The water truck parks on a block, a 10-minute walk uphill from Rocio Vega Morales’ house, for 15 minutes at most. She has no clue what time the pipa will arrive in her neighbourhood, delivering the water she and her four children need to bathe, wash dishes and flush the toilet. It could be while she is at work, or in the middle of the night.
The drought in North Mexico means taps are dry in the city of Monterrey so pipas, primarily run by the city authority, are the only way to deliver water to homes and businesses. As people who cannot afford bottled water are drinking the brackish water from the trucks, anger is growing here that beverage companies with bottling plants here, including Coca Cola and Heineken, are extracting billions of litres of water from public reservoirs.
Several brewers and soft drinks companies have factories in the city, and these use nearly 90bn litres a year in total, and over half of that – nearly 50bn litres a year (or 50m cubic metres) – is water from public reservoirs.
Vega Morales lives in a low-income area in Monterrey; one of Mexico’s largest cities, in the state of Nuevo León, it has a population of more than five million. There has been no running water in homes for over a month.
Most trucks do not carry drinking water – sometimes it is brown or has insects in it. Vega Morales has two 20-litre buckets to fill daily, and uses most of it in the bathroom. “I don’t want to get to the point where we can’t flush the toilets. That’s where I would start to feel really gross,” she says. “The kids don’t understand – it is hardest on them.”
This summer is tough for the family: they have to buy drinking water in shops, and the price has tripled in the past two months. Monterrey is facing a “sanitary crisis” as those who cannot afford bottled water drink unclean water from the pipas.
Mexico is facing its worst water crisis in 30 years as reservoirs serving about 23 million people dry up. The climate crisis has caused consistently hotter summers, and this year’s La Niña weather patterns created the perfect conditions for severe drought.
Several cities have now reached “day zero” – the point of critical water scarcity when supplies run out.
More than half of Mexico is suffering from drought, and the national water authority, Conagua, declared a state of emergency in four northern states. Jarring side-by-side photos of the Cerro Prieto reservoir in Nuevo León, taken from space by Nasa, show a deep blue-green in 2015 and what looks like desert this summer, as if the reservoir had never existed.
But the drought has not halted the water use of companies including Coca-Cola and Heineken use private wells to continue extracting groundwater for their production lines.
On 18 July, the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, asked the drinks companies to stop production and give their water to the public. Heineken said it would allocate 20% of its supply for public use; Coca-Cola invited the public to collect free water from its Topo-Chico mineral water factory, but it is too far away for most residents.
In recent weeks, activists have popularised the phrase: “No es sequía, es saqueo” (“It’s not drought, it’s plunder”).
Jaime Noyola, director of the Alliance of Users of Public Services, says his organisation predicted the crisis four months ago. The public-interest group regularly protests outside government buildings. They allege that local leaders, including the governor of Nuevo León state, Samuel García, are directly profiting from drinks companies’ water use.
“From the behaviour of the companies, we don’t see anything that indicates they will give up [water] voluntarily,” Noyola says. “And on the part of the local and state government, there’s a crisis of ineptitude, and they blame everyone but themselves.”
The alliance is calling for the removal of Monterrey’s director of water and drainage, Juan Ignacio Barragán, due to conflicts of interest. Barragán’s family – which is among Mexico’s wealthiest – founded one of Coca-Cola’s bottlers, Arca Continental.
In a joint statement, Arca Continental and the Coca-Cola Company emphasised that Monterrey’s industrial sector consumed only 4% of public water in Nuevo León state. However, this does not account for private wells.
Though a group of drinks companies, including Arca Continental and Coca-Cola, have collectively pledged to give up 28% of the water they use while the drought continues, the companies did not mention lowering prices of the essential drinking water they sell.
“How do you assign a price to water? It’s a human right,” says Noyola. “But these companies, namely Coca-Cola, in selling bottled water as the only potable water source, have made their product obligatory. Now water costs nearly as much as gasoline.”
Mexico is the world’s largest per-capita consumer of bottled water. Noyola adds: “Even if they stop production, they are still selling their products while people are suffering and infections are spreading [from people drinking water from the pipas].”
The water crisis has sparked protests and violence along class lines, as wealthier areas are given higher water quotas than poorer areas, and still have tap water for up to 12 hours a day. On 16 July, residents of two impoverished Monterrey suburbs learned that a portion of the remaining water from a nearby reservoir would be diverted to the city. In response, they blocked a highway with a barricade of cars, tyres, rocks and tree branches, stalling traffic for two days. Then they burned the water pipes.
“I won’t be surprised if people get together and start hijacking the pipas,” Noyola says. And Vega Morales concludes: “If it gets any worse, I don’t know how we’ll live like this till September.”
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