{"id":135076,"date":"2018-03-15T08:21:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T12:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=135076"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:18:21","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T16:18:21","slug":"mexico-plays-politics-water-cities-flood-others-go-dry-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/03\/mexico-plays-politics-water-cities-flood-others-go-dry-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-ed: While Mexico Plays Politics with Water, Some Cities Flood, Others Go Dry"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Cape Town acknowledged in February that it would\u00a0run out of water within months<\/a>, South Africa suddenly became the global poster child for bad water management. Newspapers revealed that the\u00a0federal government had been slow<\/a>\u00a0to respond to the city\u2019s three-year drought because the mayor belongs to an opposition party.<\/p>\n

Cape Town is not alone. While both\u00a0rich<\/a>\u00a0and poor countries are drying out, the\u00a0fast-growing cities of the developing world<\/a>\u00a0are projected to suffer the\u00a0most acute shortages in coming years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scarcity turns water into a powerful political bargaining chip. From\u00a0Delhi<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Nairobi<\/a>, its oversight is fraught with inequality, corruption, and conflict.<\/p>\n

Mexico, too, has seen its water fall prey to cronyism in too many cities. I interviewed 180 engineers, politicians, business leaders, and residents in eight Mexican cities for\u00a0my book on politics and water<\/a>. I was startled to discover that Mexican officials frequently treat water distribution and treatment not as public services but as political favors.<\/p>\n

When thunderstorms are cause for panic<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nezahualcoyotl is a city in Mexico State near the nation\u2019s sprawling capital. Just after lunch one Friday afternoon in 2008, Pablo, an engineer, was showing me around town when news of an unexpected thunderstorm began lighting up his team\u2019s cell phones and pagers.<\/p>\n

The engineers shouted back and forth, looking increasingly frantic. Having just begun my book research, I did not yet understand why an everyday event like a thunderstorm would elicit such panic.<\/p>\n

Pablo explained that Nezahualcoyotl\u2019s aged electric grid often failed during big storms and that the city lacked backup generators. If a power outage shut down the local sanitation treatment plant, raw sewage would flood the streets.<\/p>\n

These \u201caguas negras\u201d\u00a0carry nasty bacteria, viruses, and parasitic organisms<\/a>\u00a0and can cause cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, and severe gastroenteritis. If raw sewage also contains industrial wastewater \u2013 which is common in rapidly industrializing countries like Mexico \u2013 it may also\u00a0expose residents to chemicals and heavy metals<\/a>\u00a0that can lead to everything from lead poisoning to cancer.<\/p>\n

Pablo and his colleagues avoided a flood that day. But I later read news articles confirming how\u00a0relatively common sewage overflows are there<\/a>. Nezahualcoyotl residents have been dealing with this multi-system failure for 30 years, complaining of gastrointestinal illness and skin lesions all the while.<\/p>\n

So why hasn\u2019t this public health emergency been fixed? The answer is a primer on the\u00a0tricky politics of urban water delivery in Mexico<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Profit from dysfunction<\/strong><\/p>\n

Public malfeasance\u00a0in Mexico is widespread<\/a>. Nearly 90 percent of citizens see the state and federal government as corrupt, according to the\u00a0Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Scarcity turns water into a powerful political bargaining chip. — Veronica Herrera<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The country\u2019s water situation, too, is pretty dire. The capital, Mexico City, is \u201cparched and sinking,\u201d\u00a0according to a powerful 2017 New York Times report<\/a>, and 81 percent of residents say they\u00a0don\u2019t drink from the tap<\/a>, either because they lack running water or they don\u2019t trust its quality.<\/p>\n

Officially,\u00a0nearly all Mexicans have access to running water<\/a>. But in practice, many \u2013 particularly poorer people \u2013 have\u00a0intermittent service and very low pressure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Workers in one city asked me to keep their identity anonymous before explaining why the water infrastructure there was so decrepit. It wasn\u2019t a lack of technology, they said. The mayor\u2019s team actually profits from refusing to upgrade the city\u2019s perpetually defunct hardware. That\u2019s because whenever a generator or valve breaks, they send it to their buddies\u2019 refurbishing shops.<\/p>\n

Numerous engineers across Mexico similarly expressed frustration that they were sometimes forbidden from making technical fixes to improve local water service because of a mayor\u2019s \u201cpolitical commitments.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Nezahualcoyotl, I met a water director who openly boasted of using public water service for his political and personal gain. In the same breath, he told me that he fought to keep water bills low in this mostly poor city because water was a \u201chuman right,\u201d but also that he had once turned off supplies to an entire neighborhood for weeks because of a feud with another city employee.<\/p>\n

No voter ID, no water<\/strong><\/p>\n

Public officials also use water to influence politics.<\/p>\n

My sources also alleged that the powerful\u00a0Revolutionary Institutional Party<\/a>, or PRI \u2013 which has long run Mexico State, and thus controlled its water supply \u2013 has turned off the water in towns whose mayors belonged to opposition parties. These tactics are not reported in the Mexican press, but according to my research the cuts tend to occur just before municipal elections \u2013 a bid to make the PRI\u2019s political competition look bad.<\/p>\n

Water corruption isn\u2019t limited to Mexico State, or to the center-right PRI party.<\/p>\n

The millions of Mexicans who lack reliable access to piped water are served by\u00a0municipal water trucks<\/a>, called \u201cpipas,\u201d which drive around filling buildings\u2019 cisterns. This system seems prone to political exploitation.<\/p>\n

Interviewees told me that city workers sometimes make people show their voter ID cards, demonstrating their affiliation to the governing party, before receiving their water. Across the country, mayoral candidates chase votes by promising to give residents\u00a0free or subsidized water service<\/a>, rather than to charge based on consumption.<\/p>\n

The phenomenon of trading water as a political favor is probably more common in lower income communities, which\u00a0rely almost exclusively on the pipas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Water is a state secret<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state, I saw how water can hold a different kind of political power.<\/p>\n

There, I found, the location of underground pipes and other critical water infrastructure was guarded like a state secret, known by just a handful of public workers. It made them irreplaceable.<\/p>\n

So when customers complained that some municipal employees were asking for bribes to provide water, management hesitated to fire them. The workers controlled valuable information about the city\u2019s water system.<\/p>\n

Water may be a\u00a0human right<\/a>. But when politicians manipulate it for their personal or political benefit, some cities flood while others go dry.<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mexican officials frequently treat water distribution and treatment not as public services but as political favors, observes a UConn political scientist, based on her research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":135281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,88,2231,2387,2225],"tags":[2078],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[175],"class_list":["post-135076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-global-affairs","category-health-well-being","category-sustainability","category-uconn-storrs","tag-political-science"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 04:42:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135076"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135299,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135076\/revisions\/135299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/135281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135076"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=135076"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=135076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}