RIO GRANDE VALLEY — Last week, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas — along with a bicameral and bipartisan cast of supporters including Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents the Big Bend — called for cuts in aid to Mexico over a diplomatic disagreement about water allotments along the Rio Grande. The group believes that Mexico is violating an international agreement and withholding water from the river, putting Texans in harm’s way.
In 1944, the United States and Mexico signed a treaty divvying up water along their shared border. The treaty provides a formula for how much the two countries should divide the water and requires both to release water to support agriculture and downstream hydroelectric dams.
Every five years, Mexico is required to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water, or roughly 350,000 acre-feet a year. (An acre-foot is a measurement that would cover the area of a football field in one foot of water.)
Sen. Cornyn has been extremely vocal about the issue over the past year, initiating multiple calls with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and raising the alarm after a sugar mill in the Rio Grande Valley was forced to shut down because of the lack of water.
In a press call last Thursday, Cornyn also expressed concern for the hydroelectric dam at Lake Amistad. “Without water delivery, the Amistad reservoir is on track to fall below the minimum water level needed to keep the lights on, which is unacceptable,” he said.
This year’s conflict is the result of a longstanding disagreement about how to interpret the treaty. Cornyn and other officials believe that Mexico should release the water in annual increments. Mexican officials cite a gray area in the law, arguing that they’re in the clear as long as they meet the five-year cycle obligation — which also allows some flexibility in the case of “extreme drought.”
At 1,990 miles, the Rio Grande is the fifth-longest river in North America. Its watershed of more than 1.9 million acres supports over 400 vertebrate species, ranging in habitat from the river’s source in the San Juan mountains in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico.
The river has also formed part of the boundary between the United States and Mexico since 1848. Water usage along the border is monitored in part by the International Water and Boundary Commission (IBWC) and a twin agency on the Mexican side. Mexico also grants an agency called CONAGUA some power over water infrastructure, but individual Mexican states do not have a say in international negotiations.
In 2022, environmental lawyer Kathy Robb prepared a paper for the IBWC exploring some of the issues with the 1944 treaty and offering a few potential solutions. “There is a lack of understanding articulated on the US side about how Mexico operates its system and releases water, and doubt that Mexico has been forthcoming with details about operations and water availability,” Robb wrote. “Those interviewed from Mexico expressed the same concern about lack of information about water operations that the US expressed about Mexico, sometimes in the same words.”
From 1944 to the early ‘90s, there were few issues with Mexico meeting its water obligations. But widespread drought over the past few decades has changed the game: Mexico has made late payments in three five-year cycles over the past 30 years.
Both sides consider the treaty a living document, making adjustments called “minutes” that update the rules. The last minute was added in 2020, after Mexico waited until — well, the last minute — to agree to release water by October 24 of that year.
Starting in February 2020, over 2,000 protesters, many of them farmers, took over La Boquilla Dam, about two hours south of Chihuahua City. One woman was shot and killed; many others were injured. The protesters set fire to the generators at the dam, causing power blackouts across the state.
The unrest reached the Big Bend region in June 2020. Protesters shut down the Presidio International Bridge for three days and seized the Ojinaga plaza, overturning three government vehicles and setting one on fire.
Farmers across the state expressed their displeasure with what they felt was a capitulation by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to put the needs of Americans above their own in the midst of a record-setting drought. (At press time, La Boquilla Dam was at a measly 27% capacity, though reservoirs upstream enjoyed higher levels.)
In 2022, Phil Gurley, then a graduate student at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, conducted research with a small focus group of farmers and experts from Chihuahua to try to get to the heart of the problem.
Gurley’s paper offered a sense of scale: just like Texas, around 80% of the state of Chihuahua’s water goes to agriculture. To try to make up for the lack of water coming from the Rio Conchos, many farmers have turned to drilling illegal wells, draining the local groundwater supply while they wait for relief.
Of the farmers that Gurley surveyed, the majority felt that the illegal wells were a big problem. They unanimously pointed to climate change as the reason that their water supply — and therefore their livelihoods — were suffering. “Seventy years ago when an international water treaty was drawn up between Mexico and the United States, there was no talk of climate change,” said Dr. Carlos Manjarrez, a researcher at the University of Chihuahua.
A large portion of Chihuahua’s agricultural industry is invested in growing nuts — a notoriously thirsty crop. The farmers surveyed didn’t think the type of crops they grew made that much of a difference, given how extreme the circumstances were. “What crops can I sow that earn more with the water that goes to me? Nothing,” said Andrés Valles, an agricultural leader in Delicias.
Part of the issue is that the definition of the term “extreme drought” — while offered as a stopgap measure to allow Mexico more time to release water — isn’t explicitly defined. In a region where drought has increasingly become the norm, what qualifies as “extreme”?
For now, Senator Cornyn and his team don’t have all the answers — but they do think that withholding a portion of U.S. aid to Mexico could help demonstrate just how serious the problem is.
Per reporting by Dina Arevalo at the Monitor in McAllen, the amount Cornyn seeks to withhold is about $7.6 million — small change in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars a year the United States typically spends to support Mexico and other countries in Central America.
“We share a common fate, and unfortunately, common weather patterns,” Cornyn said in last week’s press call. “But we are getting a little bit desperate. We’re running out of ways to get the attention of the Mexican government.”