Fight Over Dam Points Up Water Woes

ARCEDIANO, Mexico — From the bottom of the canyon where her family has lived for four generations, Lupita Lara looks up at the zigzag contours that will be inundated -- along with her home -- when the dam comes.

The diminutive Lara, 55, is determined that it will never happen. She refuses to leave her property in this village situated in Huentitan Canyon, which would be flooded by the reservoir that the 500-foot-high dam would create.

A lawsuit she filed to stop construction of the dam, which would funnel water to nearby Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city and one of its thirstiest, could tie up the project for months or years.

The crusty Lara, her aged mother and the local priest are the last inhabitants of this town sealed off from the rest of the world by the canyon’s forbidding black basalt walls. At times, this isolated place reeks of the Santiago River’s pollution, but for Lara, it’s home.

“In the city, you feel caged like a bird. Here,” Lara said, looking upstream, “you feel free.”

Win or lose, Lara has focused renewed attention on the severe water problems faced by Guadalajara and many other regions of the country. Mexico’s often haphazard approach to water-management policy is also under scrutiny. Lara’s cause has been taken up by government watchdogs, local Green Party politicians and professors who say the project northeast of the city is a colossal boondoggle, environmentally unsound and based on faulty research. But her resistance has more to do with dollars and cents and stubborn pride than environmental principles.

“At first they offered us crumbs -- $30,000 for the house and our 25-acre orchard -- less than the cost of a house in Guadalajara. Now they are offering us nothing at all,” said Lara, who used to make a living selling food and refreshments from her home to weekend visitors who hiked the canyon. Now she and her mother subsist on the latter’s $50-a-month pension.

When the state met with rejection, Lara said, it turned to intimidation, which only made her more determined to hold out. Her water and electricity have been cut off. One day, a shadowy character showed up in her orchard and warned her that if she didn’t sell, she would “end up like Colosio” -- a reference to Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was killed during the 1994 campaign.

“I have seen many abuses of the government that I didn’t like. Laws exist for a reason, after all,” Lara said. “They said the property didn’t belong to me and that they could take it without paying me -- even though four generations of my family have lived here.”

Officials of Jalisco state defend the project and deny that any intimidation has occurred. Huentitan is the most feasible of the few dam sites available, they say, adding that the reservoir would provide Guadalajara with its only near-term hope of averting a water crisis.

Residents of the city got a taste of such a crisis last year. Water was periodically rationed after Guadalajara’s main water source, Lake Chapala, fell to historically low levels. Heavy rains raised the lake’s depth to half-full last year, but the city’s water problem is still grave, according to Enrique Dau Flores, director of the state water commission.

“The city is going dry, and we have to find new sources,” Dau Flores said. “Guadalajara added no new water sources for 13 years. During that time there was a population increase of 1 million people. We are way out of balance.”

Guadalajara is just one of the many cities in Mexico beset by water scarcity, water pollution or both. Puebla is dealing with possible seepage of highly toxic cadmium into its water supply, while the entire state of Guanajuato, President Vicente Fox’s home turf, is grappling with vanishing aquifers.

The problems stem from institutional mismanagement and lack of investment in water resources stretching back decades, said Tomas Martinez Saldana, a professor at Mexico’s Postgraduate College in Chapingo.

“No one has wanted to invest in water, and now Mexico is paying the price,” Martinez said. “From a country whose water was relatively clean and plentiful 40 years ago, we now have a situation in which virtually every city of 100,000 population has a drinking-water problem.”

Statistics from the federal water commission are sobering. The 97 aquifers that supply half of Mexico’s drinking water are officially described as overexploited and in decline.

Distribution of water in Mexico is highly inefficient, with 40% waste typical of many municipal systems because of deteriorating or outdated pipes and pumps. One-sixth of Mexico’s population has no running water at home.

Fox is acutely aware of the problem. In observance of World Water Day in Mexico City in March, the president said water was an issue of “national security” and “the great theme of the 21st century.” He pledged to spend $250 million to preserve the Lake Chapala-Rio Lerma basin.

But even in a country beset by water problems, Guadalajara’s stand out. In addition to having added no sources to its supply since 1991, as the population grew by 30%, the city’s drinking water is increasingly fouled by industrial pollution through poor or nonexistent drainage.

Officials in the administration of Jalisco Gov. Francisco Ramirez Acuna have made construction of the Arcediano dam by 2008 a top priority.

Through cash settlements, the state has bought out all but two of the 60 or so properties that once made up the town.

The only holdout besides the Laras, Father Fausto Pelayo Valera, refuses to abandon his small church here.

The Laras’ house and the Catholic chapel are the last habitable structures in the little town. The rest have been demolished.

“I don’t want it to be the church’s fault that the dam is not built,” the priest said. “Once all the permits are given and everyone is out, I will be the last one to leave. But I think it’s impossible to clean up the river and that there are better places along the Rio Verde to build the dam.”

The dam would be built about half a mile west of where the Santiago and Verde rivers converge in Huentitan Canyon, a natural wonder whose walls plunge 1,700 feet below Guadalajara’s urban sprawl.

Opponents say the dam should be situated on the Rio Verde about 25 miles to the north, before it joins the Santiago, which would save the canyon and give Guadalajara cleaner water. The Rio Santiago is among Mexico’s most polluted rivers, with high levels of aluminum, lead, arsenic, copper and manganese.

Rosier Omar Barrera, a geography professor at the University of Guadalajara who has studied the region’s rivers for two decades, believes that the government is underestimating the cost of purifying highly polluted water.

“I am afraid that the Arcediano reservoir will become a sewage pool,” Barrera said.

“The plan for pumping the water out of it and then purifying it is irrational,” Barrera said. “It might work for water that is destined for agricultural or industrial use, but I don’t know of a method to transform such polluted water economically into drinking water.”

Carlos Hernandez Solis, an engineer with the water commission, says that the water can be treated to make it potable and that the construction and operating cost of the Arcediano dam -- a projected $300 million -- is 40% less than the Rio Verde alternative.

Dau Flores, the water commission director, promises that construction will start this year, and he denounced opposition to the project as “tardy and unreasonable.”

Asked about her hopes for the outcome of the lawsuit, Lara said: “I only have hope in God. Only he can create and destroy. Human beings only destroy.”

*

Special correspondent Sean Mattson in Guadalajara contributed to this report.