A Bloody War for Water in Mexico

*This is interesting in a foreshadowing way (h/t to my son Carlos for pointing this out). Growing population and water scarcity is creating a new line of confrontation across the globe. VL

By Alasdair Baverstock, VICE News

Filling a glass from his garden faucet, Juan Ramírez held the swirling water up to the intense Mexican sun. Satisfied with its purity, he touched his glass gently against my own. “Your health,” he toasted, before drinking it down in one gulp.

Mexico City’s reservoirs consistently rank amongst the most contaminated supplies to any world capital. Drinking from the tap here is simply not recommended. Ramírez’s water, however, comes directly from a volcanic spring in San Bartolo Ameyalco, an otherwise impoverished town on the hilly southwestern outskirts of Mexico City, in the borough called Alvaro Obregon.

Ramírez is leader of a group in San Bartolo Ameyalco intent on keeping their water supply local. Last Wednesday, Ramírez along with approximately two thousand other residents of Ameyalco attacked a police force of fifteen hundred riot officers who were guarding the final construction stage of a pipeline that will connect the town’s volcanic spring to Santa Fe, one of the most affluent districts of the Mexican capital.

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[Photo courtesy VICE News]