Drifting Toward Disaster: the (Second) Rio Grande
This summer, the Rio Grande disappeared entirely from Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park, pictured on May 29, 2022. Visitors gawked at the conspicuous absence of the river whose arching path gave the region its name. Credit: Dylan Baddour
A century of enterprise brought the Rio Grande to its brink. Now authorities are “praying for a hurricane” as reservoirs dwindle and populations boom on both sides of the Mexico-Texas border.
This summer, the Rio Grande dried up in places that it never had before. For more than 100 miles through wild and scenic country, its snaking, sandy bed cradled only a series of warm, stagnant pools.
In the canyons of Big Bend National Park, visitors gawked at the conspicuous absence of the Great River whose arching path gives this rugged region its name.
Out here in the quiet desert, it’s easy to forget this meek waterway supports 6 million people in two countries. Vast distances hide the relationships at play.
Go 150 miles upstream from the canyons of Big Bend, up with Rio Conchos and you’ll find the sprawling orchards of Chihuahua State, Mexico, population 3.7 million.
Go 500 miles downstream and you’ll hit the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, with 46 bustling cities and towns, a billion-dollar agricultural sector and 1.3 million people—even more live across the river in Mexico.
Just over a century ago, this was a rolling, sometimes raging waterway, swelling in regular cycles to smash through canyons and swallow landscapes from horizon to horizon as it flows from snowy mountains 1,890 miles to the sea.
When this once-mighty river showed its cracking bottom in the distant desert this May, it flashed a critical warning of conflicts and shortages ahead for the growing populations in both Texas and Mexico that depend on its dwindling supply. Indeed, by July the largest reservoir that relies on its flow had surpassed its record low.
For more than 100 miles, the dry bed of the Rio Grande cradled only a series of warm stagnant pools like these, pictured in Big Bend State Park Ranch on May 29, 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour
“The impact is coming very quickly,” said Maria-Elena Giner, commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission, a small federal agency assigned the big business of sharing the Rio Grande and Colorado with Mexico. She was addressing worried irrigators in far South Texas, a world away from the canyons of Big Bend who gathered in late July for a town hall meeting to help prepare for shortages that were creeping down river.
What many Texans don’t realize is that these farmers, like everyone in the booming Rio Grande Valley, rely on water that flows out of Mexico. They do so thanks to a 1944 U.S.-Mexico treaty, which requires Mexico to send water from its northern mountains to Texas farmers in five-year cycles (in exchange for U.S. water from the Colorado River at the Baja California border).
When the river dried up in the canyons of Big Bend, it happened because Mexico wasn’t sending any water.
“Only about 14 percent of Mexico’s water deliveries have been made,” said Giner, at the town hall in Weslaco. “There’s a real issue going on right now and we recognize that.” (Giner understands cross-border issues better than most Texans: She grew up in Ciudad Juarez while attending school in El Paso.)
In Texas, 70 percent of the water in the river comes from the mountains of northeastern Mexico, where years of deepening drought have already reached crisis levels. Mexico’s third-largest city, Monterrey, which depends on other rivers in that region, already is rationing water. Hundreds of miles away in the north Mexican state of Chihuahua, deadly clashes broke out in 2020 over authorities’ attempts to ship water to Texas, as the treaty requires. Since then, Mexican authorities haven’t tried to come up with the water that is owed, but that debt comes due in 2025.
As the floodgates on north Mexican dams have stayed closed, spigots in the RGV have largely remained open. As reservoirs approach their record lows, that’s about to change.
“Irrigation users have really been subject over the past several months to curtailments and cuts,” said Bobby Jankecka, a commissioner with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which manages the Rio Grande. “That horrible reality is now about to expand. Our municipal, our industrial and our domestic users are now going to be prepared to face those sorts of curtailments.”
This problem didn’t sneak up on anyone. More than a century of development has sliced the wild river into pieces and hemmed it into the narrow ditch it occupies today. Because of New Mexico’s water rights, Rocky Mountain snowmelt hasn’t hit South Texas in 80 years. Below El Paso, a 200-mile stretch has run dry regularly since the 1980s.
A prickly pear cactus wilts amid drought in the Chihuahua Desert outside Redford, Texas, on May 31, 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour
At the river’s end in the Valley, close calls have come before, all since the mid-1990s. Each time, big storms saved the day.
“Whenever we start talking about water scarcity it seems to rain just in time to put it off for a little bit longer,” Xochitl Torres-Small, undersecretary for rural development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told Valley farmers in this summer’s town hall. But that won’t work forever.
“We can’t put it off for a little bit longer right now,” she said.
‘Pumps and Motors’
Most of this problem comes down to the Rio Conchos, the largest single water source and, effectively, the Texas’ river’s headwaters. It flows—or lately, it doesn’t —from the Western Sierra Madre of Chihuahua into the Rio Grande between Ojinaga, Mexico, and Presidio, Texas.
Today a meek Conchos dribbles into the Rio Grande’s dry bed in a dusty, yellow grassland. Farmers around here grow mostly hay now.
Yet, this valley used to teem with muddy wetlands, back when the two rivers that nursed it were mighty. Spanish explorers in the 16th Century dubbed it La Junta de los Rios—the Meeting of the Rivers. They found some 10,000 people in a dozen villages of two-story mud brick homes raising crops along a 50-mile stretch of fertile floodplain.
The Rio Grande nurses a wide green valley in the desert that stretched for miles below La Junta de Los Rios, pictured on May 29, 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour
“This has been farming country for thousands of years,” said Enrique Madrid, an Indigenous historian with long gray hair and a mustache, adjusting his glasses as he thumbed through his published English translation of Spanish explorations here.
As he speaks, Madrid, the son of the town librarian, pulls books and binders from tall shelves and stacked boxes that fill the living room of the small home where he’s lived all his life in the one-road town of Redford, population 23. (It’s seen better days, he said.)
He flips to an illustration of when his own ancestors tended fields along the rivers’ muddy banks but built their homes a safe distance away. Then he scans his shelf, picks out the Journal of Big Bend Studies, Volume 8, 1996, and finds his entry, “Native American and Mestizo Farming at La Junta de los Rios,” about how farmers here used the natural rhythm of epic floods to channel water through earthworks to their crops.
This place, like the rest of the Rio Grande, wasn’t part of the Republic of Texas that seceded from Mexico in 1836. Only after the U.S. invaded Mexico did it annex the river’s northern bank in 1848, along with all the southwestern territories, including the Rio Grande’s headwaters in Colorado and New Mexico.
After that, the days were numbered for traditional farming in La Junta de los Rios, and for the ancient floods that sustained it. Enterprising immigrants poured in. Railroads brought people and heavy machinery—not just here but upstream in New Mexico and down the Valley as well.
“The Anglos brought in pumps and motors,” Madrid said, chuckling in his worn-out armchair. “They think they can do better than all these poor people who’ve been here 20,000 years.”
Soon, hundreds of wood-fired pumps were drawing water onto new orchards and fields far upriver in New Mexico and Colorado. By 1916, a massive dam was built to catch Rocky Mountain snowmelt in New Mexico before it rushed into Texas.
Just like that, La Junta de los Rios was gone, its northern arm severed, the floods that nursed its wetlands over. The old Rio Grande was broken in two—one river that flowed from the Rockies to El Paso and a second Rio Grande that flows from the Rio Conchos, through Texas to the Gulf.
For the century since, the Conchos alone has watered this valley. Mechanical pumps enabled farming without floods. But little by little, the Conchos faltered, too. Mexicans built dams and planted orchards in Chihuahua, as well. This summer, the Conchos stopped running altogether, turning its path through the old Junta de los Rios into a muddy trench.
In the town of Redford, a farmer and retired Customs and Border Protection worker named Esteban Mesa peered into the shallow water where his irrigation pump tapped the Rio Grande, 15 miles below the mouth of the Conchos. He said he had never seen it so low.
A pump draws Rio Grande water to irrigate fields of alfalfa grass for livestock feed in Redford, Texas, on May 30, 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour
“The climate is changing,” Mesa said as temperatures exceeded 100 degrees during late morning in May. “I feel the heat of the sun more.”
He recounted the recent rains here—three-quarters of an inch back in June 2021 and four-tenths of an inch that October.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said his wife, Josefina, who grew up in Redford when agriculture thrived. “When there’s no water, what can you do?”
Madrid, the local historian who lives down the street, thinks he knows.
“All the cities on this river are going to fight for the water,” he said.
‘I’ve Never Seen It So Dry’
This dry spell spreads far beyond the old Junta de los Rios. Across a swath of North America, scientists have identified more than two decades of unusual dryness, as wilted cactus in the Chihuahua Desert attest.
Guadalupe Davila Hinojosa and his son, Luis Antonio Davila Oreste, stand over the valley where their tiny village of Boquillas used to grow crops, pictured on May 28, 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour
About 150 miles downstream from the mouth of the Conchos, a 74-year-old retired backcountry firefighter named Guadalupe Davila points out where his own tiny village of Boquillas used to grow its food.
“All this used to be full of crops,” he said, standing atop a rock ledge and waving his hand over the sandy desert valley.
The crops grew thanks to rain that fell in the Sierra Madre to the south then rushed past Boquillas on its way to the Rio Grande. A network of crumbling canals built by local families show how they formerly channeled pulses that washed down the mountains into fields of corn, beans, squash, tomatoes and chiles.
That was almost 30 years ago. Today, no gardens remain. One man raises hay on what little water still arrives, Davila said, pointing to a distant greenish-tan patch in the sand. For the most part, people gave up in the late 1990s. Too many dry years wrecked farmers’ labors and investments. Even though wet years have come, the rain isn’t reliable anymore. Now, a truck comes to town once a week selling produce.
“I’ve never seen it so dry like it is now,” Davila said as he scanned the parched valley. “There’s no grass.”
‘The Bucket is Almost Empty’
After Boquillas, the Rio Grande squiggles through about 220 miles of wild canyons and pristine, sparsely-inhabited country until it hits the dam that forms the Amistad Reservoir. Here, the free-flowing river ends for good. Afterwards, its flows are man-made.
This dam, completed in 1969, spans six miles to catch the floods that roll down the river and store them in its massive lake, from which millions drink.
This “lake” is like a giant bank, holding the accounts of hundreds of downstream users – cities and irrigation districts in Texas and Mexico (where all water is owned and managed by the federal government). The banker—the TCEQ Rio Grande watermaster—knows exactly how much each user has in each account. When a user wants to make a withdrawal, they ask the watermaster. When new water flows into the lake, the watermaster divides it up, giving priority to municipal users and state reservers.
Lately, not much water is flowing in. Amistad is 29 percent full—lower than it’s ever been. Its downstream counterpart, Falcon Lake, is at 14 percent. Communities there have asked the state to help extend pump intakes to reach its final dregs.
Yet from the gates of Amistad, water still rushes forth, past a half dozen cities of the Middle Rio Grande, which so far seem reluctant to confront the mounting crisis.
“The bucket is almost empty,” said Martin Castro, Watershed Science Director with the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. “We’re heading towards a point of no return.”
‘We Need Help’
Laredo forms part of the largest metro area on the Rio Grande below the Conchos. Founded in 1755, it’s better known today as “los Dos Laredos” since U.S. annexation converted the river into an international border. About 260,000 people live in Laredo, Texas, and another 425,000 across the river in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
Leaders there are aware of upcoming shortfalls. Laredo owns rights to pull 61,825 acre-feet, about 20 billion gallons, from Amistad each year. In 2021, the city’s 50-year water plan said its population would outgrow the water supply by 2040. Its top recommendation: run a pipeline between 70 and 150 miles to an aquifer in another county and import tens of millions of gallons of water per day. Laredo has 18 years to make that happen.
“The river, we cannot rely on it any longer,” Castro said from the Rio Grande study center, which is housed near the river in a former U.S. Army base built in 1849, the year after the United States claimed this northern bank.
Yet the city has no means to pay for an alternative water source. At a recent meeting of the Laredo city council, mayor Pete Saenz said the city desperately hoped for federal funding from the recent infrastructure bill in order to make the water pipeline happen.
“We need help. We cannot do it alone locally. It would throw us into a horrendous financial bind as a community for us to try to attempt to bring water,” Saenz told the council. “If somehow the state says no, we have no choice. We’d have to suspend basically everything that we have just to address that supplemental water.”
Tricia Cortez, the study center’s executive director, believes that the city’s 2040 timeline may be overly optimistic. Its projections only consider population growth, and do not take into account that drying and warming trends identified in this region will continue to deepen, she said. They assume a constant climate that no longer exists.
If the drying trend persists, Laredo has even less time to find more water.
“No one is coming to figure it out for us,” Cortez said. “There is no institution taking the lead on adapting to these big changes that are coming.”
For many people, the crisis seems easy to miss—as evidenced by the 10 million gallons of water Laredo sprays on its lawns everyday. To the untrained eye, the robust river rushing each day under bridges between the Dos Laredos creates the impression of a strong water supply. But that’s only an illusion.