VILLA MADERO, Mexico — As Mexico’s drought drags on, angry subsistence farmers have begun taking direct action against the thirsty avocado orchards and berry fields of commercial farms that are drying up streams in the mountains west of Mexico City. Mexico.
Rivers and even entire lakes are disappearing in the once lush, green state of Michoacán, as drought combines with an increase in water use for the country’s lucrative export crops, led by avocados.
In recent days, subsistence farmers and activists from the Michoacan town of Villa Madero organized teams to go into the mountains and rip out illegal water pumps and breach unlicensed irrigation ponds.
Potential conflict looms with avocado growers, who are often sponsored by drug cartels or paid protection money.
Last week, dozens of Villa Madero residents, farmworkers and small farmers took to the hills to start irrigation equipment that uses mountain springs to water avocado orchards dug into the pine-covered hills.
The week before, another group climbed up with picks and shovels and broke the walls of an illegal retention pond that was sucking water from a spring that had supplied local residents for hundreds of years.
“In the last 10 years, the streams, the springs, the rivers have been drying up and the water has been captured, mainly to be used for avocados and berries,” said local activist Julio Santoyo, one of the organizers of the effort. . “There are hamlets in the lower part of the municipality that no longer have water.”
Santoyo estimated that about 850 of the plastic-lined earthen containment ponds have sprung up in the hills around Villa Madero, usually soon after planters have illegally cut down or burned the native pine forest. Pine trees help the soil retain water, while avocados deplete it.
Francisco Gómez Cortés said that the residents of his hamlet, El Sauz, had been asking the landowner for 15 years to allow the spring to flow downhill to their community.
After a year in which Mexico received only about half its normal rainfall, residents became desperate and last week mustered the courage to climb the hill and start pumps and hoses for the avocado orchard.
“We do not have enough water for human consumption,” said Gómez Cortés.
“It’s sad. “It’s sad to walk along these trails that are dry now, when they once had trees and springs,” he said. “They haven’t even left water for the (forest) animals that nest on the banks.”
In a sign of how seriously the local government is taking the potential threat, the group was accompanied by the mayor of Villa Madero, who blamed outsiders for the problem.
“There are people who are not from this town, who come to our municipality and are invading us,” said Mayor Froilán Alcauter Ibarra. “They are taking water away from people who live downhill and they don’t realize that they are the poorest.”
Residents say they do not want to completely deny water to orchards and have proposed a deal to give landowners 20% of the water from local streams if they allow the remaining 80% to continue flowing. They say they have not yet received a response.
Drug cartels often make money from illegal logging and extorting avocado farmers in Michoacán. Villa Madero activists have suffered threats, kidnappings and beatings in the past.
“We run a serious risk of being killed for protesting,” Gómez Cortés said. “Out of necessity, we are doing what the government should do.”
The government has long done little to limit producers and combat deforestation and water appropriation. But he seems to have suddenly developed an interest in preventing the coming conflict.
In March, activists organized a meeting near Lake Pátzcuaro to demand that authorities do something about rapidly declining water levels. Pátzcuaro is a shallow but sprawling lake in Michoacán with a beautiful colonial town on its shores and a fishing island in the middle.
The Janitzio Island fishermen with their shallow boats and figure-eight nets became famous by photographers and filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s as a symbol of Mexico’s popular traditions. The city of Pátzcuaro attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists.
But due to drought, deforestation, sediment buildup, and increased water demand from avocado and berry growers, Lake Pátzcuaro has shrunk to about half its size. Janitzio Island can now be reached by wading, and activist Juan Manuel Valenzuela estimates that 90% of the boats that used to fish and transport tourists are now out of service.
Nearby Lake Cuitzeo, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Mexico, is almost dry.
“We cannot allow them to extinguish our lakes,” Valenzuela said. “It would be a tragedy for Michoacán.”
Alejandro Méndez, Secretary of the Environment for the state of Michoacán, recognizes that the problem has gotten out of control. Water has become so scarce in once lushly forested lake areas that orchard owners often send water trucks to suck thousands of gallons from the lake to water their plantings.
“You could see up to 100 trucks taking water out of the lake,” Méndez said of the situation in March.
Then, about a week ago, state police began patrolling the lakeshore and stopping truckers they saw pumping water. And Mendez said the state has begun monitoring agricultural ponds to see if any are being refilled from the lake.
While Lake Pátzcuaro has shrunk in the past, this time it may be terminal; Farmers are beginning to herd livestock and plant crops on the lake bed.
“It will be difficult, because humans and livestock will survive, barely, but animals and plants will disappear, all of that will dry up and disappear,” Gómez Cortés said.
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AP writer Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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