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PORTSIDE CULTURE

US CORPORATIONS PUMP AQUIFERS DRY IN RURAL MEXICO  
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David Bacon
July 26, 2024
DavidBaconBlogspot
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_ Farmers are risking their lives to fight back against the US-owned
factory farms that are destroying Mexico’s water. _

Fausto Limon looks at his bean plants, knowing they need more
fertilizer, but lacking the money to buy it, in Veracruz, Mexico.,
David Bacon

 

On June 20, more than 200 angry farmers pulled their tractors into the
highway outside the Carroll Farms feed plant in the Mexican town of
Totalco, Veracruz, blocking traffic. Highway blockades are a
traditional form of protest in Mexico. Every year, poor communities
mount dozens, seeing them as their only way to get powerful elites to
hear their demands.

At first, the Totalco blockade was no different. Farmers yelled at the
guards behind the feed plant gates, as they protested extreme water
use by Carroll Farms and its contamination of the water table. Then
the police arrived in pickup trucks. They began grabbing people they
thought were the leaders. One was Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man
who’d led earlier protests going back more than a decade. After he
was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded
it and rescued him.

“Then four police grabbed me,” recalls Renato Romero, a farmer
from nearby Ocotepec and a protest leader. “I was rescued too. But
then more police arrived and began beating people. We put our bodies
in front of their guns and said, ‘Shoot us!’ And they began
shooting.”

Two young brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez, were killed,
their bodies found beside their family’s tractor used in the
demonstration. Each had been shot several times, one of their widows
said.
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Others were wounded by gunfire. The farmers had no weapons. As they
fled back into town, the police chased them, Romero says. “They
followed people in the streets, and went into homes, shooting.
Afterwards you could see the high caliber shells on the floors of the
houses. They didn’t try to talk. They just wanted to terrorize
us.”

This bitter confrontation and the death of two campesinos is more than
simply a bloody tragedy south of the border. It is one more example of
the impact U.S. food corporations have had on local farm communities
as they’ve expanded in Mexico. That process is felt north of the
border as well, in the spread of disease, the displacement of local
communities and resulting migration, and even in the national politics
of both countries.

Granjas Carroll (the name of Carroll Farms in Mexico) is a division of
the huge U.S.-based Smithfield Foods meatpacking company. It owns a
vast network of industrial pig farms in this one valley on the border
of Puebla and Veracruz states. Here, large barns each house hundreds
of animals at a time. The urine and feces they produce is concentrated
in big open-air oxidation pools or lagoons.

According to a Humane Society International report, pigs produce four
times more waste than human beings
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“One animal facility with a large population of animals can easily
equal a small city in terms of waste production. This is particularly
worrisome for certain regions in Mexico like the Perote Valley, which
… has a pig population five times greater than that of its human
population.”

The killings created a political storm in Veracruz. Within a few days,
more than 50 organizations
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throughout Latin America had signed a statement condemning “brutal
repression” and demanding to know who was responsible. Despite the
police attack, after four days farmers returned and reinstituted their
_planton_
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or blockade. The municipal president of Totalco, Delfino Ortega,
blocked the road
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with them.

The state administration of Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez then
announced that the special police unit that shot the farmers, the
Fuerza Civil, would be dissolved. The unit was created in 2014 by the
previous governor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa (now in prison for
corruption
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and had a reputation for kidnappings, extortion and disappearances.

Six days after the killings, Governor García announced the company
plant in Totalco would be partially closed because of violations of
regulations governing water consumption and pollution from the
lagoons. The Veracruz State’s Attorney Office for Environmental
Protection said it would carry out inspections
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at the 51 Granjas Carroll facilities located in the municipality of
Perote, where Totalco is located. The head of the agency, Sergio
Rodríguez Cortés, said
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that so far nine facilities have been reviewed and various
irregularities have been found.

GRANJAS CARROLL PUMPS WATER, FARMERS GO DRY

Perote and Totalco are towns in the Libres-Oriental basin
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surrounded
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by mountains and volcanos. It’s dotted with shallow lakes in former
volcanic craters, historically sustained by underground water. In this
basin, water runs not to the ocean, but into its interior, and rain
that falls here sinks into the aquifer below. There is very little
surface water, and the recharge of the aquifer mostly comes from
surrounding mountains as it passes underground into the basin.
Libres-Oriental is essentially an enormous natural water storage
facility.

Farmers say that 20 years ago, the water level was just a meter below
the surface in their fields near the lakes, with natural springs
throughout the region. Today, the land is dry.

Mexico has enormous and growing water problems. Some 104 basins
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like Libres-Oriental have a deficit — the amount of water recharging
their aquifers is less that the amount being extracted. The University
Center for Regional Disaster Prevention (Cupreder
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of Puebla charges that in 2016, the aquifer already had a deficit of
0.35
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million cubic meters annually. This was the year the Audi auto
assembly plant located in the basin started up its assembly lines. By
2023, the aquifer deficit approached 22 million cubic meters.

Cupreder Director Aurelio Fernández Fuentes says Conagua, the
National Water Commission that manages Mexico’s water and gives
permits for its extraction, does not have an aquifer recharge policy.
“It only extracts,” he said
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“There is no transparency in issuing concessions, because there is a
shady business that the Fourth Transformation [the administration of
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)] has not resolved.”

According to José Vicente Nolasco Valencia
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another researcher at Cupreder, the alarming growth of the deficit is
due to corporate extraction from the industrial park where the Audi
and Mercedes-Benz plants are located, Coca-Cola’s water bottling
facility, the recently built complex of 14 military factories, and
Granjas Carroll’s pig farms.

Agribusiness operations, which started two decades ago, also
contribute. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox began growing
broccoli on his large landholdings in the basin after leaving office
in 2006, and today factory farms grow and sell berries for the
Driscoll’s berry conglomerate. They all have Conagua’s permits for
industrial agriculture.

Granjas Carroll was given five concessions
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between 2020 and 2024, in addition to its original permits, to pump
more water from the aquifer below the Libres-Oriental basin. The
company’s water consumption doubled in that period. It now has
permits to pump 3.8 million cubic meters of water per year. Of that,
Granjas Carroll says it uses 3.54 million cubic meters to produce 1.67
million pigs per year on 121 farms, as well as in a processing plant
and two feed distribution facilities.

The basin has theoretically been closed to new water extraction for 20
years, because the rate at which water is pumped is greater than the
recharge of the aquifer. As a result, throughout that time, small
farmers have been denied pumping permits, Romero told me. But under
neoliberal changes in water law made since 1982 by the administrations
prior to the current government of López Obrador, water use was
modified. New permits were made available for industrial users and
private water concessions. Granjas Carroll got its permits as an
industrial user under this neoliberal system.

“We have been six years with no harvests,” Renato Romero charges,
“and for three years we haven’t even had water for planting. I’m
63, and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived my whole life
here. But we have no way to farm anymore.” The government action in
closing the Totalco plant is meaningless, he says. “This is just
where they make food for the pigs. They have others like it, and more
than 100 farms where the contamination comes from. No one is closing
them. Our fields are dry, while big ranches have green fields of
broccoli all year around.”

Romero is a member of the Movement in Defense of Water in the
Libres-Oriental basin. Farmers in the movement have three demands:
They should have access to water, so they can stay on the land; the
foreign companies in the Libres-Oriental basin should be forced to
leave; and the people responsible for the murders of the two farmers
should be held responsible. “Who gave the order?” Romero asks.

DOING WHAT IT COULDN’T DO AT HOME

“Granjas Carroll can do here what it can’t do at home,” Carolina
Ramirez, who formerly headed the women’s department of the Veracruz
Human Rights Commission, told me. In Virginia in 1997, Federal Judge
Rebecca Smith imposed the largest Clean Water Act fine to that date
— $12.6 million — on Smithfield Foods, which owns Granjas Carroll,
for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, running into
Chesapeake Bay. The state of North Carolina, no friend to
environmentalists, went further, passing a temporary moratorium on the
creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons, made permanent in
2007.

In the Libres-Oriental basin, however, Granjas Carroll didn’t have
to worry about U.S. regulations. No complaint was ever filed under the
North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) side agreement
supposedly enforcing Mexican environmental standards. Each of the
company’s 121 hog farms has a lagoon for waste.

When the company built one of its sheds half a mile from the farm of
Fausto Limon, it changed his life. On some warm nights, his children
would wake up and vomit from the smell. He’d put his wife, two sons
and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they’d drive away from his
farm until they could breathe the air without getting sick. Then
he’d park, and they’d sleep in the truck for the rest of the
night. Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments until they
began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from their
farm’s well, the infections stopped too.

According to Veronica Hernandez, a schoolteacher in La Gloria, another
town in the basin, students told her coming to school on the bus was
like riding in a toilet. “Some of them fainted or got headaches,”
she charged. In 2007, Granjas Carroll filed criminal complaints
against Hernandez and 13 other leaders for circulating a petition
protesting the conditions, charging them with “defaming” the
company. Until the charges were dropped after a year, she had to
travel to the state capital, Puebla, every month to report to the
prosecutor’s office.

Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the A/H1N1
virus, was found in an 8-year-old boy from La Gloria, Edgar Hernandez.
According to Hernandez and others from the town, pickup trucks from
the local health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to
kill the omnipresent flies that could potentially transmit the virus
from pigs to humans. Nevertheless, the virus spread to Mexico City. By
May, 45 people in Mexico had died. From there, it spread around the
world.

Granjas Carroll’s Public Relations Director Tito Tablada Cortés
denied the virus came from its Veracruz hogs, and Mexican officials
were quick to agree. He wrote to the newspaper _Imagen de Veracruz_,
asserting, “Our company has been totally cleared of any links with
the AH1N1 virus,” and “the official position of the Secretary of
Health and the World Health Organization leaves no room for doubt.”
In the valley, though, “no one believed it,” Limon recalled.

Because there is no water outlet to the ocean, what goes into the
Libres-Oriental groundwater stays there. Anabel, an environmental
activist with Manos Unidas por una Cuenca Libre (United Hands for a
Free Basin), who didn’t want to use her last name for fear of
retaliation, told me: “Wells around the pig farms are contaminated
with _aguas negras_ [black, or polluted, water]. They bring up mud
with a bad smell. Many of those older wells that farmers have had for
years are going dry. Because they’re shallow, to get more and
cleaner water they need to dig deeper and can’t get permission. In
any case, deeper wells cost a lot of money, which they don’t have.
The only farms that can get permission and have the money are the big
industrial farms.”

Small towns also feel the impact. Many of them don’t have public
wells or can’t get permission to dig new ones. Water service has
been privatized, and private operators get permits from Conagua for
commercial use, she charges.

Granjas Carroll also had a big impact on Mexican pig farmers.
Smithfield not only produces hogs in Mexico, but is also one of the
biggest exporters of pork to Mexico from its U.S. operations.
According to Alejandro Ramírez
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general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers,
Mexico imported 811,000 tons by 2010, after NAFTA took down tariff
barriers. Pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56
percent. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimated, “20,000
farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs
dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total….
That produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities.”

GROWING RESISTANCE

The first environmental movements to protect the basin were organized
in the 1980s and 1990s, against a project to pump out water to supply
the city of Puebla, and eventually Mexico City itself. That was
stopped, but as NAFTA took hold, the government of President Carlos
Salinas de Gortari modified Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to
allow the privatization of land formerly held in _ejidos_, the
collective units established under the land reforms following the
revolution of 1910-20 and the land struggles that followed.

That change allowed Granjas Carroll to buy the land for its swine
sheds. Farmers have been trying to stop the operation of Granjas
Carroll ever since the enterprise arrived in the Perote Valley in 1993
and dramatically changed rural life.

Various groups, like Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Perote (United People
of the Perote Valley), have fought the company, along with residents
of many of the valley’s towns. In 2005, protesters blocked the main
highway, as they did in June. A construction crew about to build a
shed and oxidation pond was met by a thousand angry farmers. Police
had to rescue the workers, but their heavy equipment disappeared once
they left. In 2007, Granjas Carroll’s Tito Tablada signed an
agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. In 2011,
however, company representatives convinced the municipal president of
Guadalupe Victoria, the municipality next to Perote, to grant a permit
for construction of new hog farms.

Following the most recent protests, communities and environmental
organizations held a National Meeting in Solidarity
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with Totalco and the Movement in Defense of Water in Libres-Oriental.
Their demands included “the departure of transnational companies
that plunder its resources.” They declared a state of rebellion
against Conagua, accusing it of being “submerged in corruption”
for granting concessions only to corporations and not to farmers,
noting that the basin has been closed to locals for 20 years.

The meeting announced the formation of the Veracruz Assembly of
Environmental Initiatives and Defense of Life. “We join the cry for
justice that resonates throughout Mexico against Granjas Carroll,”
its statement said, “a company that for more than 15 years has
contaminated the air, soil and water of the region with the complicity
of the government.”

PUSHING FOREIGN COMPANIES OUT?

Local and national environmental groups have different perspectives on
how to resolve the water crisis in the Perote Valley. The Veracruz
government asserts that its partial and temporary closing of the
Granjas Carroll feed plant in Totalco, and the promise of more
rigorous inspections of the company’s other facilities, will protect
the rights of residents and the environment. At the same time, the
company will continue to operate.

Sergio Rodríguez Cortés, director of the Veracruz State
Environmental Protection Agency, says it has found violations in nine
other facilities
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and more inspections are planned. Most involve the pig feces and urine
collected in the lagoons attached to the sheds, which he admitted were
finding their way into the water table.

The agency has given the company until September to remedy the
violations, and Granjas Carroll has signed an agreement to spend money
on remediation. Further sanctions, however, are up to Conagua and the
federal prosecutor for environmental protection. Neither has said
publicly what enforcement measures they plan to take, if any. Puebla
Gov. Salomón Céspedes Peregrina
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said he has set up a dialogue process between farmers and the company.

“We don’t want any more dialogue,” Renato Romero responded.
“We’ve seen for 20 years that it changes nothing.” Another
group, the Colectivo Ambiental Diente de Leon (the Dandelion
Environmental Collective), issued three demands in response to the
recent protests: “Granjas Carroll get out! Make a new general water
law in Mexico. Get rid of Conagua, and establish a fair administration
of water.”

Anabel of Manos Unidas por una Cuenca Libre warns that far from
diminishing the role of foreign investment, the Puebla state
government is encouraging more. “Our first demand should be stopping
the investment wave,” she says. The valley may have lithium
deposits, much sought-after for electric vehicles, and the Mexican
army has been given the concession nationally for exploration and
development. The Libres-Oriental basin already has Canadian mine
concessions
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and several military installations.

“Getting rid of foreign companies will be a very long struggle,”
Anabel warned. “Maybe they’d go if the water dries up, but in
meantime, they’ll be extracting even more of it. So, we want the
government at least to stop giving more concessions, especially for
mining, and then to go on to cancel the ones already given.” At the
same time, she says, “We want a better level of regulation of the
use of water. Residents get water once or twice a month, and the
companies get it every day. There should at least be equal access.”

In the neoliberal economic model Mexican governments pursued for
decades, strict regulation was considered a barrier to foreign
investment. Lack of enforcement of existing laws, no matter how good
they were, was used as an incentive for companies to invest, from the
maquiladora factories
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on the U.S. border to Granjas Carroll in the Perote Valley.

The accumulated popular anger of almost four decades was a big reason
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won office in 2018, and he
promised a change in direction. Speaking to the Mexican Congress
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as he was sworn in, he declared: “For three decades the highest
authorities have dedicated themselves … to concessioning the
territory and transferring companies and public goods, and even
functions of the State to national and foreign individuals.”

In the Perote Valley, AMLO’s description rang true. Granjas Carroll
and Smithfield “turned the local economy into a living laboratory
for all that is wrong with NAFTA,” Tim Wise, senior advisor at the
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy at Tufts University, told
me. “Open-door policies for multinational firms are enshrined in
NAFTA and its successor agreement, the USMCA [U.S.-Mexico-Canada
Agreement]. Thanks to the agreements, these firms don’t have to
guarantee environmental compliance, labor rights or good working
conditions as a condition for their investments. And the profits do
not have to be reinvested in Mexico.”

Promising change, AMLO told Congress: “We will put aside the
neoliberal hypocrisy. The State will take care of reducing social
inequalities, social justice will not continue to be displaced from
the government’s agenda. Those born poor will not be condemned to
die poor.”

“AMLO’s economic policies then fostered the development of safety
nets for poor people especially, with cash transfer programs,
including pensions and education subsidies,” explained Gaspar
Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA,
and co-founder of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales,
an organization of Indigenous Mexicans, with chapters on both sides of
the border. In reality, however, AMLO’s administration inherited an
economy that was already heavily dependent on foreign investment.

“The money for those programs depended on healthy economic growth,
and that in turn depended on investment and increased ties to the
U.S., Mexico’s number one trading partner. So, the neoliberal model
wasn’t dramatically altered, and we now see the contradictions,”
Rivera-Salgado told me. “There’s a growing fight for natural
resources, especially water, which has become very scarce. The primary
consumer with guaranteed access is industry, like Granjas Carroll. In
effect, it is a subsidy. This is a structural issue. You can tinker
around the edges, but the model depends on the subsidies.”

Social conflicts over water access, mining concessions and
environmental degradation are the product of these continuing
contradictions. And with the political changes of the Fourth
Transformation, the name given to AMLO’s policy agenda, the Mexican
state is now administered by people who fought neoliberal policies in
their youth. Both Puebla and Veracruz are governed by Morena, AMLO’s
party. As a student, Veracruz Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez
belonged to the Mexican Socialist Party and was a follower of Heberto
Castillo, a historic figure of the Mexican left.

The conflicts include those within Morena itself. One Morena deputy in
Puebla, Fernando Sánchez Sasia, proposed punishing farmers who
organized more plantons with up to four years in jail. Puebla Gov.
Salomón Céspedes Peregrina
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proposal, saying
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that criminalizing protest “will never be the answer” to social
conflict. President López Obrador declared
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in one of his daily morning press conferences that there would be no
impunity for the two police arrested for shooting Jorge and Alberto
Cortina Vázquez.

A NEW PRESIDENT, BUT A NEW DIRECTION?

Mexico has just chosen a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who comes
from a left-wing family of scientists and was herself a left activist
in her youth. With a doctorate in energy engineering, she was
secretary for the environment in Mexico City when AMLO was mayor, and
eventually was elected mayor herself. As mayor, she agreed that water
is a human right, and promised
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to provide water service to everyone in the city. As a scientist, she
seems to grasp the looming environmental crises facing the nation,
especially when it comes to water.

However, according to Paloma Duran, an analyst for _Mexico Business
News_
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although the corporate elite were worried, “the appointment of the
new cabinet members
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especially Marcelo Ebrard as the new Minister of Economy, has brought
certainty and confidence to both investors and international
markets.” Ebrard’s appointment especially “signals openness to
business
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alleviating market concerns.”

Sheinbaum herself reiterated
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López Obrador’s rejection of neoliberalism and privatization in a
joint post-election tour of Puebla and other states in early July.
“Now President López Obrador has returned the rights that belong to
the people of Mexico and we will never allow them to be taken away
again,” she said. In San Luis Potosi she declared
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that AMLO had replaced the neoliberal model with a moral economy and
Mexican humanism, “a government by and for the people of Mexico.”

“Will Sheinbaum be able to maintain the core investment model and at
the same time address the issues the farmers are raising?”
Rivera-Salgado asks. “We don’t know yet. A lot depends on how
strong the social movements become, and their demands for change.”

Anabel is confident, though. “We water defenders say: the water is
worth more than gold, it is life,” she declares. “We have
denounced the death industries. Two people have died, and others are
sick. But we don’t have to wait until blood flows, if these farmers
and the original inhabitants of this valley are heard.”

* water supply
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* Mexican farmers
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* water rights
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