dams like La Boquilla.

That has made the Conchos an ulcer in U.S.-Mexico relations. A fracturing treaty, signed in 1944, mandates that Mexico send billions of gallons of water north into the Rio Grande. In return, the U.S. keeps dams like the Hoover open and allows the Colorado River to take its natural course into Mexico. But over the past thirty years, as water has grown increasingly scarce in the great arid center of North America, Mexico and the U.S. have clashed over the dwindling rivers that crisscross their borders. Few realize how desperate the situation has become, but this conflict will define the next decade of life in the region. By the time Velderrain stood on the hillside in Chihuahua, in 2020, a dangerous new phase had begun.

In the midst of a punishing drought, Mexico had fallen far behind in its water deliveries to the U.S. Local leaders in Chihuahua were determined to keep the precious water in their own reservoirs. On the other side of the border, farmers and politicians in Texas grew livid. Governor Greg Abbott persuaded the U.S. State Department to lean hard on the Mexicans. 

In Mexico City, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was desperate to avoid conflict with President Donald Trump, but he had few options. On paper the Mexican federal government controlled the flow of the Conchos, but in Chihuahua the reality was closer to anarchy. When federal officials attempted to open the state’s dams in early 2020, the governor resisted. And that was only part of the problem. Experts estimate that more than a quarter of all water use in the state is unlicensed and unregulated. (When I drove along the Conchos into Chihuahua last year, bulldozers had just dismantled an illegal dam on the river that was diverting water to irrigate a large ranch; the ranch was owned by a former governor, César Duarte.) In February 2020, to seize control of the area’s endless maze of dams and canals, López Obrador sent in the Mexican National Guard. 

Thousands of campesinos revolted. There is a long history of uprisings in Chihuahua. This is where Pancho Villa rode at the front of the División del Norte and where Gerónimo regrouped his fighters after fighting to liberate Apache reservations in Arizona. Over the next six months in 2020, protesters burned cars and government buildings. They blockaded a major railroad between the U.S. and Mexico. Some even took politicians hostage. But the government in Mexico City didn’t blink. Miraculously, no one had died. Not yet.

By September, national guardsmen had garrisoned themselves at La Boquilla, the largest dam in the state. La Boquilla is, in the words of one farmer I met in his alfalfa fields nearby, the “heart of Chihuahua.” Built in 1915 during the height of the Mexican Revolution, it was once the largest dam in the Americas. Under protection of the soldiers, officials threw open the gates of the dam, and water flowed freely toward the U.S. border.

For Velderrain, draining the reservoir was akin to stealing his life savings, peso by peso. For other farmers, it felt more like getting strangled. September was the end of the monsoon season, when the reservoirs are usually at their fullest, and La Boquilla had been depleted to just 30 percent of its capacity—not enough to support their harvests the following year. Those with smaller parcels in Chihuahua often live on the razor’s edge of subsistence farming. If they couldn’t grow and sell their crops, they couldn’t feed themselves. For many, the danger was even more immediate. Most of the agriculture in Chihuahua operates on flood irrigation, an ancient method in which water is released across leveled fields, and that has allowed locals to dig shallow wells, called norias, to capture the runoff for household use. For farmers who rely on norias, a slowdown in regional flood irrigation meant the loss of their drinking water. 

Throughout the summer of 2020, Velderrain had joined many of the protests, but the action was led by local irrigation authorities and union leaders. Now many of those leaders had disappeared. (A rumor had spread that they’d gone into hiding after receiving threats from the federal government.) Velderrain and a handful of other farmers formed a new organization they called Defensa Nacional del Agua. They soon came up with a plan to take control of La Boquilla. 

It began with a bit of subterfuge. On social media and WhatsApp, the group spread news of a planned protest caravan that would end in the farm town of Camargo, some 25 miles from La Boquilla. On the morning of September 8, as thousands gathered in the town square in cars and tractors, Velderrain and the group’s other leaders revealed their actual plan. They had mustered everyone to Camargo so as not to alert the National Guard, but they were going to take over the dam. They were all going to La Boquilla. 

Velderrain led the caravan down the highway; the cars lined up bumper-to-bumper for over twenty miles. Among them was a couple in a white pickup: Jéssica Silva and her husband, Jaime Torres. The pair leased a roughly 22-acre farm where they grew pecans and alfalfa. It was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Silva took care to wear a mask. Outside their windows, in the bright desert sun, pecan orchards stretched into the horizon in every direction. 

Chihuahua is the world capital of pecan production. Between 1990 and 2020, even as drought gripped the region, the industry terraformed vast arid lands into sprawling orchards of nut trees, most of them enriching a small number of powerful planters. President López Obrador—elected as a left-wing champion of Mexico’s workers—had spent the summer blaming these agricultural behemoths for the chaos in Chihuahua. It was rich landowners fomenting rebellion, he said, not poor farmworkers. The largest growers did support the protests, even encouraged them, but that day it wasn’t plantation bosses putting their bodies on the line—it was desperate tenant farmers like Silva and Torres. 

The caravan soon reached the base of La Boquilla, pulling up to the small fenced-off campus where operators controlled the flow of water through a series of gates and hydroelectric turbines. Hundreds of soldiers stood ready, led by a brigadier general named Alejandro Vázquez Flores. A gruff, white-haired veteran with a square face, Vázquez Flores had become prominent during the protests. At times he tried negotiating directly with protesters. It wasn’t effective diplomacy; the conversations looked closer to shouting matches. But that morning there was little talk. As soon as the protesters reached the gates, they demanded to be let inside. When the troops refused, the protesters rushed the gates. 

The scene turned chaotic. Tear gas sailed over the fence into a crowd that included men, women, and children. In response, a hailstorm of rocks rained down on the soldiers. Some protesters had brought Molotov cocktails, and these too sailed over the gates to the dam, leaving burning tails like comets. The soldiers, decked out in riot gear, responded with more volleys of tear gas, and the canisters bounced off the rioters’ homemade shields. 

With the soldiers occupied, Velderrain set in motion the second phase of the plan. He enlisted a separate group of three hundred campesinos, and they returned down the road they’d come in on, parking near a hillside a couple of miles away. Velderrain had secured the help of a few locals who knew the landscape, and these guides led the group into the thornbush, up toward La Boquilla’s less defended northern edge, where they hoped to break into the back side of the facility. 

As they perched atop the hill, their eyes burned from the white clouds of tear gas drifting up to them. Velderrain issued the order to charge. The soldiers below were too distracted to hear the throng of men and women sprinting toward them from behind. Even as the group’s leader, Velderrain had no idea what would happen next. “The plan wasn’t to attack the National Guard,” he told me. The idea, instead, was to overwhelm the soldiers, to stun them with the sheer number of protesters and force them to surrender, trusting that they wouldn’t open fire on civilians. But as they charged, Velderrain understood that he had no control over what his people did or how the soldiers would respond. The automatic weapons were in a shed, within easy reach of the guardsmen. 

By the time the soldiers turned, Velderrain was close enough to register the shock on their faces. Everything happened quickly after that. Tear gas canisters and rocks were still flying back and forth. Someone from Velderrain’s crew opened the gate at the front of the campus, and protesters poured inside, surrounding the soldiers. A military helicopter soon hovered overhead, and Velderrain could feel the wind as the blades pounded the air. Surveying the mass of people, he spotted a shock of white hair under a camo cap: the general, Vázquez Flores. Velderrain marched up to him. “It’s over,” Velderrain said. “There’s no reason to continue escalating.” 

Vázquez Flores was frustrated, but he agreed. The order went out—the soldiers surrendered. A contingent of farmers rushed into the control facilities and closed the great cortinas. The Rio Conchos stopped flowing north. “We liberated it,” Velderrain said. 

For the moment, the violence had ended. That evening, Torres and Silva, the tenant farmers, drove home in a small caravan with other protesters. Their children were waiting for them at home, and Silva and Torres were having car trouble, so the others let them drive in front in case they needed to pull over for repairs. As the group reached the outskirts of Delicias, three vehicles roared past them. 

Two National Guard trucks were flanking a civilian vehicle from the front and behind. On the tailgate of the civilian car, Torres spotted a protest sign: “Sin agua no hay vida”—without water there is no life. Torres was unnerved; it appeared that the soldiers had detained some protesters. He and Silva contacted the drivers behind them, and together they agreed to follow the trucks, hoping to see where the protesters were being taken.

A short while later, the civilian car suddenly veered toward an exit. The military truck in front couldn’t make the turn in time, and it jerked off the road onto the unpaved shoulder before turning around in a dusty arc. Torres tailed the civilian, and the other National Guard vehicle followed closely behind them.

Moments later, the lead military truck reappeared and swerved in front of Torres and Silva’s pickup. Torres heard gunshots and felt something hit the back of his neck. He pulled off the road and came to a stop.

A human rights inquest later found that a soldier had fired into the pickup from behind. Before losing consciousness, Torres watched a soldier tear open the door to their truck and rack a rifle. In the passenger seat, his wife lay hunched over her seatbelt, blood blooming from exit wounds in her chest, neck, and shoulders. She was still wearing her COVID mask.

Chapter II.

A Ticking Bomb

“I don’t know if I can emphasize enough how dire and urgent it really is.”

The Flowers family citrus grove.

A river connects the world in strange ways. Five years after Velderrain’s charge, almost to the day, I walked through a grove of adolescent orange trees with Mike Flowers, five hundred miles from La Boquilla, near the town of Mission, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Flowers, tattooed and muscled, is one of the most imposing men I’ve ever met. He wondered aloud whether, had he lived in another era, he might have been a Viking “swinging an axe into someone.” As it was, he was a citrus farmer and a dad to four girls. His father, Jud, had introduced him to me as “Mikey.” Pointing at the surrounding trees, Mike explained that he’d planted them to replace thousands that had died off in recent years. A freak storm was partly to blame for the losses, but so was lack of water. 

Just a handful of years ago, some 40,000 acres of sugarcane stretched out in the fields east of the Flowerses’ orchards. In 2024 the entire industry collapsed when the last sugar mill in the state closed. Along with sugarcane, citrus is one of the thirstiest crops in the Valley, and Lone Star Citrus is among the few holdouts. Flowers runs the only remaining family-owned citrus-packing operation in Texas. “If we don’t get water,” he said, “we’re a couple years from not being a thing.”

It’s not just farmers who are at risk. An orange is close to 90 percent water, which makes it a sort of bellwether for the calamity that now plagues South Texas. Even before the skirmish at La Boquilla, the Rio Grande was one of the most endangered rivers in the country. When the Conchos stopped flowing, the Rio Grande Valley was plunged into one of the worst water crises the U.S. has ever seen. 

For Flowers, the crisis began in February 2021. He rushed through his orchards with a team of pickers, working day and night to evacuate the fruit from his trees. A polar vortex stalked their way. Citrus is harvested in winter, and much of the year’s yield of oranges and grapefruits still hung on the branches. Forecasters predicted that the storm would drop the mercury below 20 degrees, which would freeze the fruit solid, ruining it. Flowers, though, was more worried about the trees themselves. 

Already stressed by years of drought, the trees were brittle, and the trunks could explode when the water inside them froze. Most vulnerable were the youngest, those that hadn’t yet borne fruit. Flowers did what he could to protect them. As a last resort, he set up microjets to spray the bases of the trunks. When this water froze, the ice would, paradoxically, insulate the tree from the cold air outside, keeping it at a steady 32 degrees. 

On Valentine’s Day, Flowers watched the temperature sink to 17 degrees. “When it gets that low, there’s nothing you can do,” he said. The storm was an especially brutal blow because it affected his entire family. 

In 1970, Mike’s father, Jud, had started the family farming business with one Jersey cow an uncle gave him as payment for hauling some cattle to Alabama. Jud bought up several cattle pastures and turned the cow into a herd, and he raised Mike on a horse. Mike did the same with his daughters. “My littlest one, dude, as soon as she saw a horse, she was grabbing under his hair, trying to get on him. Can’t even walk yet. Her eyes light up. She’s, like, just the happiest thing on earth.” 

In the eighties, Jud started acquiring citrus orchards as well, and in the following decades he doubled down on fruit, snatching up more farmland and building a juice-processing plant. He turned this operation into Lone Star Citrus. “That’s what we’re doing now,” Mike said. “He used the cows as a way to sustain everything while he was building this.” 

Growing citrus, though, came with hardship. The trees are expensive and finicky. One December when Mike was young, it got cold enough to snow in the Valley. Mike remembers his father leaving the house on Christmas Eve to pace under the frigid sky. “He was just worrying,” Mike said. “I’m a little bit different. I’m like, What are you gonna do? Stop it being cold? It’s gonna suck either way.” 

When the polar vortex hit, in February 2021, Mike waited out the storm at home with his family. Then he walked into the orchards to survey the damage. Across the Valley, citrus orchards lost some 50 percent of the grapefruit harvest and nearly 100 percent of the Valencia oranges. And then there were the trees. Mike and Jud inspected them for the telltale broken limbs and cracked trunks. When they got to the newest groves, everything was lost. They would have to replant all of it. 

This would take months, it turned out. Greenhouses didn’t have enough saplings to meet the sudden demand across the region, and the Flowerses joined a lengthy waiting list. By the time trees were available, an even bigger debacle had arrived. 

Like most farmers in the Valley, the Flowerses get their irrigation water from two massive reservoirs that straddle the Rio Grande. The first, and most important, is Lake Amistad, outside Del Rio, with Caribbean-like waters that are perhaps the clearest in Texas. The other, just to the south of Laredo, is Falcon Lake. It once offered some of the best bass fishing in the country. 

Farmers don’t pay for water the way you or I do. Instead, they make a onetime purchase of water rights, which are considered property—a major investment that many pass down to their children. In the Rio Grande Valley, the amount of water these rights represent fluctuates because they entitle farmers to a certain percentage of the water that’s actually available in Amistad and Falcon at any given time. The system’s design assumed that there would always be at least some water flowing in the river.

After the battle of La Boquilla, that flow collapsed. When the dam’s gates were slammed shut, the Rio Grande was crippled by the loss of its largest tributary. Before long it began running dry for huge stretches. By February 2022, a year after the polar vortex wiped out fields across the Valley, Amistad and Falcon hit some of their lowest levels in history. Farmers were forced to drastically cut water use. 

Somehow, things got even worse. Through a historically hot summer, the water in the reservoirs evaporated at a stunning pace. On the Flowerses’ farm, Mike and Jud anxiously checked the levels of the lakes. As the water retreated, dead aquatic life began to appear on the edge of Falcon. The open mouths of pipes were exposed on the dry lakesides. These were the intakes through which cities from Eagle Pass to Brownsville got some of their municipal water.

Throughout the Rio Grande Valley, some 90 percent of all drinking water comes from Amistad and Falcon. (You can actually tell from the taste; filtration removes microbes, but flavor molecules are far smaller than even single-celled bacteria, so what flows out of the faucet carries the vegetal, muddy taste of the river.) Most of these cities have no backup. If the reservoirs dried up, millions of Texans would lose their drinking water indefinitely.  

As cities launched emergency engineering projects to extend their intake pipes down to the water, state and federal water officials began holding open meetings for farmers and local leaders in the Valley. They didn’t disguise their alarm. “I don’t know if I can emphasize enough how dire and urgent it really is,” Bobby Janecka, a commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said at a gathering in July 2022. 

It was Janecka’s job to ensure that there was enough water in the reservoirs to keep the taps flowing. When Governor Abbott first appointed him to the position, in 2019, he learned about the contingency plan for when the reservoirs began running out of water. “It looked awful on paper, but it was a hypothetical—it had never been used before,” Janecka said. An ambitious technocrat, he had worked at the agency’s radioactive-materials section for five years before rising to commissioner, so he was used to hearing about disaster scenarios. He never expected they’d come true. “Then we crossed that red line,” he said. 

Once the reservoirs reached a critical threshold, Janecka’s agency informed farmers that it was declaring a sort of martial law: It would temporarily commandeer the water rights that farmers had already paid for. In some instances, farmers checked their accounts and saw that the state had debited all of their remaining water for the year—some even went into the negative. Irrigation canals ran dry. Crops wilted.

Janecka had no choice—he had to preserve every last drop so that cities could have drinking water—but that made it no less painful. Many days, he heard from farmers whose fields were in ruins. These were brutal conversations, but there wasn’t much Janecka could tell them. It was like being a doctor and having to inform a patient that all treatment options had been exhausted. 

Yet even with all these sacrifices, the reservoirs continued to shrink precipitously. By the middle of August, Amistad was around 30 percent full; Falcon was at just 9 percent. The question on everyone’s mind was how long the reservoirs could hold up. How long until Texans’ taps went dry?

Sam Sandoval Solís, a professor at the University of California, Davis, sat at his desk poring over every set of data he could find, looking at flow rates from gauges across the Rio Grande basin, trying to answer that question. Considered one of the foremost experts on the river, Sandoval Solís had spent thirty years creating the single most detailed database of its flows, collecting records that went back to the year 1900. His data allowed him to create a model that spit out an estimate for how long South Texas had until what’s known as Day Zero, the moment it ran out of drinking water: six months. 

There was little that could be done at that point, and all across the Valley, officials turned to a peculiar form of faith. “We’re praying for a hurricane,” Jim Darling, the former mayor of McAllen, told the Texas Observer. An act of God was the only thing that could bail out the Valley.

Most South Texans don’t know how close they came to running out of water, because Darling’s prayers were answered. In mid-August 2022 a powerful storm system barreled into Texas. Amid the drought, it began flooding. In Laredo, Interstate 35 turned into a river, with water levels lapping at the bellies of semitrucks. The storm continued west along the Rio Grande until it reached Chihuahua, dumping a foot of rain. The water poured into La Boquilla and other reservoirs across Delicias-Camargo faster than it could be collected, and a torrent traveled up the Conchos into the Rio Grande, eventually spilling into Amistad and Falcon. The immediate crisis was over. 

Yet this was only a temporary reprieve. In the years since, state and federal officials haven’t done enough to prevent another shortage. And the risk to South Texans has not diminished. “For the last four years, they’ve escaped by the skin of their teeth,” Sandoval Solís said. “They have barely, barely escaped.” 

Opportune storms have saved the region from a full-blown crisis multiple times. That good fortune will not last. 

Chapter III.

A Journey of 1,900 Miles

“This has always been the lifeblood of the Rio Grande.”

Farmland in the desert landscape south of El Paso.

Last year I spent seven months traveling the entire length of the Rio Grande basin, from the headwaters high in the mountains of Colorado to the terminus on the Gulf of Mexico, some 1,900 miles later. I wanted to understand the disaster gripping the river, and what might be done to stop it. While the imperiled Colorado River tends to attract the headlines, the Rio Grande is in an even more severe state of collapse. Just 15 percent of its natural flow makes it out to the Gulf each year. 

For years these changes have been obvious and ominous. I’ve spent most of my career reporting along the border, and in places where I’d once watched migrants swim against deep, treacherous currents, the water has receded to a muddy trickle. Experts have been worried about the river for decades, yet I’d assumed the threat of it vanishing was, at worst, decades away. I didn’t realize it had already begun.

The crisis starts in the mountains. A few dozen miles north of the New Mexico state line, in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, the headwaters of the Rio Grande form early each summer when the snowpack starts to melt. Creeks appear on steep mountainsides like dense sets of braids, trickling down and collecting into the master stream. In June of last year, I hiked through these mountains, sleeping at the edge of swollen creeks and trekking across ice fields. 

Even in early summer I got hit by snow flurries, as thunderstorms rumbled through the alpine. For thousands of years, the peaks of the San Juans have scraped the undersides of clouds traveling east from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California, releasing the torrent of rain and snow that turns into the Rio Grande. But the world has changed. At the turn of this millennium, a record-shattering drought took hold in the American Southwest. This drought has refused to break. The snowpack in the San Juans has shrunk to a fraction of what it was in the twentieth century. Last year its level was just 56 percent of its historic median. This year it was a terrifying 8 percent—the worst in recorded history.

The dry spell has been so severe and prolonged that some researchers now suggest we are seeing a historic shift in the climate. In the early 2020s scientists studied the rings of ancient coniferous trees and created a historical record of their growth to estimate annual rainfall. The results put the region’s megadrought into stark historical perspective: The last time the dry center of North America experienced a drought of this proportion was in the ninth century, generations before the Aztecs emerged. Some researchers have stopped calling it a drought and started using the term “aridification.” This is the new normal. 

Yet a changing climate is not the only cause of the river’s demise. More than a century of relentless overuse has pushed the Rio Grande to its breaking point. Agriculture is responsible for an estimated 87 percent of all water use along its length. And even as the water disappears, farmers are still using a stunning amount of it. 

Before the river makes it even twenty miles from its headwaters, it’s pooled behind an earthen dam, into the Rio Grande Reservoir. This reservoir, like all the others along the river, was built for agriculture; in this case, it allowed growers in Colorado to plant thousands of hectares of alfalfa, hay, and potatoes. Much of the alfalfa harvested in the U.S. is shipped overseas to support massive cattle herds in countries including Japan and Saudi Arabia. 

The water that’s rerouted by the Rio Grande Reservoir weaves through aspen forests and deep granite canyons before it emerges into an expansive alpine plain, the San Luis Valley. Though the area is a desert—it receives less than ten inches of rain a year—it is the heart of Colorado’s agricultural industry. The San Luis Valley was one of the first agricultural regions settled by Hispanos traveling north out of Santa Fe in the 1800s; by 1888 farmers here were using so much water that the Rio Grande ran dry before it reached El Paso. Today interstate compacts compel Colorado to ensure that some water makes it south to New Mexico and Texas, but much of what flows out of the San Juan Mountains stays in Colorado. 

When it comes to who gets water in the West, there is no one set of rules. Each state has its own byzantine regulations and water laws; users within each state can sue one another over water use, and states can take one another to court. (This gets only more complicated when Mexico is added to the mix.) In general, though, the philosophy of water rights in the United States is rooted in a pioneer mentality. Imagine you start a farm along a healthy river, and you spend a generation using its water to make a life for your family. Later, perhaps after your children have inherited the farm, the water starts disappearing because new farmers upstream are diverting the river to cultivate their own fields. Who has a rightful claim to the water? State laws tend to prioritize the oldest users: If you staked your claim first, you get dibs.

The farmers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley have some of the oldest claims to the Rio Grande. But even they have been devastated. The dwindling snowpack has meant far less water is available to them. Researchers estimate that 18 percent of Colorado farmland along the Rio Grande has disappeared in recent decades. 

The situation downriver is more severe. Last year I drove deep into the lake bed of Elephant Butte Reservoir, in southern New Mexico. On Google Maps, the car appeared to be moving across a pool of blue, as if I’d steered a submarine into the lake. The reservoir was at under 5 percent capacity. I parked next to what remained of the water, the dam’s spillway rising hundreds of feet above me. Earlier, at a viewpoint overlooking the lake, I had overheard a father and son reminiscing about fishing for bass downstream the last time the water went over the spillway. “I wish I’d gotten one of the T-shirts they was selling saying, ‘I saw the ’86 spillover,’?” the father told me. “I didn’t realize that’d be the last time.” 

Though Elephant Butte is in New Mexico, Texas owns the rights to most of its water. El Paso once got almost half of its water from the reservoir, and city leaders have been forced to find alternatives. Local geology has compounded the challenge. The groundwater along much the river is brackish and undrinkable. El Paso has dealt with the problem by building the world’s largest inland desalination plant.

Farmers, though, still rely on the river. The system of canals that transports its water over one hundred miles from Elephant Butte to farmers’ fields in Texas—delivering the right amount, at the right time—is astounding. Last summer I watched as a cotton farmer named Ramón Tirres placed an order for a water delivery at the headquarters of the local irrigation district, outside El Paso. An employee punched the request into one of his four computer monitors. Water from Elephant Butte poured first into the smaller Caballo reservoir before moving into the Rio Grande itself. 

For four days that water traveled south in the river before reaching irrigation canals in El Paso. The oldest of these canals were dug in the 1880s, and their engineering is a thing of beauty. A crew of ditch riders, who travel in trucks along the canals, shepherd the water to the right field. There are no pumps anywhere in the system: Every hundred feet, the canal drops a few centimeters in elevation. Gravity alone carries the water to even the most far-flung fields, sometimes through hundreds of miles of canal. When Tirres opened the gate to the canal at the edge of his fields some 96 hours after placing the order, water gushed down his rows of cotton plants. 

The canal system helped transform one of the harshest landscapes in North America into a major agricultural region. El Paso gets less than nine inches of rain a year—less than half that of the desert city of Jerusalem—and yet just to the south of the city are lush fields of pima cotton and dense orchards of pecans. This is where the river dies. 

On a map the Rio Grande appears as a blue line that travels from Colorado all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. That line is a lie. By the time the river makes it past El Paso, it has fed so many fields of potatoes, cotton, and pecans that no water remains. For most of the year, the Rio Grande runs dry for the next two hundred miles through what some call the Forgotten Reach. This is perhaps the most important fact to understand about the Rio Grande: Human activity has turned it into two rivers. The upper Rio Grande flows from the headwaters. The lower Rio Grande comes from somewhere else. 

Charlie Angell knows this better than most. Since 2008 he has led rafting expeditions on the river, guiding adventurous souls through the canyons in Big Bend National Park. Last December we crossed the border near his home, in Redford, and drove fifty miles south, eventually descending the mouth of a deep canyon and pushing off into the river that ran through it: the Conchos. “Without the Rio Conchos, there is no Rio Grande,” Angell said, his voice echoing off the canyon walls. “This has always been the lifeblood, the source of the Rio Grande.” 

When Angell first got to the Texas border, in the early aughts, he could float down the Rio Grande on large inflatable rafts for days-long expeditions. But in 2000 the megadrought had begun at the same time that pecan production in Chihuahua was aggressively expanded. Chihuahua withheld more and more of the Conchos’s waters to sustain new fields. Angell’s rafts started getting stuck on the rocks of the exposed riverbed.  

He switched to inflatable and plastic-hulled canoes, which have a shallower draft. Even with the new boats, some canyons became impassable for part of the year. But the river still flowed through the jewel of Big Bend, the iconic Santa Elena Canyon. Santa Elena’s walls rise hundreds of feet on both sides of the river, forming a vast cathedral. Some of Angell’s customers got engaged there, in the middle of the river. 

Then, in the winter of 2021—a little more than a year after farmers occupied La Boquilla—the water levels in Santa Elena began to shrink fast, to lower than Angell had ever seen. By the spring of 2022, Santa Elena had gone entirely dry. Angell walked out into the riverbed; the earth was cracked into geometric shapes like the pattern of a giraffe’s coat. 

When rivers run dry, it complicates their recovery. As the sun bakes the exposed soil, the levels of salt and selenium increase. When the rivers finally refill, they’re toxic and brackish. It takes a major surplus of water to get the river flowing again, and even more to make the water fresh and drinkable. Long-term damage to rivers across the world is why United Nations researchers, in a recent report, argued that we need to call this sort of crisis “water bankruptcy.” We’re not just out of water; we’re in debt. 

In South Texas, this has set the stage for disaster. Without any of the flow from the headwaters, cities there are dependent on a tributary that’s been held captive. But the chain of events triggered by the takeover of La Boquilla doesn’t end in the Rio Grande Valley. As nightmarish as the situation has become in Texas, in Mexico the scenario is worse. Over 11 million people are at risk.

Chapter IV.

Disaster Comes for the Mountain Royals

“You could feel that there was something wrong.”

Monterrey, Mexico, a city of millions, at night.

In the spring of 2022, Rosario Sanchez, one of North America’s most respected water experts, stopped into an Oxxo convenience store near her home, in Saltillo, less than two hundred miles southwest of Laredo. When she went to grab a bottle of water, the fridges were strangely empty. She made a loop around the store. Where normally there were room-temperature bottles and jugs lining the shelves, there was nothing. Confused and a bit alarmed, Sanchez asked the clerk what had happened. “It’s all gone to Monterrey,” he replied. 

Sanchez knew Monterrey well. In the nineties she had attended university at Tec de Monterrey, a modernist campus south of the city’s downtown high-rises. While just fifty miles separated Monterrey from her hometown, the two cities are worlds apart. Saltillo lies within the eastern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. Monterrey sits on the other side of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The city is flanked by rivers and cradled by lush mountains covered with forests of pine and oak. The environmental contrast between Saltillo and Monterrey mirrors an economic one: The wealth in Monterrey is remarkable. An industrial powerhouse, the city contains some of the richest zip codes in all of the Americas. Residents are known as regiomontanos—mountain royals. 

At Tec de Monterrey, Sanchez studied international relations and at one point picked up La leyenda de los soles, by Homero Aridjis. Published in 1993 and set in a dystopian Mexico City in 2027, the novel imagines a world where water has disappeared from the Valley of Mexico. As the scarcity deepens, the social order breaks down. People begin attacking water infrastructure, destroying water lines and stealing pipes. It never occurred to her that she would one day hear similar stories coming out of Monterrey. 

Soon though, she would understand how fraught and pervasive the conflict over water already was. After graduating, Sanchez began a career as a diplomat, and her first foreign posting took her to the Mexican consulate in the border town of Yuma, Arizona. There she got her first taste of the diplomatic war between the U.S. and Mexico over water. 

Yuma’s water comes from the Colorado River, which passes through the city before crossing the border into the Mexicali Valley, one of Mexico’s most important agricultural regions. During the Great Depression, the United States had famously constructed the Hoover Dam to divert the Colorado’s water to use on farms in California’s Imperial Valley and to the booming city of Los Angeles. As Hollywood’s fortunes rose, the Mexicali Valley suffered. An international crisis emerged.

By the forties, tensions were so high that the U.S. State Department committed precious diplomatic resources during World War II to hosting a grand negotiation with Mexican officials in Washington, D.C. What resulted was the 1944 Treaty on the Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande. It is a dense, complex document, but, broadly speaking, the United States agreed to let some water from the Colorado travel to Mexico; in return, Mexico promised to allow water to flow north from its tributaries to the Rio Grande, in particular the Conchos. In the decades that followed, the two countries used the treaty’s framework to cooperate on the construction of Amistad and Falcon, and they agreed to share the water in the new lakes roughly equally. 

Yet from its first days, the treaty did not solve so much as organize the fight over water. The document contained two fatal flaws: It significantly overestimated the amount of water in both the Colorado and the Rio Grande basins, and water wasn’t allocated by a percentage of what’s actually available. Instead, there’s a discrete amount of water that each country owes the other. This meant that as the climate changed and the populations of Texas and northern Mexico exploded, the treaty couldn’t easily adapt to growing demands and diminishing availability. 

By the time Sanchez got to Yuma, in 2001, the compact was disintegrating. Four years earlier, shortly before the megadrought began, Mexico had defaulted on part of the 489 billion gallons of water it owed Texas. The U.S. protested, and Mexico pledged to make up the deficit as soon as the drought relented. The drought, of course, continues to this day, and Mexico has only ever been able to catch up on payments by sending spillover water after major storms. This has not proved to be a durable solution. 

Sanchez realized that it wasn’t sufficient to be a diplomat. If she were going to help solve the water problem, she’d need to be a scientist as well. In 2006 she began a doctoral program in water management at Texas A&M University. “I thought, hey, how hard could it be?” Sanchez said. “And it became the hardest thing I’d ever done.” 

But it gave her an expansive new perspective on what a river is: a complex organism made up of a vast network of tributaries, arroyos, and aquifers that pays no mind to international borders. She later went to work at the Texas Water Resources Institute, a government agency that researches solutions to the state’s water issues, and she pressed for changes that accounted for the realities faced by Texans and Mexicans.

In 2020, after Velderrain and the farmers took over the dam, Sanchez watched as the Mexican government found itself cornered: Either it could send more soldiers to Chihuahua and face outright armed rebellion, or it could default on its treaty debt, stoking the ire of President Trump. Seeking a compromise, Mexico made a concession of last resort. In October that year, a month after the clash at La Boquilla, Mexico agreed to cede part of its claim to the water in the Amistad and Falcon reservoirs. This immediately threw northeastern Mexico into danger. 

The result was tragic but predictable. To compensate for the water the nation had relinquished, Mexican officials began relying more heavily on other reservoirs in the region to support agricultural production. One such reservoir was El Cuchillo, which at the time provided up to 70 percent of the drinking water for Monterrey. Within two years the city was on the verge of calamity. 

Sanchez was acutely aware of the critical water shortage, but it was nonetheless startling when the first warning signs appeared. They were mild at first. As El Cuchillo shrank, city officials in Monterrey called for increasingly strict rationing to try to stave off Day Zero. Though Sanchez was working in Texas, she often visited her hometown of Saltillo. One day she took her son to a routine pediatrician visit, and the doctor mentioned that her son and his roommates at Tec de Monterrey were driving hours each way to her house multiple times a week just to take showers and wash their laundry. Not long after, bottled water disappeared from the shelves. Around Saltillo, Sanchez began noticing tanker trucks and pickups with large cisterns in their beds, stopping near water pipelines where they could fill up and haul the water back to Monterrey.   

The rationing didn’t work. Desperate city officials tapped smaller reservoirs as well as regional rivers to supplement Monterrey’s water, which offered temporary relief but in turn expanded the scope of the shortage. To the south of the city, the Rio Ramos, another tributary of the Rio Grande, provided water for the small town of Allende. In July 2022, after officials announced they would divert that water to Monterrey, angry protests broke out. In what became a rallying cry across the region, locals chanted, “¡No es sequía, es saqueo!”—it’s not drought, it’s theft. Early one July morning, plumes of smoke shot high into the air above the pipelines that would have carried the water north to Monterrey—a group had lit them on fire. The dystopian novel Sanchez had read in the nineties had come true. 

By the height of summer, the unthinkable happened: An entire reservoir dried up. Astronauts could detect the impacts from space. NASA photos showed what was once a blue lake reduced to mud and dust. Taps across Monterrey began to run dry. 

Monterrey is a huge, sprawling mass, home to over five million people across its greater urban area, and depending on what street a person lived on, their experience of the crisis varied wildly. Predictably, the poorest parts of the city were hit hardest: Some neighborhoods went months without running water. During this same stretch, faucets in the richest neighborhoods continued running, albeit with rationing requirements. One worker who lived in a suburb of Monterrey told reporters that his neighborhood had no water, but when he traveled into the city to work in the kitchen of a luxury restaurant, water flowed freely. 

The inequality spurred lawless behavior and ugly conflicts between residents. In poor neighborhoods, the city organized weekly water-truck deliveries. Residents waited in line to fill up jugs. Fights, bordering on riots, sometimes broke out as parents pushed to the front to secure water for their children and outsiders from other neighborhoods tried to elbow their way in. Around the city, people were desperate to get their hands on anything they could use to haul water, including trash cans. Profiteers sold plastic buckets for a hundred times their value. One driver of a delivery truck was reportedly ambushed by a group of young men who threatened to kidnap him if he didn’t take the water to their neighborhood. 

In surrounding rural areas, the scenes were apocalyptic. Across northern Mexico, livestock dropped dead from thirst. In Coahuila, the state just north of Monterrey’s, 30 percent of the cattle died or were sold off. The smell of rotting livestock choked the air. Ranches and farms went out of business. Some campesinos packed up and went north to try their luck across the border. 

The newspaper El Norte organized a water forum in Monterrey, and Sanchez was invited to participate. Despite the years she’d spent there, the idea of visiting the city now made her nervous. She eventually decided to attend but opted to drive to Saltillo that evening to avoid staying overnight in the city. When she arrived in Monterrey for the first time since the water crisis began, “it was a surreal experience,” she said. “The environment was tense. You could feel that there was something wrong.” 

During the conference, Sanchez was frustrated that many of the presentations focused on the extreme drought hitting northern Mexico. Yes, the drought had exacerbated the problem, but she felt this missed the true engine of the crisis: extreme and chronic overuse of water. In her talk, Sanchez pointed out that each year around the world, trillions of gallons of water go toward growing food that will end up in landfills as food waste. 

That August, salvation blew in from the Gulf. The same storm system that bailed out South Texas in 2022 brought an end to Monterrey’s misery. The deluge refilled the reservoirs enough that by September, local leaders declared the emergency over. But Sanchez knew better. Absent a radical reimagining of how farmers use water throughout the Rio Grande basin, the emergency was only beginning.

Chapter V.

An Inland Tsunami

“The needle only moves further toward crisis.”

Amistad has hovered at perilously low levels for years.

Old-timers in Laredo remember the floods. My grandfather Guillermo Herrera was born into the city’s projects in 1938. Back then—before the construction of Falcon and Amistad—the Rio Grande would often jump its banks and flood the surrounding ranchland. When this happened, his mother would gather him and his siblings into a borrowed truck to help rescue livestock. One of the last stories my grandfather told me before he died was about the day he learned to swim, when his mom pointed at a chicken flailing its wings in the middle of a pond created by floodwaters and told him, “Go get that one.” 

A decade later the river disappeared. In 1953 the Rio Grande ran dry through Laredo for the first time in recorded history. The disaster made headlines across the country. “The city has only a one-day supply of water for its 51,000 inhabitants,” an alarmed report in The New York Times read. A miserable snowpack in the San Juan Mountains had pushed the river to the breaking point, but even back then agricultural use was also to blame. Land speculators had successfully marketed the dry brushland along the Texas border as a “Magic Valley” for farming, and the industry exploded. In a desperate effort to persuade growers to pause irrigation until Laredo’s crisis had passed, Texas Governor Allan Shivers dispatched an agent to the farmland upstream. Legally, there was nothing this agent could do. “He cannot force them to cooperate,” the Times wrote. In a state where private property was sacrosanct, the government had no real power to deny farmers the use of their own water rights.

Falcon and Amistad, built in the fifties and sixties, were supposed to solve this problem. To make sure residents didn’t lose their drinking water, state code required that the reservoirs bank enough water for the cities that depended on them, though how much water counted as enough was left vague. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was put in charge of the reservoirs, and the agency generally decided to set aside a year’s worth of water for municipal use. Farmers would then divide the surplus, which, most years, was the bulk of the water in the lakes. It was a clever system. But over the next five decades, as the climate became hotter and drier and the region’s population surged from some 500,000 to over 1.7 million, it became much more difficult to manage. 

In 2019, when Governor Abbott appointed Janecka to the TCEQ, the lanky technocrat discovered how fraught the job was. On its surface, the water-banking system sounded simple. But calculating how much water to conserve for cities wasn’t a matter of simply adding up the total number of gallons that municipalities used annually. TCEQ had to factor in rates of evaporation, water loss due to ground seepage and leaky pipes, and smaller river flows entering the reservoirs. There wasn’t much room for error: If Janecka set aside too little, cities could face catastrophe; if he saved up too much, farmers could go out of business.

For years, TCEQ managed a precarious balance by expertly modeling river flows in and out of the reservoirs. Then came the battle at La Boquilla. Suddenly the agency’s slick math applied to a world that no longer existed. 

In 2022, TCEQ got it wrong. With no new water entering the reservoirs from the Conchos, Janecka watched in horror as the supply he had conserved for the cities evaporated faster than the lakes could refill. That’s when he was forced to debit water away from farmers, buying precious time. The region was fortunate that a massive storm system averted a larger disaster that year. 

Yet despite the deluge, the reservoirs remained at critically low levels, and the river still ran dry for long stretches. The Rio Grande remained in crisis.

Hydrologists say rivers have memory—when they’re full, they stay full; once they’re dry, they stay dry. The same is true of reservoirs. When bodies of water diminish, the lack of cool depths accelerates rates of evaporation, and salts and sediment build up. 

To keep the Texas farming system afloat, TCEQ continued delivering as much water as possible to the Valley’s growers. The agency had little choice. Janecka compared TCEQ to air traffic control. “They are entirely reactive,” he said. 

As a result, Falcon and Amistad continued to hover at some of their lowest levels in history, further scrambling the agency’s models—it’s hard to estimate water loss downstream from the reservoirs when the riverbed is the driest it’s ever been. “What are future losses going to be? We don’t know,” Janecka said. “It’s an interesting natural experiment—and a terrifying one.” 

The reservoirs have been stuck in a sort of doom loop ever since, putting cities at perpetual risk. In August 2024, an unprecedented heat dome settled over Lake Amistad. Nearby Del Rio registered consecutive days of temperatures above 112 degrees. The rate of evaporation was stunning. The lakes hit their lowest combined level in history. In some places downstream, the Rio Grande disappeared entirely.

For the city of Zapata, this spelled an immediate crisis. Local officials wheeled in an emergency pump to ensure that water reached the city if the main intake pipe failed, but it was only a temporary fix. No one knew how long they had.

Sonny Hinojosa, who’d spent two decades working as general manager of an irrigation district in Hidalgo, checked the reservoirs obsessively. When a reporter for The Monitor, based in McAllen, asked him what would happen if taps ran dry, Hinojosa chuckled before turning serious. “That’s what we have been trying to ask, and no one has an answer,” he said.

Agricultural water deliveries bottomed out, and for the second time in three years, crops wilted across the Valley. Farmers were incensed. Agricultural overuse might be a culprit in the river’s demise, but was it fair that individual farmers had to pay the cost for a broken system? The consensus among growers in Texas was that Mexico was the true villain. Over the past three decades, agricultural water use has decreased in every American state that the Rio Grande touches. There’s one place where it has gone up.

At one point, Dante Galeazzi, the president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association, approached Janecka and showed him a series of infrared satellite images taken from above the Mexican state of Chihuahua. In the photos, time-stamped by year, crops and vegetation were coded in greens and blues. As Galeazzi clicked through the slides, the colored blotches expanded like dye in water. He explained that over the past twenty years, the amount of land being farmed in Chihuahua had quadrupled, as new growers, many of them unregulated, chased a boom in global pecan prices. “Chihuahua is the problem party,” Galeazzi told me.

Yet he also knew there was plenty of blame to go around. In 2024 he and other lobbyists pushed the federal government to complete a study of tributary health on the American side of the border, where Texas rivers like the Pecos and Devils empty into the Rio Grande. Preliminary data from the study found that the amount of water flowing into Amistad and Falcon from U.S. sources had collapsed by a stunning 33 percent.  

The accusations against Mexico weren’t unfounded, but they had distracted from the larger origins of the crisis. “Even if Mexico makes good, there’s an urgent scarcity, urgent shortage,” Janecka said. “The river running dry in El Paso is not something we can blame on Mexico.” 

In the arid West, farmers talk about “paper water” and “wet water.” Paper water refers to water rights, while wet water is what’s actually in the river. In Texas, water rights represent almost double the amount of water that’s actually in the river in a given year, according to Sandoval Solís, the UC Davis professor. “That’s why the reservoirs will never refill—that’s why the needle only moves further toward crisis,” he told me. 

Yet Janecka, like the agent wandering the countryside in 1953, felt powerless to fix the problem on the American side. There was only one lever he could pull.

In November 2024, Janecka was part of the team that successfully amended the 1944 treaty to allow Mexico to make water deliveries from the San Juan River, which is banked in El Cuchillo—the same reservoir that Monterrey relies on. Just two years after disaster in that city, the prospect of depleting Monterrey’s primary reservoir struck some as insane. For Mexican officials, it was the best option on the table. 

Janecka believed the agreement was a real victory for Texas farmers—every drop of water they get from the San Juan is a drop they don’t need to take out of Amistad or Falcon. But he knew that growers back home would dislike the deal. The river enters the Rio Grande downstream of Amistad and Falcon, so it can’t be stored, and the water was brackish. Galeazzi told me that the farmers he represented were desperate enough to take what they could get. “Is that water good?” he said. “No, but it’s water that’s wet. It’s water we can actually do something with.” 

Except when they couldn’t. For a few months in 2025, the water quality got so bad that TCEQ let it pass by. The water dribbled uselessly into the Gulf. Texas told Mexico to stop sending it entirely until its quality had improved. When it resumed delivery in December of last year, Mexico emptied almost 20 percent of El Cuchillo to send to Texas—enough to cover three to four months of water consumption in Monterrey, leaving a vulnerable city even more susceptible. 

Meanwhile Texas’s own reservoirs still hover on the verge of collapse. Janecka stepped down as a commissioner last year, but he keeps close tabs on the reservoirs. Recently he took a fishing boat out to Amistad, and signs of its demise were abundant. Most of the boat launches were stranded dozens of feet above the waterline, and the waters that were once crystalline were choked with sediment.

After circling the lake he parked the boat and hiked to the southern side of the Amistad dam. On the riverbed where the Rio Grande once swelled, limestone rocks baked like bones in the sun. He walked down into the field, which was dotted with concrete rectangles, each of them tagged with a number. “They look like tombstones,” he said. 

Each of these markers denoted a place where engineers had discovered a sinkhole traveling underneath the dam. The weight of the lake creates massive pressure, and this pressure pushes water through subterranean limestone, weakening the entire structure. For years the problem lay disguised beneath the river. Then the Rio Grande began to dry up. When Janecka first saw the sinkholes, they terrified him. 

The erosion threatens to bring down the entire dam. The U.S. and Mexico are preparing an emergency stabilization project, but Janecka worries that it’s too late. More than Day Zero, this is the thing that keeps him awake at night: He imagines the dam crumbling any day now, the reservoir’s water rushing uncontrolled downstream toward Laredo. Even at limited capacity, there’s still enough water in Amistad to submerge the city, in an inland tsunami that would pummel residents with little to no warning, drowning them in a land parched by drought. 

Chapter VI.

Betting the Farm

“Those are the people deciding the fate of the economy, of the environment, of the entire region.”

A pecan orchard on Jarett Rogers’s farm near El Paso.

With millions of people on both sides of the river at risk of losing their water, will anything be done in time to spare them? When I talked with some of the more strident water activists, one proposal came up a few times: stripping farmers of their water rights. If it weren’t for agricultural use, everyone who makes their home in the Rio Grande basin would have ample drinking water. For Sandoval Solís, the most egregious example of this dynamic is found in the deserts of West Texas, where the landscape is hard and hostile and the mountains look like piles of gravel. The City of El Paso is investing hundreds of millions to ensure that residents have water. Yet all along the Rio Grande are sprawling orchards of pecan trees and fields of cotton. “We are putting business ahead of drinking water,” he said. 

Whenever I spent time among farmers, though, the reality in the fields felt far less simple. Early one morning last fall, I drove down a county road south of El Paso and hung a right through a field bursting with cotton. The night before, a rare, light rain had fallen, and the sky was still pink as Jarett Rogers and his farmhands got to work repairing tractors and mending irrigation pipes. When I stepped out of my car, Rogers turned and greeted me with a sideways grin. He told me to call him Jerry. 

We climbed into his pickup and headed out across a muddy farm road toward the first of his sprawling fields of cotton, pecan trees, and cattle. Already it was close to 100 degrees, but Rogers kept his seat heater turned on to soothe his ailing hip. Smiling, the 38-year-old explained that he’d broken it four separate times riding rodeo broncs. 

Rogers, one of the largest growers in the El Paso area, is the fifth generation to work this land. Those deep roots mean his family owns some of the oldest water rights in El Paso, which makes them a sort of hydrological aristocracy. Rogers’s great-great-grandfather settled here to farm cotton, and Rogers grew up with his grandfather Gerald and father, Casey, running the operation together. 

Over the past century, the number of farmers in the United States has plummeted, and it seemed that Rogers would be yet another farmer’s kid to leave the fields behind. When he was younger, he had little interest in inheriting the family business. “I thought I was going to leave and never come back,” he told me. A quarterback for the high school football team, he was a coveted college prospect. Then he took his first hard fall off a bronc. A snapped hip ended his football career, and he went to Tarleton State University on a rodeo scholarship. 

After graduating, he stuck around in Stephenville, got a girlfriend, started a business, and joined the professional bronc-riding circuit. When he was in his mid-twenties, his grandfather came to see him compete in Reno, Nevada. His grandfather was a farmer’s farmer, laconic and clever. As they stood around between events, he asked Rogers a question without turning to look at him. “Listen, are you ever going to come home?” 

Rogers replied that he was busy with two jobs, bronc riding and his own business. “I don’t care about that,” his grandfather said. “Are you ever coming back to the farm?”

From inside his pickup, Rogers gestured at the surrounding fields. “I knew this was my home,” he said. “But this was their business, and I didn’t want to step on their toes.” After his grandfather’s visit, he realized his family needed him, even if the old man was too proud to say so outright. Not long after, his dad called. “Me and your grandfather talked,” he said. “We’d like to have you back.”

Rogers stopped the truck, and we got out next to a large canal that runs through one of his many pecan orchards. Every parent hopes to leave their children something, but farmers leave something singular. All around us, for miles and miles, stretched the physical evidence of the labor of Rogers’s ancestors, a thriving orchard they’d willed onto the hostile surface of the desert over generations. The water that flowed through the canals beside us was also the family’s legacy, and Rogers’s great inheritance. To lose the right to that water would be as annihilating to his business as losing the fields themselves. 

Rogers’s father and grandfather had both died the previous year, and when he talked about them, he still sounded mournful. In the month between their deaths, Rogers learned that his wife, Ana-Florencia, was pregnant with their third child—their first boy. Another Rogers man born in El Paso’s farmland. “I’m not a huge religious person,” Rogers said. “I mean, I believe, but it’s like, man, that’s pretty much God, right?”

Rogers met Ana-Florencia at a rodeo—she was a decorated barrel racer—but he likes to joke that they were matched on the Farmers Only dating site. “She wanted to marry a farmer,” he insists. There’s some truth in it: She loves raising their kids on the farm. She and their daughters started a vegetable patch and henhouse next to their ranch house. Ana-Florencia often says she and Rogers are raising the “sixth generation.” Looking out the window of Rogers’s truck, I wondered about the world this generation would inherit. 

Rogers acknowledged that his family’s way of life is changing. He remembers when the river was plentiful. “When I was a kid, I didn’t know what a drought was because we would have water all year long if you wanted it.” Around 2003 he spotted a tall, thin, tractorlike machine in the fields and asked his grandfather what it was doing. Digging a well, his grandfather explained. “I was like, ‘What for?’ It hadn’t been raining. They were calling it a drought, and we needed to stay ahead of it.” 

This was the beginning of the megadrought. The water rights the Rogerses owned didn’t mean much when there wasn’t anything in the river. Over the years the amount of water arriving from the north has only shrunk. Pecans are among the thirstiest crops, and I asked Rogers why he didn’t grow something more essential, such as potatoes or onions, that consumes far less water. He nodded thoughtfully. “It’s like anything else,” he said. “There’s a market for it.” The margins in this business are thin: Tractors, water, power, and land are expensive. There’s no financial sense in tearing up orchards that are profitable.

It wouldn’t do much to solve the problem anyway. To blame specific crops is to fundamentally misunderstand why we’re in a water crisis. It wouldn’t matter if we banned pecans entirely—Rogers is incentivized to use every drop of water allotted to him, in the same way he’s incentivized to plant on every productive inch of his land. 

In Texas, as in other states, water rights usually come with a “use it or lose it” provision. If a landowner doesn’t use their water, eventually they will forfeit their rights. I’ve heard of nonfarming landowners along the Rio Grande who irrigate their land just to preserve their water rights. For Rogers, keeping his rights is imperative, not just to his business but also to his children’s inheritance—those water rights are a huge part of his net worth. Even if he decides not to plant as much in any given year, he’s still cautious about decreasing his water use.

There have been few attempts to remedy this perverse incentive. Sandoval Solís insisted that more substantive reforms are needed anyway. He ran through the math. Some 15 million people depend on drinking water from the Rio Grande basin; of those, at most 10,000 have some kind of water rights. “Those are the people deciding the fate of the economy, of the cities, of the environment,” Sandoval Solís said. He argued that revoking water rights is not dispossessing farmers; it’s taking back water that it wasn’t rational to give them in the first place. 

Moral questions aside, it’s not clear what mechanisms exist to expropriate these rights or what agency would have the power to renegotiate them. Because of the high cost of litigation, U.S. jurisdictions rarely, if ever, use eminent domain to force farmers to sell rights. Other states have attempted workarounds, to limited effect. In Colorado the government has paid some farmers to voluntarily retire their irrigated land and groundwater wells. Utah pays growers who agree to let their fields lie fallow during dry seasons. 

Sandoval Solís acknowledged that there’s no plausible political path to revoking the water rights of thousands of farmers. He proposed a more elegant solution to the Rio Grande Valley’s predicament. The state already reserves water for cities. What if the state also conserved water for the river itself? The dry riverbed would rejuvenate, the reservoirs would refill, and farmers could still irrigate with the surplus. This could require new legislation, though it would be far simpler and less litigious than dealing with the water rights of 10,000 landowners.

It would be a tough sell to lawmakers and farmers, but when I shared this proposal with Janecka, he thought that the plan, paradoxically, might actually help farmers more than hurt them. Healthy environmental flows would let the river carry far more water to the fields over time, and keeping the reservoirs full would offer farmers something just as valuable as water rights: certainty. With water banked, farmers could accurately plan for the future, instead of praying for rain and snow, as Rogers does now. 

Rogers and I left his farm just before 7 a.m., as the sun made it over the tops of his pecan trees. We drove into the town of Clint and pulled into a local Mexican cafe. Every morning he meets a group of other farmers here, all of them a few decades his senior. Inside, the joint looked like a time capsule from the seventies—linoleum floors, bulky cash register, black and white photos on the wall. We made our way to his regular table, and the guys started taking shots before Rogers could even sit down. “You’re interviewing him for Texas Monthly?” a farmer named Bobby Skov asked. “Definitely don’t include pictures—Jerry’s got more of a face for talk radio.” 

Rogers grinned. “I come here to learn from my elders,” he told me. 

“The hell you do!” Skov shot back. 

Conversation soon turned to the drought. I wondered if they thought there was any chance it would break. “It’s been twenty years, but we ought to be working our way out of it,” Skov said. “Hopefully.” 

Like other farmers I met all across Texas, they were optimistic, confident really, that the drought would end, maybe even in the next year when El Niño hit. Instead the snowpack this past winter was the worst in recorded history. 

After we finished our meal, someone took out a cup containing a pair of dice, and the men began passing it around. Rogers explained that it was a long-standing tradition, a game to see who would buy breakfast. Every day the farmers wake up and gamble.

Chapter VII.

A Catastrophe of Our Own Making

“Chose not to plan for uncertainty.”

The Rio Grande runs dry through El Paso for part of the year.

Just to the north of Rogers’s farm, the scientists and engineers who work for the City of El Paso aren’t making the same bet. They don’t believe the drought will end, nor do they expect the river to flow year-round here ever again. These days the Rio Grande typically dries up in the city around August. In the late spring, Scott Reinert, the water resource manager at El Paso Water, joins his colleagues in a new tradition: They walk out into the dry riverbed, a litter-strewn rock field at the southern edge of town. There they stand waiting for a small, muddy line of flowing water to appear to the north, growing larger as it approaches. Soon they hear the soft trickle in the distance as the surge passes over hundreds of stones. Then the Rio Grande is upon them, resurrected from the annual snowmelt. At first the water moves at a walking pace, and they can stroll alongside it or wade in it, a ritual to welcome the river back to their city. 

They delight in the river’s arrival because they don’t take it for granted. El Paso is one of the driest cities in the country, but it manages to sustain its area population of nearly 900,000 with one of the most advanced and efficient water utilities in the world. Officials fly in from as far away as Saudi Arabia and New Zealand to learn how it does it. 

There was a time, as recently as the early aughts, when El Paso relied on the Rio Grande for about half its drinking water. When the river ran dry, in 2012, residents would have faced a desperate Day Zero scenario had El Paso Water not spent a decade rushing to prepare. The crown jewel of the utility’s effort was the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, which takes brackish water from the aquifers and makes it drinkable. 

Reinert oversees this effort. I first met him the morning after I’d shot dice with the farmers, and he gave me a tour of the plant. Inside, the sound was deafening. Desalination is an extraordinarily energy-intensive process, as the plant extracts the salty water and pushes it with immense force through a complex array of reverse osmosis pipes. The resulting fresh water is separated from a toxic saline sludge, which is deposited back deep beneath the earth. When one of Reinert’s colleagues passed us cups of the fresh water, I couldn’t taste a hint of earth or mud.  

Impressive as the plant is, it’s no longer the future. The city still depends on the Rio Grande for nearly a third of its water some years. El Paso is sprinting to shrink that portion even further, reflecting their concern over how unreliable the river’s water supply has become. Last year, El Paso Water broke ground on its next great investment, a water-recycling plant. Currently on track to be completed by 2028, the facility will be the first of its kind in the nation, taking sewage and transforming it into pure drinking water. 

This engineering feat reflects the kind of ambition human beings will need to survive on Mars. But it comes at a steep cost. The Pure Water Center is going to cost $295 million and will be funded by El Pasoans’ utility bills and federal tax dollars. That’s money El Paso wouldn’t have to spend if agricultural use were managed more judiciously and the headwaters were allowed to flow downstream. El Paso is, in effect, subsidizing the pecans and potatoes grown to the north.  

Farther downriver in the Rio Grande Valley, cities have been slower to adapt to the crisis, and they’ve run out of time. This year, when the multigovernment Rio Grande Regional Water Planning Group released its official 2026 strategy, local officials from across South Texas admitted that they had no plan in place for what happens if the drought continues to worsen. The report offered the weakest of excuses: “The Rio Grande RWPG chose not to plan for uncertainty or DWDOR [drought worse than the drought of record] on a regional scale at this time because forecasting tools have not been able to provide the resolution needed for water planning on a regional basis.” 

The Valley is home to a handful of desalination plants, and officials are scrambling to bring others online. In addition to the high price tag, these facilities will come with immense environmental costs: Toxic saline sludge will get pumped out into surrounding wetlands.

Farmers themselves have actually pushed for more measures to improve efficiency. Galeazzi, the lobbyist, told me he’s spent time in Austin and D.C. arguing for public investment in water infrastructure. Some of the simplest changes, such as lining dirt irrigation canals with concrete, would save millions of gallons of water. But Galeazzi says politicians balk when they learn that those savings will cost billions of dollars.

In the end, there’s no clever technology that can pull us back from the brink. “No matter what we do—desalination, irrigation tech, conservation in cities, rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge—there is no way out,” Sandoval Solís said. The only thing that can help now is reducing agricultural water use. Everything else is too little, too late.

With the reservoirs in critical condition, Sandoval Solís said it could take just two dry years to wipe out the water that remains. And he fears that on the Mexican side of the river, over a million people could experience Day Zero as soon as next year.

If the reservoirs collapse, South Texas will get thrown back to a more primitive era. Sanchez, the researcher from Saltillo, doesn’t think Day Zero in the Valley will look like it did in Monterrey. It will look worse. “Mexico is actually much more resilient to water scarcity than the U.S., only because they’re used to it,” she said. “I cannot imagine my neighbor in Texas opening the tap and not getting water. What would happen? They would probably sue the city.”

Elsewhere around the world, Day Zeroes have been rare, but they almost always lead to violence. In 2015, São Paulo, Brazil, a city of over 20 million, got within weeks of Day Zero. Caught off guard, the government chaotically announced a strict limit: Water was turned off for twelve hours a day in neighborhoods across the city, leading to mass protests. In 2019 several reservoirs in Chennai, India—one of the world’s largest cities—ran completely dry, and taps stopped flowing for months. The government trucked in water by train and in convoys of tankers, but it couldn’t meet demand for more than 10 million residents. Tankers entering the city were attacked and hijacked. A woman was stabbed while arguing with a neighbor over water. In one of the larger riots in the region that summer, police arrested at least 550 people.  

If a similar crisis comes to pass in Texas, governments in Austin and Washington, D.C., won’t be able to offer much more than tanker trucks. For residents, the most important technology will become the bucket, which they will need to bathe, launder clothes, and flush the toilet. Even if the rains return, this sort of deprivation could last for years as residents wait for the reservoirs to refill. 

Thousands of Texans already live this way. During one reporting trip, I drove into the brush outside of Laredo until I reached the community of La Presa, known locally as a colonia. One of the residents I met there was Luz Castillo, a retired farmwork manager. She explained that in the nineties, a rancher had sold her an illegally subdivided plot of land, falsely claiming that he had plans to connect electricity and water lines. She was nine months into building her house when she realized he had lied to her. Today, Castillo trucks in her own water using a five-hundred-gallon jug in the back of her pickup. She’s spent thirty years organizing her neighbors and petitioning the county to connect water mains. “They are so hesitant to help you,” she said. 

La Presa contains a warning for those on the brink of losing their water: The state is doing little to help its own residents secure this most basic resource.

The collapse of the borderlands’ water system would transform life in the region. Millions of Texans will face the immediate pressure to relocate, fueling the kind of disaster migration Texas saw when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. On both sides of the border, the agricultural system could break down completely. 

There will be other more subtle but equally devastating long-term effects. South Texas is already home to some of the poorest counties in the nation, and the water scarcity will discourage investment and new business. Instead of preparing for that future, boosters are conducting business as usual. In fact, the Valley is booming. 

One night I grabbed dinner at a restaurant in downtown Laredo. At the table next to me, a group of businesspeople in suits talked animatedly about the potential to build new AI data centers around Webb County. Last year, one Houston-based company announced that it plans to build the world’s largest so-called green-powered data center here. At the proposed scale it would require millions of gallons of water annually. Farther down the river, near the Gulf, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has snatched up more and more water rights. Every time SpaceX shoots off a rocket, it inundates the launchpad with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water; the company uses millions of gallons each year. A new liquid natural gas project nearby will use billions more.

All that water will need to come from the Rio Grande.

Chapter VIII.

The Drums of War

“They’re going to try to take over the dams at all costs.”

An irrigation ditch carrying water from the Rio Conchos to a pecan farm in Chihuahua.

If the U.S. doesn’t immediately, and drastically, reduce water use, the only alternative will be to pry water away from Mexico. On a cold day in December, I crossed the border near Presidio and followed the Rio Conchos deep into Chihuahua, taking a circuitous route to avoid cartel-controlled towns. The desert was beautiful, its vastness punctuated by the yellow leaves of the occasional cottonwood trees, which grow alongside small hidden oases. As I drove nearer to the Conchos, verdant forests of pecans appeared. Bulldozers idled on the side of the road next to sandy terraces dug into cliffs. Sprinkler equipment littered the ground. A landowner was making room for more trees. 

Eventually, I made my way to the bustling farm city of Delicias, where I’d made plans to meet a former farmer. Over the phone, he’d told me that water shortages had made it impossible to farm profitably, so he’d sold his fields and bought a steakhouse, which he named Distrito 05 after the local irrigation district. He was well-known around town—he’d run unsuccessfully for political office in 2022, campaigning in part on keeping Chihuahua’s water in the state. When I walked into the steakhouse, I saw him carrying a box out of a handsome wood-paneled bar. He set the box down and greeted me, brushing off the front of his black puffer vest, which he wore over a neatly ironed pink oxford. It was Víctor Velderrain. 

Together we traveled to La Boquilla, back to the hillside that he and three hundred others had ascended to ambush the National Guard. As we drove, I could see why he’d run for office. Velderrain spoke eloquently but with understated, self-effacing charisma. When the dam appeared in the distance, he called up a video on his phone that a journalist had taken shortly after the National Guard’s surrender. In it, Velderrain walks alongside General Vázquez Flores. Velderrain felt that it was important to personally escort him, to make sure he got past the protesters without trouble. The general wears spotless green fatigues and a black bulletproof vest, the Mexican tricolor on his shoulder; it’s a stark contrast to Velderrain’s sweaty pearl-snap and jeans. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t fulfill the mission a soldier is supposed to fulfill,” the general says in the video. “It brings me great sadness.” 

We parked and began hiking up toward the dam, Velderrain recalling key moments from that day. I’d been following the river for so long, learning about dams and diplomacy, treaties and tributaries, but this was an actual battlefield, a place where the fight over water wasn’t just theoretical.

We didn’t know it in that moment, but Trump was preparing to make one of his most aggressive plays yet to compel Mexico to pay its water debt. “Mexico continues to violate our comprehensive Water Treaty, and this violation is seriously hurting our BEAUTIFUL TEXAS CROPS AND LIVESTOCK,” the president posted on social media. He threatened a punishing 5 percent tariff if the country didn’t immediately start sending water north. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum quickly announced a plan to send water, including from Chihuahua’s reservoirs, and Trump never followed through on the threat. Yet as Mexico remains woefully behind on its water delivery, the danger for Sheinbaum is not just economic warfare; it’s actual military aggression. 

The U.S. policy toward Mexico has turned more hostile than it has been in generations. The CIA is flying MQ-9 Reaper drones over the country. For now they’re on surveillance missions, but Trump has made it clear he wants drone strikes on cartel targets in Mexico, and he’s instructed the military to plan for that possibility. Sheinbaum has avoided U.S. military intervention, and yet—after the toppling of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, after the bombs dropped on boats in the Caribbean and off Mexican shores, after the American war against Iran—her government is grimly prepared for missiles to strike. In April two CIA operatives died in a car accident in the rugged western mountains of Chihuahua. They did not have permission to be in the country. 

In 1916, U.S. troops poured across the border into Chihuahua, occupying the state to hunt down Pancho Villa. More than a century later, could American troops cross the border again to take control of La Boquilla? When I started reporting this story, it was hard to imagine the U.S. using military force to secure water in the Rio Grande basin. Today that prospect isn’t so far-fetched. On the day that Texans’ taps run dry, Trump would have a strong excuse—a domestic, humanitarian emergency—to leverage lethal force in Mexico. In Cuba and Venezuela, he has shown his willingness to risk casualties to bring resistant governments into line. 

Mexico has desperately tried to avoid conflict with the U.S., agreeing multiple times to send water it can’t afford to spare. In Monterrey, Sheinbaum has demonstrated the willingness to allow one of its wealthiest cities to go thirsty to appease the U.S. 

Some citizens could soon fight back. Near La Boquilla, I met Esteban Hidalgo Franco, a broad-shouldered young farmer with a wide smile and an even wider belt buckle. He showed me where his family uses natural hot springs water to feed small fields of alfalfa and rows of pecan trees on the banks of the Conchos. After Sheinbaum announced that Mexico would send water north to Texas, I asked Hidalgo if he thought she might send water from La Boquilla or other major Chihuahuan reservoirs. “I don’t think the farmers movement will allow that,” he told me. “They’re going to do the same thing they did five years ago: try to take over the dams at all costs.” 

Even if Chihuahua could deliver water north without descending into calamity, the decline of the state’s reservoirs would still decimate the region and upend life on both sides of the border. 

For decades statisticians have noticed a strong connection between drought in Mexico and migration to the United States. In 2021, Mexican researchers from the Morelia branch of the national university found that during drought, the migration of low-income rural farmers to the U.S. tripled. The researchers estimated that drought could have influenced up to a third of all historical Mexican migration to the U.S. If northern Mexico drains of water, it could create a historic wave of migration to the north. Families would crash into a border where Trump has lined up heavily armed soldiers and heavily armored vehicles, into an interior where ICE is already shooting immigrants. 

In the United States, most of us are detached from the sources of our water. But whether we realize it or not, water scarcity, food insecurity, migration, border enforcement, military aggression—these things are connected. They’re tributaries of the same churning river. 

Velderrain and I descended the hillside and made our way to the gates of La Boquilla, and we stood beneath a canopy of willow trees as the sun was setting. Unsurprisingly, the guards at the gate didn’t allow us to enter the facility, but Velderrain reached his hand inside the fence to point toward the parking lot. Just inside, at the edge of the road, there was a small monument: an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe over the name of Jéssica Silva, the farmer who was shot and killed. “We raised that money and made that monument in her honor,” Velderrain told me. “She was the main victim of this conflict.” 

Below us the Rio Conchos made a sluggish trickle north, passing under a grove of cottonwoods. The trees moved in the wind in the way only cottonwoods do, dropping yellow leaves onto the water.

Silva knew where her water came from, and she put her life on the line for it. If the taps run dry for millions of Texans, will chaos come to the northern banks of the Rio Grande? The border between the U.S. and Mexico is defined as the deepest part of the river. This ever-shifting boundary will continue to move, even after all the water is gone. Wind, dust, and footsteps will curl it like a snake. Wherever that line in the sand lies, the most basic human need will persist on both sides of it: We depend on water to live. Silva fought for it, and she died. A martyr of the water war. She won’t be the last.