Once the epicenter of hydraulic engineering, Mexico City is now running out of water

In the district of Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, resident Rosa Contreras is used to waking up in the middle of the night to collect water in multiple plastic containers. 

She and her neighbors only get running water a few days a week during the wee hours of the morning, “and it’s dirty water,” she said. “We can’t drink, cook or wash our clothes with this because it smells like sewage.”

People in Contreras’ building are accustomed to skipping showers, reusing clothes multiple times and recycling water, she said.

In Mexico City, water shortages are becoming a way of life. 

After two consecutive years of high temperatures and low rainfall, the reservoirs and underground wells that supply the city with water are drying up, and only a fraction of the city’s 22 million residents have a continuous supply of water throughout the year. 

Government agencies distribute pipes to some districts in the city, but in Contreras’ neighborhood, that’s not the case. For those who can afford it, the best solution is to pay for private delivery of water. But for the poorest residents, it’s not uncommon to walk several miles to refill their buckets.  

The causes

Rafael Carmona, head of the water authority in Mexico City (Sacmex), blamed climate change for water scarcity in a recent interview with a local TV station. “Nature is bringing scenarios we weren’t used to dealing with,” he said, referring to heat and drought. 

But environmental factors alone don’t explain the scale of the current water crisis in Mexico’s capital, according to Luis Zambrano, a professor of urban ecosystems at the National Autonomous University (UNAM). He said chaotic urban growth, leaking infrastructure and the overuse of water by large companies have also contributed to the problem.

Zambrano added that the city has a history of bad water management that goes back to colonial times.

Paradoxically, what is now the historic center of Mexico City used to be an island surrounded by lakes. In the 14th century, the Aztecs founded a floating metropolis known as Tenochtitlan and became masters of hydraulic engineering — building sophisticated navigation channels, canals, dikes, aqueducts and floating vegetable gardens.

But centuries later, Spanish colonizers destroyed many Indigenous hydraulic works and created a large system to drain the water from the lakes to transform Tenochtitlan into a European-like capital built on firm terrain.

In the 1950s and 1960s, city leaders decided to pipe water from the city’s main rivers and hide them under asphalt to make space for roads and urban construction. Because of this, rain storm water could not permeate the concrete-covered city and refill the aquifers. 

“Mexicans wanted to copy the economic expansion and urban development that happened in the US, so we thought that it was better to have rivers of cars instead of rivers of water,” Zambrano explained.

Contamination and higher temperatures were also unintended consequences of this policy, Zambrano added, “because it reduced the green areas that filter the air, to make space for more pollutants.”

Women are in charge

In some of the poorest suburbs, people haven’t seen water running from the tap in years. In the city of Ecatepec, in the central state of Mexico, resident Dinorah Ballesta said she and her two daughters alternately pick up 200 liters of water from the nearest source, located more than four miles away.

“It’s a full-day job, and we’ve been doing it several times a week for four years,” Ballesta said. 

Especially in low-resourced houses, a lot of the hands-on labor involving water collection, management and storage are performed by women and girls, said Elizabeth Roberts, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan who has spent time in Mexico City studying the water crisis. 

“It has a big impact on their lives,” she added. “If you have to wake up in the wee hours of the morning every day, that will have an impact on your health. If you have to dedicate a big chunk of your week to collecting water, that is time you are not using to perform a paid job or go to school.”

Lack of trust

Public data about the water crisis is scarce, and it represents an added challenge to fixing Mexico City’s water crisis, said Enrique Lomnitz, a Mexican sustainable industrial engineer and director of the nonprofit Isla Urbana.

“We don’t find any information about water quality, leaking pipelines or water concessions made to large companies,” he said, “and we need it, not only to address the problem, but also to recover trust in our public institutions.”

Some people are fed up with Sacmex’s — Mexico City’s water authority — response. 

“They told us to take fewer and shorter showers and that climate change is the main cause of the problem, but what are they doing to fix the crisis in the long term? What investments are they making?” Contreras questioned. 

Experts consulted said it’s unlikely that the city will reach the critical point at which the water supply is completely depleted. Even if the drought persists and the reservoirs dry up, the city still has enough underground water reserves. But everyone agrees that a long-term solution is urgently needed.

Water shortages and contamination are also affecting upscale neighborhoods.

In recent weeks, residents in the Benito Juarez borough, primarily populated by the middle and upper-middle classes, started to notice that the water running from the tap smelled “like gasoline.” Resident Cristina Montemayor said she and her neighbors had a hard time getting the attention of the authorities, who initially dismissed their claims. 

After days of protests, city leaders agreed to take and examine water samples in the district, but they are reluctant to publish the results, alleging “they could be misinterpreted.”

Neighbors then ordered an independent water test, which showed unusually high levels of chloroform, benzene and other chemicals present in lubricants that can be harmful to human health. 

Despite the root cause of the contamination remaining unknown, last week a Sacmex employee told the neighbors in a community meeting that the problem was fixed. 

Montemayor seems skeptical.

“Water authorities have dismissed our claims, lied to us, and now they want our trust,” she told The World. “The reality here is that using this water is an act of faith.”  

A group of 350 residents affected by water contamination in the Benito Juárez borough filed a lawsuit in court to demand payment of compensation to the Government of Mexico City because of the mismanagement of the crisis. 

A representative of Sacmex declined to make any comments before Mexico’s general elections, scheduled for June 2.