US Corporations Pump Aquifers Dry as Police Kill Water Defenders in Rural Mexico
Fausto Limon looks at his bean plants, knowing they need more fertilizer, but lacking the money to buy it, in Veracruz, Mexico. David Bacon
Farmers are risking their lives to fight back against the US-owned factory farms that are destroying Mexico’s water.
By David Bacon
On June 20, more than 200 angry farmers pulled their tractors into the highway outside the Carroll Farms feed plant in the Mexican town of Totalco, Veracruz, blocking traffic. Highway blockades are a traditional form of protest in Mexico. Every year, poor communities mount dozens, seeing them as their only way to get powerful elites to hear their demands.
At first, the Totalco blockade was no different. Farmers yelled at the guards behind the feed plant gates, as they protested extreme water use by Carroll Farms and its contamination of the water table. Then the police arrived in pickup trucks. They began grabbing people they thought were the leaders. One was Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man who’d led earlier protests going back more than a decade. After he was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded it and rescued him.
“Then four police grabbed me,” recalls Renato Romero, a farmer from nearby Ocotepec and a protest leader. “I was rescued too. But then more police arrived and began beating people. We put our bodies in front of their guns and said, ‘Shoot us!’ And they began shooting.”
Two young brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez, were killed, their bodies found beside their family’s tractor used in the demonstration. Each had been shot several times, one of their widows said. Others were wounded by gunfire. The farmers had no weapons. As they fled back into town, the police chased them, Romero says. “They followed people in the streets, and went into homes, shooting. Afterwards you could see the high caliber shells on the floors of the houses. They didn’t try to talk. They just wanted to terrorize us.”
This bitter confrontation and the death of two campesinos is more than simply a bloody tragedy south of the border. It is one more example of the impact U.S. food corporations have had on local farm communities as they’ve expanded in Mexico. That process is felt north of the border as well, in the spread of disease, the displacement of local communities and resulting migration, and even in the national politics of both countries.
Granjas Carroll (the name of Carroll Farms in Mexico) is a division of the huge U.S.-based Smithfield Foods meatpacking company. It owns a vast network of industrial pig farms in this one valley on the border of Puebla and Veracruz states. Here, large barns each house hundreds of animals at a time. The urine and feces they produce is concentrated in big open-air oxidation pools or lagoons.
According to a Humane Society International report, pigs produce four times more waste than human beings: “One animal facility with a large population of animals can easily equal a small city in terms of waste production. This is particularly worrisome for certain regions in Mexico like the Perote Valley, which … has a pig population five times greater than that of its human population.”
The killings created a political storm in Veracruz. Within a few days, more than 50 organizations throughout Latin America had signed a statement condemning “brutal repression” and demanding to know who was responsible. Despite the police attack, after four days farmers returned and reinstituted their planton, or blockade. The municipal president of Totalco, Delfino Ortega, blocked the road with them.
The state administration of Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez then announced that the special police unit that shot the farmers, the Fuerza Civil, would be dissolved. The unit was created in 2014 by the previous governor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa (now in prison for corruption), and had a reputation for kidnappings, extortion and disappearances.
Six days after the killings, Governor García announced the company plant in Totalco would be partially closed because of violations of regulations governing water consumption and pollution from the lagoons. The Veracruz State’s Attorney Office for Environmental Protection said it would carry out inspections at the 51 Granjas Carroll facilities located in the municipality of Perote, where Totalco is located. The head of the agency, Sergio Rodríguez Cortés, said that so far nine facilities have been reviewed and various irregularities have been found.
The mill for hog feed owned by Granjas Carroll de Mexico near Perote. David Bacon
Granjas Carroll Pumps Water, Farmers Go Dry
Perote and Totalco are towns in the Libres-Oriental basin, a large enclosed valley surrounded by mountains and volcanos. It’s dotted with shallow lakes in former volcanic craters, historically sustained by underground water. In this basin, water runs not to the ocean, but into its interior, and rain that falls here sinks into the aquifer below. There is very little surface water, and the recharge of the aquifer mostly comes from surrounding mountains as it passes underground into the basin. Libres-Oriental is essentially an enormous natural water storage facility.
Farmers say that 20 years ago, the water level was just a meter below the surface in their fields near the lakes, with natural springs throughout the region. Today, the land is dry.
Mexico has enormous and growing water problems. Some 104 basins like Libres-Oriental have a deficit — the amount of water recharging their aquifers is less that the amount being extracted. The University Center for Regional Disaster Prevention (Cupreder) at the Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla charges that in 2016, the aquifer already had a deficit of 0.35 million cubic meters annually. This was the year the Audi auto assembly plant located in the basin started up its assembly lines. By 2023, the aquifer deficit approached 22 million cubic meters.
Cupreder Director Aurelio Fernández Fuentes says Conagua, the National Water Commission that manages Mexico’s water and gives permits for its extraction, does not have an aquifer recharge policy. “It only extracts,” he said. “There is no transparency in issuing concessions, because there is a shady business that the Fourth Transformation [the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)] has not resolved.”
According to José Vicente Nolasco Valencia, another researcher at Cupreder, the alarming growth of the deficit is due to corporate extraction from the industrial park where the Audi and Mercedes-Benz plants are located, Coca-Cola’s water bottling facility, the recently built complex of 14 military factories, and Granjas Carroll’s pig farms.
Agribusiness operations, which started two decades ago, also contribute. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox began growing broccoli on his large landholdings in the basin after leaving office in 2006, and today factory farms grow and sell berries for the Driscoll’s berry conglomerate. They all have Conagua’s permits for industrial agriculture.
Granjas Carroll was given five concessions between 2020 and 2024, in addition to its original permits, to pump more water from the aquifer below the Libres-Oriental basin. The company’s water consumption doubled in that period. It now has permits to pump 3.8 million cubic meters of water per year. Of that, Granjas Carroll says it uses 3.54 million cubic meters to produce 1.67 million pigs per year on 121 farms, as well as in a processing plant and two feed distribution facilities.
The basin has theoretically been closed to new water extraction for 20 years, because the rate at which water is pumped is greater than the recharge of the aquifer. As a result, throughout that time, small farmers have been denied pumping permits, Romero told me. But under neoliberal changes in water law made since 1982 by the administrations prior to the current government of López Obrador, water use was modified. New permits were made available for industrial users and private water concessions. Granjas Carroll got its permits as an industrial user under this neoliberal system.