Multinational Corporations Are Sucking Mexico Dry
In Mexico, water has been transformed from a public resource into a commodity to be sold for profit. It means that corporations can consume water in high quantities while people lack basic access to drinking water.
Residents line up to collect clean water from a pipa northwest of Monterrey, Nuevo León, June 8, 2022. (JULIO CESAR AGUILAR/AFP via Getty Images)
Imagine a city of 5 million people where temperatures routinely top a hundred degrees. Now imagine that city without water. Two of the city’s reservoirs have run dry, schools have cut class hours, and supermarket shelves are emptied of bottled water in fits of panic buying. Lines of cars snake through the streets to buy whatever water they can, while residents from the hardest-hit areas roam from one neighborhood to another looking for a tank, a spigot, anything that will allow them to fill the empty containers they’ve lugged along. Lines stretch for hours on end.
This is not an exercise in dystopian imagination or some Mad Max spin-off: this is Monterrey, Mexico, today.
Not the Drought but the Plunder
This industrial hub and capital of the state of Nuevo León, barely two and a half hours from the Texas border along Route 85, is not just the epicenter of a burgeoning water crisis — it is a case study of the inequities that have produced it. In between untimely trips abroad and furious outbursts about the lack of support he is supposedly receiving from other states, the governor — frivolous social media influencer Samuel García — blames climate change for the record drought. And while global warming is undoubtedly an important and ever-increasing factor, there is much more to this story.
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