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José Luis Méndez Gómez grew up without access to running water in San Miguel Mitontic, a village of predominantly indigenous Tzotzil ethnicity in Chiapas. There was no infrastructure for water access until the 1990s, when an inadequate rainwater collection system was put in place. Indeed, this system was only truly effective during the rainy season, forcing people to be extremely cautious with their water usage as nothing was guaranteed the next day.
Before the rainwater system’s implementation, and during the dry season when it was insufficient, Méndez Gómez and others in his community had to trek to distant water sources and carry water home daily. Now the Strategic Alliance Coordinator for Cántaro Azul, a civil society organization in Chiapas, he works for Sitalá as a representative of the group. He told me that the situation of access to water is still not an uncommon situation in rural Chiapas, and that this water was not necessarily safe or good for your health, saying,. “It is one of the examples that there are in the whole region, where you must trust the spring and drink its water without checking the quality of water, and that persists nowadays in places where they have no water systems.”
He also told me about how the school he attended as a child did not have any access to water. “People had to bring their own water to drink at school, and this is an example that repeats itself a lot even nowadays, twenty years after I lived it” he said.
His experience growing up in a constant struggle for access to safe drinkable water pushed him to take action. He focuses on providing safe access to water in schools so that children can take care of their health while they are in educational spaces.
I asked him whether he believed the situation was improving or rather stagnating. “There are clear steps taken but there is a long way to go.”
“We are surrounded by water but we have no access to it.”
Chiapas, the southernmost region of Mexico, faces a paradoxical crisis. The region has the highest renewable water resources per capita in the entire country. Yet, tap water is almost never safe to drink. Rural indigenous populations suffer disproportionately from this lack of safe access to drinking water.
Chiapas houses a little more than 5 million people, half of which live in rural areas where they have almost no access to clean, safe, drinking water. To this day, people need to fetch water from springs miles away from their homes. The amount of water they can physically carry back home is between 20 and 50 litres a day. This is a very small quantity for families to meet their daily needs.
In comparison, statistics from the Canadian government show that the average Canadian consumes up to 400 litres of water a day, 8 to 20 times more than a whole family’s consumption in Chiapas.
Effects on health and livelihood
The responsibility of collecting water is mostly pushed onto women. This puts their health and wellbeing in jeopardy. Children also suffer from following their mothers along uneven terrain for more than half an hour every day. Besides, leaving them at home while they fetch water has led to many accidents as well.
Dr. Marisa Mazari Hiriart is a professor and biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who agreed to talk to me. He worked in Chiapas for ten years, mainly studying the quality of water. He said that one thing that surprised her during her field work in Chiapas was the situation for women and girls. Their livelihood is most affected by the lack of water distribution. To help collect water, girls are pulled out of school at a young age. “I witnessed this thirty years ago and, although the situation has gotten better, it has not been fixed,” he said.
The amount of water they manage to collect is too little to cater to their basic human needs. Not only that but most of it is also contaminated. Fermin Reygadas is the director of Cántaro Azul and focused on providing safe access to water in rural Chiapas. He spoke with me about how dire the current situation is for local communities, saying that the risks of drinking this water every day are extremely high, especially for vulnerable people like children. The bacteria and diseases in the water cause severe stomach problems like chronic diarrhea.
In poor rural communities, there is already very limited access to good nutritious food. This is particularly problematic for children who need more nutrients than adults to grow healthily. Adding to that the issue of diarrhea, which drains the body of its nutrients, can quickly cause malnutrition and illnesses. These can limit children’s cognitive and physical development durably.
Economically, the Grijalva-Usumacinta water system is key to tourism in Chiapas. It is Mexico and Guatemala’s most important source of water, used to generate electricity and drinkable water. It includes the Lagos de Montebello, a system of fifty-two lakes. People from surrounding areas live from tourism. Tourists come to see the beautiful, transparent and blue lakes. With agrochemical contamination and no proper sanitation systems, Dr. Mazari Hiriart said the lakes were turning opaque and green. This is endangering local people’s health and livelihood.
State failure and discrimination against indigenous people
“A democracy that doesn’t work with, at the core of it, weakness of institutions that don’t serve poor minorities,” Reygadas said.
In the summer of 2022, Monterrey, one of the wealthiest and largest cities in Mexico but also one of the few cities blessed with safe, drinkable tap water, ran out of surface water. Officials rationed and distributed the water only a few hours a day. Within two months, the government invested 10,000 million pesos (6-700 million Canadian dollars) to build a dam and an aqueduct to bring water to Monterrey. This was one of the largest investments on water in the past decade.
“Within one year, the federal government provided Monterrey with the equivalent of one hundred years of funding to Chiapas, because the issue reached a national audience and even though people in rural communities have lived in much more dire conditions in terms of water and sanitation for decades,” Reygadas said.
In contrast, other states like Oaxaca, Guerrero, Veracruz and Chiapas house a similar number of people living in rural communities and the government only invests about five million dollars a year on water access in these areas.
Following this example of the government’s unequal treatment of its citizens, Reygadas criticised Mexico’s democracy that serves only the elite and disregards minorities. He also said that the prevalence of racism as well as classism have severe consequences on rural indigenous communities.
“When an indigenous community is facing a problem, any type of problem, they will not receive the same attention or mobilisation from society or the government,” hhe said.
One third of people in rural Chiapas do not have running water at all. Unexplained by droughts, this problem is rooted in structural inequalities, racism and capitalism in Mexico. The lack of access to water in rural Chiapas is accepted as the norm by local populations and continues to deepen inequalities between rural and urban, indigenous and mixed, poor and rich.
Indigenous communities of Chiapas receive less government funding for infrastructure than more central regions of the country. Although, from an outside perspective, the country seems to have the means to tackle basic services like providing clean water to everyone, the distribution of resources is completely unequal, Reygadas told me, saying that “When you go and visit rural or indigenous communities, it is very clear that they have been marginalised from the laws, from the public policies and from the institutions that are in place to provide these services efficiently in other regions.”
Similarly, Marisa Mazari Hiriart said, “What we see in these populations, especially in the rural area, has not progressed over the last 30 years. They are still marginalised, poor populations, in great need, I do not say of modernization, but of facilitation of their ways of life.”
Marginalisation of rural communities
Another problem is the difficulty of building water systems in rural areas. “Big gaps” exist between providing access to water to an urban versus a rural area. The infrastructure is much more expensive, time-consuming and difficult to install in the countryside. “A human right to water and sanitation could play a significant role in transforming reality,” said Reygadas, but, so far, the government refuses to acknowledge it and provide for its people.
Mazari Hiriart also said that the geographical dispersion of small communities is a big obstacle to gaining water access. Scattered villages are much harder to attend to, particularly those in the mountains of Chiapas. The National Water Commission is responsible for water distribution in Mexico. Yet, they don’t pay attention to small communities’ needs because meeting them would be expensive. “We are surrounded by water but we have no access to it,” she was told by inhabitants of the region.
Reygadas gave me an example of a community located a few kilometres downhill from a water spring. In order to access this spring, they need to reach an agreement with a neighbouring community. Although negotiations take time, they could reach a compromise. Once matters are settled, the water, flowing downhill, would reach our community. This basic pipe system is easy to sustain and operate long term.
However, with a project designed in a government office, the construction company’s interests are prioritised over people’s long-term needs. They could use that water spring but negotiations between communities take time. Pumping water up from a river downhill is easier and quicker for this construction company. So, they choose to build a pump system. Consequently, the community now has to pay for electricity, repairs when the pump inevitably falters. For poor rural communities, this is far from a success story. Besides, much of the infrastructure built by the state in Chiapas hardly works due to design flaws and top-down decision-making.
Even when the state does take action and, for example, plans to install a pipe water system, Reygadas says that the design responds more to technical specifications decided in a government office that many times do not reflect the community’s needs or resources.
Relatively often, a community will develop hope that change is coming. They will mobilise, organise themselves and create a proposal to overcome a specific challenge like getting access to water. The government avoids solving the issue by subjecting them through a frustrating bureaucratic process, despite the Mexican government’s obligation, stated in the Constitution, to provide access to water.
When they contact local officials, the municipality says they lack funding and send them to the state institution. Once they get there, state-level entities say it’s not their responsibility and that they should try the National Water Commission, who will send them right back down to the municipality. After a couple years of this aimless back and forth, the community is tired of not seeing results and has lost hope.
Distrust and skepticism
Mazari Hiriarttold me that she found indigenous residents to be reticent and negative about changing their habits. She told me about her work trying to improve the quality of water in certain communities. People closed their doors to them. Water distribution systems generally need to be disinfected with chlorine to prevent germs spreading. When her team proposed this, the people were firmly against chlorinating the water. “They want water but only under their own regime, under their own conditions,” she said.
They have their own local organisation and rules. In most indigenous communities, everyone knows when and how the water is distributed, and who, in the community, is responsible for it. Like most people, they don’t want to be told how to function, how to live their lives.
Reygadas said that his non-profit organisation Cantaro Azul aims to show people that even with limited resources but a driven community, change can happen. They improve water management conditions by introducing rainwater harvesting as well as small water distribution systems that reduce the distance between communities and water, “bringing water from the spring closer to the home.”
At first, rural communities tend to be skeptical of investing their time and money. With commitment, transparency and direct work with the communities, they try to build trust and show that there is a possibility of a positive transformation. In addition to helping build and solidify existing infrastructure, they also encourage communities to get together and join forces to pressure the government with higher numbers and a unified voice. This makes a huge difference when dealing with the big power asymmetry between one community and a government institution, he said.
He expresses hope that the situation is improving: “For the first time, we’re seeing that the authorities are willing to go and make an explicit commitment to solving certain problems.”
Feature photo: River in Chiapas. Photo: fjlehnerz CC 2.0
