US Corporations Pump Aquifers Dry as Police Kill Water Defenders in Rural Mexico

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.

“I’m 63, and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived my whole life here. But we have no way to farm anymore.”

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.

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.

“We have been six years with no harvests,” Renato Romero charges, “and for three years we haven’t even had water for planting. I’m 63, and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived my whole life here. But we have no way to farm anymore.” The government action in closing the Totalco plant is meaningless, he says. “This is just where they make food for the pigs. They have others like it, and more than 100 farms where the contamination comes from. No one is closing them. Our fields are dry, while big ranches have green fields of broccoli all year around.”

Romero is a member of the Movement in Defense of Water in the Libres-Oriental basin. Farmers in the movement have three demands: They should have access to water, so they can stay on the land; the foreign companies in the Libres-Oriental basin should be forced to leave; and the people responsible for the murders of the two farmers should be held responsible. “Who gave the order?” Romero asks.

Doing What It Couldn’t Do at Home

“Granjas Carroll can do here what it can’t do at home,” Carolina Ramirez, who formerly headed the women’s department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, told me. In Virginia in 1997, Federal Judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest Clean Water Act fine to that date — $12.6 million — on Smithfield Foods, which owns Granjas Carroll, for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, running into Chesapeake Bay. The state of North Carolina, no friend to environmentalists, went further, passing a temporary moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons, made permanent in 2007.

In the Libres-Oriental basin, however, Granjas Carroll didn’t have to worry about U.S. regulations. No complaint was ever filed under the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) side agreement supposedly enforcing Mexican environmental standards. Each of the company’s 121 hog farms has a lagoon for waste.

When the company built one of its sheds half a mile from the farm of Fausto Limon, it changed his life. On some warm nights, his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. He’d put his wife, two sons and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they’d drive away from his farm until they could breathe the air without getting sick. Then he’d park, and they’d sleep in the truck for the rest of the night. Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments until they began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from their farm’s well, the infections stopped too.

“Getting rid of foreign companies will be a very long struggle…. Maybe they’d go if the water dries up, but in meantime, they’ll be extracting even more of it.”

According to Veronica Hernandez, a schoolteacher in La Gloria, another town in the basin, students told her coming to school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. “Some of them fainted or got headaches,” she charged. In 2007, Granjas Carroll filed criminal complaints against Hernandez and 13 other leaders for circulating a petition protesting the conditions, charging them with “defaming” the company. Until the charges were dropped after a year, she had to travel to the state capital, Puebla, every month to report to the prosecutor’s office.

Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the A/H1N1 virus, was found in an 8-year-old boy from La Gloria, Edgar Hernandez. According to Hernandez and others from the town, pickup trucks from the local health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to kill the omnipresent flies that could potentially transmit the virus from pigs to humans. Nevertheless, the virus spread to Mexico City. By May, 45 people in Mexico had died. From there, it spread around the world.

Granjas Carroll’s Public Relations Director Tito Tablada Cortés denied the virus came from its Veracruz hogs, and Mexican officials were quick to agree. He wrote to the newspaper Imagen de Veracruz, asserting, “Our company has been totally cleared of any links with the AH1N1 virus,” and “the official position of the Secretary of Health and the World Health Organization leaves no room for doubt.” In the valley, though, “no one believed it,” Limon recalled.

Because there is no water outlet to the ocean, what goes into the Libres-Oriental groundwater stays there. Anabel, an environmental activist with Manos Unidas por una Cuenca Libre (United Hands for a Free Basin), who didn’t want to use her last name for fear of retaliation, told me: “Wells around the pig farms are contaminated with aguas negras [black, or polluted, water]. They bring up mud with a bad smell. Many of those older wells that farmers have had for years are going dry. Because they’re shallow, to get more and cleaner water they need to dig deeper and can’t get permission. In any case, deeper wells cost a lot of money, which they don’t have. The only farms that can get permission and have the money are the big industrial farms.”

Small towns also feel the impact. Many of them don’t have public wells or can’t get permission to dig new ones. Water service has been privatized, and private operators get permits from Conagua for commercial use, she charges.

Granjas Carroll also had a big impact on Mexican pig farmers. Smithfield not only produces hogs in Mexico, but is also one of the biggest exporters of pork to Mexico from its U.S. operations. According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 811,000 tons by 2010, after NAFTA took down tariff barriers. Pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimated, “20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total…. That produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities.”

Growing Resistance

The first environmental movements to protect the basin were organized in the 1980s and 1990s, against a project to pump out water to supply the city of Puebla, and eventually Mexico City itself. That was stopped, but as NAFTA took hold, the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari modified Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to allow the privatization of land formerly held in ejidos, the collective units established under the land reforms following the revolution of 1910-20 and the land struggles that followed.

That change allowed Granjas Carroll to buy the land for its swine sheds. Farmers have been trying to stop the operation of Granjas Carroll ever since the enterprise arrived in the Perote Valley in 1993 and dramatically changed rural life.

Various groups, like Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Perote (United People of the Perote Valley), have fought the company, along with residents of many of the valley’s towns. In 2005, protesters blocked the main highway, as they did in June. A construction crew about to build a shed and oxidation pond was met by a thousand angry farmers. Police had to rescue the workers, but their heavy equipment disappeared once they left. In 2007, Granjas Carroll’s Tito Tablada signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. In 2011, however, company representatives convinced the municipal president of Guadalupe Victoria, the municipality next to Perote, to grant a permit for construction of new hog farms.

Following the most recent protests, communities and environmental organizations held a National Meeting in Solidarity with Totalco and the Movement in Defense of Water in Libres-Oriental. Their demands included “the departure of transnational companies that plunder its resources.” They declared a state of rebellion against Conagua, accusing it of being “submerged in corruption” for granting concessions only to corporations and not to farmers, noting that the basin has been closed to locals for 20 years.

The meeting announced the formation of the Veracruz Assembly of Environmental Initiatives and Defense of Life. “We join the cry for justice that resonates throughout Mexico against Granjas Carroll,” its statement said, “a company that for more than 15 years has contaminated the air, soil and water of the region with the complicity of the government.”

Pushing Foreign Companies Out?

Local and national environmental groups have different perspectives on how to resolve the water crisis in the Perote Valley. The Veracruz government asserts that its partial and temporary closing of the Granjas Carroll feed plant in Totalco, and the promise of more rigorous inspections of the company’s other facilities, will protect the rights of residents and the environment. At the same time, the company will continue to operate.

Sergio Rodríguez Cortés, director of the Veracruz State Environmental Protection Agency, says it has found violations in nine other facilities, and more inspections are planned. Most involve the pig feces and urine collected in the lagoons attached to the sheds, which he admitted were finding their way into the water table.

The agency has given the company until September to remedy the violations, and Granjas Carroll has signed an agreement to spend money on remediation. Further sanctions, however, are up to Conagua and the federal prosecutor for environmental protection. Neither has said publicly what enforcement measures they plan to take, if any. Puebla Gov. Salomón Céspedes Peregrina said he has set up a dialogue process between farmers and the company.

“We don’t want any more dialogue,” Renato Romero responded. “We’ve seen for 20 years that it changes nothing.” Another group, the Colectivo Ambiental Diente de Leon (the Dandelion Environmental Collective), issued three demands in response to the recent protests: “Granjas Carroll get out! Make a new general water law in Mexico. Get rid of Conagua, and establish a fair administration of water.”

Anabel of Manos Unidas por una Cuenca Libre warns that far from diminishing the role of foreign investment, the Puebla state government is encouraging more. “Our first demand should be stopping the investment wave,” she says. The valley may have lithium deposits, much sought-after for electric vehicles, and the Mexican army has been given the concession nationally for exploration and development. The Libres-Oriental basin already has Canadian mine concessions and several military installations.

“Residents get water once or twice a month, and the companies get it every day. There should at least be equal access.”

“Getting rid of foreign companies will be a very long struggle,” Anabel warned. “Maybe they’d go if the water dries up, but in meantime, they’ll be extracting even more of it. So, we want the government at least to stop giving more concessions, especially for mining, and then to go on to cancel the ones already given.” At the same time, she says, “We want a better level of regulation of the use of water. Residents get water once or twice a month, and the companies get it every day. There should at least be equal access.”

In the neoliberal economic model Mexican governments pursued for decades, strict regulation was considered a barrier to foreign investment. Lack of enforcement of existing laws, no matter how good they were, was used as an incentive for companies to invest, from the maquiladora factories on the U.S. border to Granjas Carroll in the Perote Valley.

The accumulated popular anger of almost four decades was a big reason President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won office in 2018, and he promised a change in direction. Speaking to the Mexican Congress as he was sworn in, he declared: “For three decades the highest authorities have dedicated themselves … to concessioning the territory and transferring companies and public goods, and even functions of the State to national and foreign individuals.”

In the Perote Valley, AMLO’s description rang true. Granjas Carroll and Smithfield “turned the local economy into a living laboratory for all that is wrong with NAFTA,” Tim Wise, senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy at Tufts University, told me. “Open-door policies for multinational firms are enshrined in NAFTA and its successor agreement, the USMCA [U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement]. Thanks to the agreements, these firms don’t have to guarantee environmental compliance, labor rights or good working conditions as a condition for their investments. And the profits do not have to be reinvested in Mexico.”

Promising change, AMLO told Congress: “We will put aside the neoliberal hypocrisy. The State will take care of reducing social inequalities, social justice will not continue to be displaced from the government’s agenda. Those born poor will not be condemned to die poor.”

“AMLO’s economic policies then fostered the development of safety nets for poor people especially, with cash transfer programs, including pensions and education subsidies,” explained Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA, and co-founder of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, an organization of Indigenous Mexicans, with chapters on both sides of the border. In reality, however, AMLO’s administration inherited an economy that was already heavily dependent on foreign investment.

“The money for those programs depended on healthy economic growth, and that in turn depended on investment and increased ties to the U.S., Mexico’s number one trading partner. So, the neoliberal model wasn’t dramatically altered, and we now see the contradictions,” Rivera-Salgado told me. “There’s a growing fight for natural resources, especially water, which has become very scarce. The primary consumer with guaranteed access is industry, like Granjas Carroll. In effect, it is a subsidy. This is a structural issue. You can tinker around the edges, but the model depends on the subsidies.”

Social conflicts over water access, mining concessions and environmental degradation are the product of these continuing contradictions. And with the political changes of the Fourth Transformation, the name given to AMLO’s policy agenda, the Mexican state is now administered by people who fought neoliberal policies in their youth. Both Puebla and Veracruz are governed by Morena, AMLO’s party. As a student, Veracruz Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez belonged to the Mexican Socialist Party and was a follower of Heberto Castillo, a historic figure of the Mexican left.

The conflicts include those within Morena itself. One Morena deputy in Puebla, Fernando Sánchez Sasia, proposed punishing farmers who organized more plantons with up to four years in jail. Puebla Gov. Salomón Céspedes Peregrina killed the proposal, saying that criminalizing protest “will never be the answer” to social conflict. President López Obrador declared in one of his daily morning press conferences that there would be no impunity for the two police arrested for shooting Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez.

A New President, But a New Direction?

Mexico has just chosen a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who comes from a left-wing family of scientists and was herself a left activist in her youth. With a doctorate in energy engineering, she was secretary for the environment in Mexico City when AMLO was mayor, and eventually was elected mayor herself. As mayor, she agreed that water is a human right, and promised to provide water service to everyone in the city. As a scientist, she seems to grasp the looming environmental crises facing the nation, especially when it comes to water.

However, according to Paloma Duran, an analyst for Mexico Business News, although the corporate elite were worried, “the appointment of the new cabinet members, especially Marcelo Ebrard as the new Minister of Economy, has brought certainty and confidence to both investors and international markets.” Ebrard’s appointment especially “signals openness to business, alleviating market concerns.”

Sheinbaum herself reiterated López Obrador’s rejection of neoliberalism and privatization in a joint post-election tour of Puebla and other states in early July. “Now President López Obrador has returned the rights that belong to the people of Mexico and we will never allow them to be taken away again,” she said. In San Luis Potosi she declared that AMLO had replaced the neoliberal model with a moral economy and Mexican humanism, “a government by and for the people of Mexico.”

“Will Sheinbaum be able to maintain the core investment model and at the same time address the issues the farmers are raising?” Rivera-Salgado asks. “We don’t know yet. A lot depends on how strong the social movements become, and their demands for change.”

Anabel is confident, though. “We water defenders say: the water is worth more than gold, it is life,” she declares. “We have denounced the death industries. Two people have died, and others are sick. But we don’t have to wait until blood flows, if these farmers and the original inhabitants of this valley are heard.”