One day out of every week, Silvia Bojorquez knows not to try turning on her tap. Nothing will come out of it.
“We have one water network and I don’t know if it has been maintained in 40 years,” she says. “Pipes are regularly broken and are not repaired.”
A community board leader in the Tijuana neighborhood of Privado Viento, Bojorquez is at the mercy of rotating water shutoffs, a tool the city government has used to conserve the rapidly dwindling resource. Often, the shutoff happens more than once a week, with water failing to flow through taps even when it’s supposed to be there. Residents scramble to conserve water in buckets just so they can bathe, flush the toilet, and cook.
While all of the city’s neighborhoods suffer in some way from water shortages, Tijuana’s poorest districts suffer the most. Some neighborhoods, such as Altiplano and Villas de Santa Fe, are barely even served by the city’s system.
In the past year, chronic water shortages have debilitated much of Mexico’s arid North. Across the region, people spend hours waiting in line for water deliveries, with some residents illegally siphoning the resource out of city pipes. Desperate citizens have kidnapped water delivery drivers and hijacked their trucks. Livestock is dying or becoming too expensive to maintain due to water’s increasingly high cost. Agricultural setbacks are driving up food prices. And in some cities, water use has been limited to certain times during the day or to specific days of the week.
In response to the crisis, citizens are participating in demonstrations and major road blockades, demanding that water be redirected for domestic use. Although many households have seen dry pipes for weeks, businesses have been guaranteed a steady supply. A common refrain now goes, “No es sequía, es saqueo,” meaning “It’s not drought, it’s pillage.”
Among the industries most subject to citizens’ ire is beer. The frustration is primarily directed at Heineken and Constellation Brands, which brew on a massive scale—Heineken produces over 26 million barrels of beer in Mexico every year, and Constellation over 32 million. Beer is a water-intensive product, using an average ratio of seven gallons of water to one gallon of beer produced, though larger breweries tend to be far more efficient than small ones. While Heineken and Constellation both claim to use only about three gallons of water per gallon of beer, residents note that, even with that efficiency, the water dedicated to beer production from a single industrial plant could supply 200,000 homes.
“Water scarcity is a major concern now and for the future, to the point where one would think it’s a good idea to leave the North and go to a city in the southeast of Mexico, where there is plenty of water,” Bojorquez says. “People should be prioritized, not breweries or beverage companies like Coca-Cola, which were given concessions to exploit aquifers.”
In response to the North’s worsening water crisis, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced in August that breweries in the North will no longer be granted water concessions. “This is not to say we won’t produce any more beer, it’s to say that we won’t produce beer in the North—that’s over. If they want to keep producing beer, increasing production, then all support for the South.”
Months after President López Obrador’s announcement, it is still unclear if existing permits and concessions will be protected, and if the moratorium on water concessions will apply to all breweries or only industrial ones.
Diego Balmori, the head brewer at Cervecería Transpeninsular in Ensenada, Baja California, believes the restrictions will only apply to large, industrial breweries.
“Although we craft brewers are an important part of the movement, we don’t make up more than 1% of the beer produced in Mexico,” he says. “Those comments and regulations always end up affecting us in some way, but I don’t think it’s a direct measure for us.”
Beyond making up only a small portion of national sales, craft beer in Mexico often operates informally, with homebrewers selling their products under the table, making such a measure difficult to enforce.
The future of major breweries is also uncertain. Constellation has plans to expand its production sites in the northern state of Sonora, claiming that the president has “expressed full support” for its growing operations, possibly due to concessions from the company. A spokesperson for Constellation noted that the company is “engaged in a series of initiatives, working with the government and local authorities to restore watersheds and provide ample access to quality water in communities where we operate throughout Mexico.” The spokesperson also provided an environmental impact report.
Miguel Madrid, the commercial manager at Cervecería Heroica in the southeastern state of Veracruz, said that breweries are already looking to shift at least a portion of their projects south due to potential disruptions.
“As brewers in Veracruz, the feeling is bittersweet. On the one hand, we are very empathetic towards the industry in the North, but on the other hand, we have received a lot of production opportunities from other breweries, because they’re looking towards the South.” An undisclosed brewery from the North is currently relying on Heroíca’s facilities to carry out parts of its production, something Madrid thinks will occur with greater frequency in the near-term.
As consumption-focused sociologist Ellis Jones discusses in his research on the sustainability of the craft beer movement, business ethics have undergone a process of “McDonaldization.” That is, environmental efforts have been reduced to a series of phrases advertising a business’s corporate sustainability practices without leaving room for creative solutions spearheaded by craft beer brewers. Some water sustainability options are out of reach for small producers due to the economic challenges posed by acquiring the necessary equipment.
“We should put a greater emphasis on helping the entire industry,” says Madrid. “With support or credits to improve equipment and production, there should be a plan so that even smaller breweries can have better equipment to take care of the resources.”
While some smaller breweries might not have access to the equipment that can make water use more efficient, this isn’t to say they’re not addressing the issue of water consumption and scarcity in ways that are less marketable than their corporate counterparts. In Mexicali, the water has extremely high salinity, meaning most breweries rely on reverse osmosis to extract minerals. Typically, according to Balmori, the process results in water waste of about 40-60%. Transpeninsular transfers its wastewater to a second tank, where it is then used for the rest of the taproom—for cleaning the floors, the kitchen, and the bathroom.
“Climate change is something that hits us very, very directly here, so we always have to be conscious of our resources,” Balmori says. “I think the craft beer movement is always trying to be more sustainable, not wasting water, trying not to waste resources, because, well, it costs us. And it costs us dearly.”
This is, in part, what sets craft brewers in Mexico apart from corporate producers. Craft brewers are part of their neighborhoods, the product often made by and for the communities in which their taprooms and production plants are situated. These businesses suffer from climate change in much the same way as individual households.
By contrast, Mexico’s biggest names in beer, including Corona and Modelo, are owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev and Constellation Brands, the latter of which exclusively produces beer for export to the U.S. Mexico is the world’s largest exporter of beer, and 76% of its total beer exports go to its northern neighbor. This means one of the country’s scarcest and most vital resources is being exported to the U.S. in the form of beer, and to the monetary benefit of non-Mexican companies.
Still, the presence of the large breweries in the North has at least one positive outcome: they contributed to the rise in craft beer culture in that same region. “The North of the country is where the largest breweries operate, and the region where important movements regarding craft beer were started,” Madrid says. “Plus the brewing industry employs a significant number of people in our country. This will impact families, jobs, etc.”
An estimated 90,000 individuals are employed by the major breweries, plus an additional 800,000 indirect employees. In part because of the number of people employed by breweries, some water rights activists claim that moving operations to the Southeast is not a viable solution.
According to the North American Drought Monitor, nearly 75% of Mexico is suffering from drought, directly impacting some 26 million individuals. The La Niña cooling cycle exacerbates drought conditions, meaning that this summer was worse than most. But northern Mexico has been struggling with water scarcity for years, with states along the border experiencing significant shortages since at least 2015.
Of the 1,954-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, about two-thirds is water. Together, the Colorado River and the Rio Grande stretch between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, passing through border towns and serving the people who live there. A vast network of tributaries sprawl from the two main sources, extending through seven U.S. states and much of Mexico’s North. When a resource marks a border, there are bound to be disputes.
The management of water resources that serve the U.S.-Mexico border are dictated by the 1944 Water Treaty. The agreement came at a time when water was abundant. But border cities soon boomed, growing from about half a million people then to nearly 10 million now. Severe droughts and extreme heat, coupled with water-intensive sectors such as mining and manufacturing, drove water scarcity.
The industrialized manufacturing boom in Mexico’s North originated in the 1960s, when the Border Industrialization Program lured maquiladoras—factories owned by foreign companies—to the region to boost economic growth and increase job opportunities. Foreign companies, primarily from the U.S., relied on Mexico’s labor and resources to manufacture products, only to export them back across the border. With the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s, the number of maquiladoras dramatically increased. Workers from throughout Mexico migrated to northern cities, most of which lacked the infrastructure to accommodate the booming population growth. About 2 million small-scale farmers left their land to pursue jobs in the factories, paving the way both for industrialization and a less sustainable agricultural market dominated by big companies.
“It’s important to understand that we’re not the only industry that exists in the country,” Madrid says. “I don’t know how other products are produced, but they use water too, don’t they? Paper, plastics, food…”
According to the 1944 treaty, water sharing between the two countries is measured in five-year cycles. If, during one cycle, Mexico fails to meet its water obligations, it must repay this debt during the subsequent five-year cycle. (If, on the other hand, the U.S. fails to meet its obligations, it can reduce its delivery requirements to reflect its new consumption needs.) The last cycle came to an end in 2020, when Mexico still owed 240 million cubic meters of water, or about 20% of the amount dedicated to the dams serving the state of Chihuahua.
Just before the cycle’s end, residents knew water was to be redirected from their sources to pay the country’s water debt. In response, a group of about 2,000 farmers occupied the La Boquilla dam, clashing with National Guard forces, who shot and killed one protester. Instead of further fighting with the demonstrating farmers, the federal government relied on two other reservoirs located in the country’s North, nearly draining the region of its stored resources.
In 2015, Constellation began building a major new brewery in Mexicali, one of the hottest and most drought-prone municipalities in the country. Citizens protested the project, claiming that the company was receiving cheap and exclusive water concessions in a city where most lacked regular access to the resource. At the peak of unrest, over 12,000 residents protested the brewery’s ongoing construction.
A 2020 study carried out at a university in Mexicali examined the degree of secrecy behind the project, concluding that residents’ lack of say in the allocation of their environmental resources was at the center of the conflict. Local authorities were accused of colluding with the company to provide the brewery favorable contracts while keeping the relevant paperwork and project details (such as environmental impact statements) hidden from residents. The agreement for land and resource use between state authorities and the company was subject to a confidentiality clause.
Despite the company’s persistent use of the phrase “job creation,” resistance groups considered the social and economic benefits of the project to be inadequate given the high environmental costs, particularly surrounding water use, according to the same study. The state ceded land to the company for low prices and through a fast-track decree, and the state government paid for the construction of an aqueduct meant to transport water to the city’s South, where the brewery was to be located. Experts estimated that the brewery alone would use 25% of the available water, much of which was meant for domestic rather than industrial use.
Five years after the project began and $1.4 billion in investment later, President López Obrador announced a public consultation to determine if Constellation could continue progressing on the project. While only about 5% of residents participated, over 75% of them voted for the brewery’s construction to end.
Critics note that the consultation was poorly planned and irregularly carried out, with ballot boxes strategically placed to influence results. The vote took place during one of the worst periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, discouraging many from leaving their homes. Still, the consultation was the result of mass public pressure, and was the first time citizen opinion was considered in the project.
Constellation could no longer continue its project in Mexicali. But, President López Obrador said, it could go to the Southeast.
Following the thwarted construction project in Mexicali, Constellation agreed to the president’s proposal, shifting operations to Veracruz. While the region does hold a more abundant water supply, some argue that moving Constellation is part of a broader political project to fulfill one of the president’s key campaign promises to promote industrial development in the region. Constellation’s willingness to shift operations could be one reason why the federal government has not halted the company’s planned expansion in the northern state of Sonora.
In 2019, the López Obrador administration proposed the Program for the Development of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. At the center of the project is the plan for a railway and four-lane highway spanning 186 miles and connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans, permitting companies to transport goods to the U.S.’s East Coast and to Asia. In towns and cities the railway passes through, there will be industrial parks consisting of oil refineries, industrial shrimp farms and, like in the North, maquiladoras.
The president has offered a series of incentives to any company that agrees to conduct business in one of the 10 development poles to be located within the Isthmus, including significant tax breaks. But few businesses have been willing to move from the favored border zone, arguing that the Southeast lacks the infrastructure necessary to conduct industrial operations.
Not everyone in the Southeast favors the president’s definition of development. Nearly one-third of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec’s residents belong to one of the region’s 10 Indigenous groups. Out of 2.2 million Indigenous residents, only about 3,000 were consulted. From this number, President López Obrador concluded that the project could move ahead, even though some participants reported being coerced into providing a positive response. After the consultation, both the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Liberation Army, activist groups fighting for the defense of land and territory, denounced the development. The new infrastructure will not benefit them, they argue, and could negatively impact already-existing livelihoods, such as small-scale fishing and farming. In a statement, they called it a “project of death.”
For Madrid, the North’s problems should serve as a hint. “Exploiting resources in the Southeast will lead to the same results as in the North, the same thing will happen,” he says.
The president’s announcement may be little more than a way of achieving a broader political victory. Regardless of whether President López Obrador actually forces breweries south, the broader question of how to make the beer industry more sustainable as the climate becomes less suited to it remains. Craft breweries, while unlikely to be forced to shift operations, will still feel the ramifications of waning resources and worsening heat. They will feel it personally, in the drying taps and daily desperation to acquire enough liquid to bathe, clean, cook, and drink.
“We are a source of employment, of diversity and community. People can look at us and see that beer isn’t just light or dark. In the taproom, there’s community. We try to have a positive impact by promoting the culture, the economy. The whole country,” Balmori says. Local breweries are culturally relevant, contributing to their communities in ways beyond job creation. For them, it’s not as simple as relocating. They came from and became a part of the communities in which they were built.
Some water activists and brewers are trying to identify more comprehensive solutions to the problem of worsening drought. Madrid believes that the government’s focus should be on technological and regulatory measures, adopting more formal standards for the brewing industry. Right now, he says, breweries are subject to the same general standard as food and non-alcoholic beverages.
Antonio Nerio Maltos, the general director of the Coahuila State Water and Sanitation Commission, also wants more long-lasting solutions. “The challenge is to be more efficient in managing the liquid, to seek a better culture of caring for the water so as not to waste it, to build infrastructure that revives the soil, contributes to reforestation, build retention dams and control floods in the mountains,” he says.
There is also the possibility that price control could be instituted in the U.S. to slow demand for Mexico’s exported beer.
With greater resource scarcity comes increased socio-environmental conflict, much of which results from the lack of consideration of local contexts and cultures in resource allocation, particularly when multinational companies are prioritized. Even if beer production is moved south, even if entire industries are forced to shift their operations, it won’t really matter if residents do not get to decide how their resources are used. The issue goes beyond beer as a water-intensive industry to the need for democratic distribution of resources and inclusive decision-making processes.
“The distribution of water is not fair,” Bojorquez says. “As with everything, the poorest and most marginalized are the ones who lack water. These people have to go fill up jugs for the most essential things and they even rely on water trucks to deliver it. The wealthy can fill swimming pools.”
While beer isn’t the only water-intensive industry in northern Mexico, it has become symbolic of the unequal distribution of resources and the opacity behind how and to whom they are allocated. To water-starved residents, shifting a water-intensive industry elsewhere could provide a temporary salve to the problems resulting from climate change and chronic overuse. But, there will always be another industry, another favorable water concession, another shadowy deal citizens are not privy to.
In the meantime, Bojorquez says, they will suffer through thirst and dry pipes and hope that the season’s change will permit a temporary reprieve, a salve on a long-pressing problem.
“We eagerly wait for the rains to come,” she says.
Words by Chelsea CarrickIllustrations by Colette Holston
