Gov't abandons plans for Guerrero dam

The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has canceled plans to build a massive hydroelectricproject near Acapulco known as La Parota that would have produced enough power to light up the state of Guerrero for an entire year. The project had been a crown jewel in the infrastructure plans of successive PAN administrations, but generated enormous controversy among the local campesino populations. The campesinos alleged the CFE failed to properly consult them on relocation and never made proper offers of compensation for their small plots of land near the Papagayo River.

The CFE officially canceled the project due to a lack of financing - and the dam was among a series of projects nixed by the federal government for similar reasons - but the utility had encountered stiff opposition from campesinos and human rights groups, who successfully took the case to court.

I wrote on the controversy over La Parota for The News in the fall of 2007. The story pointed out that irate campesinos and locals facing expropriation over the past 15 years had derailed projects by staging riots, taking hostages and wielding machetes. The failed attempt at building a new international airport for Mexico City earlier this decade in the State of Mexico - where machete-wielding campesinos forced the Fox administration to back down - was perhaps the most notable example. But La Parote was different: The campesinos, backed by environmental lawyers, went to court - and even obtained an injunction against parts of the project.

Whether the federal government and CFE return to La Parota remains to be seen - the dam was first proposed in 1976 and could provide drinking water for fast-growing Acapulco - but the strategy of campesinos mobilizing to fight expropriations that previously would have turfed them from their properties with scant compensation appears to gaining traction.

As examples, just witness the difficulties earlier this year in Tula, Hidalgo, where the state government was unable to expropriate ejido land in a timely enough fashion to meet the deadline for winning the construction of a Pemex refinery. (The state did win the refinery project, but only after a farcical competition with perhaps the most polluted town in Mexico - Salamanca, in the PAN stronghold of Guanajuato - to obtain the necessary land for Pemex.) Or, the Altamira port project near Tampico, where former PAN presidential candidate and legal bigwig, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, won an injuction on behalf of two ejidos facing expropriation that could cost the Transportation and Communications Secretariat billions of pesos.

The campesino skepticism of expropriation offers is understable: Ejiditarios in Tula told Notimex in April that the first time the government came for 50 hectares of their land in the 1970s, they were offered nothing more the five pickup trucks as compensation.

Across Mexico, water bills go unpaid

By David Agren
The News

For six months of the year, water flows only intermittently from the taps in Guadalupe Nava’s apartment in the capital’s Colonia San Rafael neighborhood, often forcing her to haul buckets down to a local well for filling.

Nava grumbles about the price she pays for the unpredictable utility, which is subsidized by the city and costs just over three pesos per 1,000 liters. The elderly homemaker would prefer not to pay at all, though not necessarily because of the inconsistent service.

“For households, it should be free,” she said while washing clothes at a laundry in another neighborhood due to a lack of water at her apartment.

Even so, Nava says she always manages to pay her water bill, though it’s often a late settlement on an overdue account, and one that’s made largely made due to pressure from the other tenants in her cooperative apartment complex.

Nava’s story illustrates a Catch-22 of water service in Mexico, where many users, citing poor quality and a belief in the constitutional right to free water, pay infrequently or not at all. For their part, providers say the lack of reliable customer payment prevents them from making much-needed infrastructure and service improvements.

A DEEPLY ROOTED PROBLEM

According to the National Water Commission, or Conagua, 60 percent of water bills go unpaid nationwide. In some municipalities in the Valle de Mexico, the agency says, the delinquency rate reaches 90 percent, causing some water providers to give up on pursuing deadbeat customers.

In September, Conagua director José Luis Luege Tamargo called the present water billing problem “extremely critical” and blamed payment delinquency for leaving the country's water infrastructure in a sub-standard state. He went on to warn that the lack of revenue from payments could jeopardize the long-term supply of water in northern and central Mexico, where more than 70 percent of the population resides and one of every six aquifers is “overexploited.”

In an effort to address the problem, the Environment Secretariat, or Semarnat, launched an ad campaign over the summer, warning consumers of the long-term consequences of not paying their water bills – like continued inconsistent service, a lack of new pipes and persistent drainage problems.

The effort to rally citizens to pay their water bills may be largely in vain, said Sylvia Gutiérrez y Vera, a sociology professor at Universidad Iberoamericana, who added that the idea of free water is ingrained in the psyche of many Mexicans.

“In Mexico, it used to be said very clearly that water should not be denied to anyone,” she said.

The concept originated in a social pact between the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and the citizenry, Gutiérrez y Vera said. It resulted in local laws that barred utility companies from cutting service to delinquent customers – no matter how much they owed or how long they had owed it.

And the culture of nonpayment extends beyond cash-strapped pueblos. Some of the country's best-known institutions – and even the federal government – have accumulated enormous water debts.

Popular soccer franchise Chivas left an unpaid 5-million-peso water bill upon closing its Guadalajara sports club last fall. In September, Ramón Aguirre Díaz, water systems director for Mexico City, criticized the federal government for running up a debt of 4.6 billion pesos with his municipal utility.

Aguirre Díaz also accused Conagua of owing 2.8 million pesos, a charge hotly denied by the agency. Federal officials maintain that a constitutional amendment exempts them from paying for water services.

ONE CITY TAKES A STAND

In the central city of Aguascalientes, capital of a small, semi-arid state 500 kilometers northwest of Mexico City, a private waterworks concessionary demands timely payment and cuts service to delinquent customers after just two months.

According to the waterworks, Concesionaria de Aguas de Aguascalientes, or CAASA, 90 percent of its customers remit payment before the deadline. By comparison, in Mexico City, where service is seldom – if ever – suspended for nonpayment, one-third of bills go unpaid after two months.

Water customers in the city of 633,000 pay some of the highest rates in the country: 8.80 pesos per cubic meter, or 1,000 liters. The fee covers the full cost of the liquid flowing from users’ taps, something rare in a country awash in government subsidies.

“In the (country’s) 100 biggest cities, only four or five will charge the real price for water,” said former Aguascalientes governor Otto Granados Roldán of the PRI, who presided over the water privatization.

CAASA, a French, Spanish and Mexican partnership that assumed control of the Aguascalientes waterworks in 1993, says its network serve 99 percent of the municipality’s residences, up from 70 percent at the time the concession was granted. In addition, some 80 percent of city neighborhoods receive 24-hour service, a jump from 51 percent in 1996, according to CAASA. The firm also boasts that nearly all its wastewater is treated, while nationwide, Conagua put the number at around 30 percent.

Per-capita water consumption also dropped by 20 percent after privatization, added Granados Roldán, now a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Aguascalientes.

“What we wanted, in effect, was a measure – like the concession was – to change people’s habits,” he said.

Still, some Aguascalientes residents complain about the relatively high price of their water. And CAASA recently landed on the consumer protection agency Profeco’s list of most complained about companies.

Enriqueta Medellín, legal representative for the (NON-GOVERNMENTAL?) environmental group Conciencia Ecológica de Aguascalientes, agreed with the idea of making delinquent customers pay their water bills. But she said that CAASA’s service is too expensive for poor residents and the quality fell short of what was mandated in the original concession.

“It’s been a bonanza for the water company, but from a social point of view, no,” she said, pointing out that in her own neighborhood, service is often intermittent.

“It’s the same or even worse service.”

Water issues surfaced in summer municipal election as the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and Convergence Party promised to revoke CAASA’s concession. Both parties, however, finished well behind the PRI and the incumbent National Action Party, or PAN, which have shown a more favorable attitude toward the concession. In 2006, the PAN and PRI voted down a measure that would have revoked CAASA’s right to suspend service.

BUT WOULD IT WORK IN THE CAPITAL

Water tariffs in Aguascalientes, a relatively prosperous industrial city, increase regularly to keep pace with inflation. But in Mexico City, PRD Mayor Marcelo Ebrard opted this fall to keep prices low and not to impose a retroactive rate hike for the remainder of 2007. Instead, the mayor said the capital would improve on its collection rate before raising tariffs.

David Barkin, a water expert at the capital’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, said charging higher rates or bringing in a concessionaire wouldn’t necessarily solve Mexico City’s problems. As evidence, he cited mixed results after four private companies were hired in 1994 to handle commercial affairs for the municipal waterworks, including billing.

Barkin also questioned the fairness and viability of charging poor residents high rates for a service so essential for life.

“How can you charge a private rate of return to people whom the system doesn’t pay a living wage?” he asked.

Nava, the San Rafael resident with intermittent service, said “the poor shouldn’t pay for water,” but citing the example of a neighbor that never remits payment, she acknowledged, “Some people would abuse it.”

Lake Chapala improves

According to a story in today's Publico (Milenio in Guadalajara), Lake Chapala's water level jumped by 30 centimeters during the first 10 days of August - the best rate since 1992. With at least six weeks left until the end of the rainy season, the water level stands at 58 percent capacity, just shy of the high point of 59 percent reached last fall. The upstream dams are also hoarding more water than usual.

Since Lake Chapala supplies some 70 percent of Guadalajara's water needs, the news sounds good. Unfortunately, Jalisco's dam-building brigade - previously led by both former PAN governor Francisco "Paco" Ramirez Acuna and state water commissioner Enrique Dau, the former PRI mayor of Guadalajara that left office in disgrace after the 22 de abril de 1992 explosion - are still championing the Arcediano Dam on the Santiago River near Guadalajara as the solution to the city's pending water problems.

Cleaning up Lake Chapala, which is fed by the toxic Rio Lerma, instead of trapping and distributing highly-contaminated water from behind the proposed Arcediano Dam might be more logical - but logic has never driven this agenda. As an example, the Arcediano Dam is being built near the convergence of the Rio Santiago and Rio Verde. It will be much lower than Guadalajara, meaning any power generated will go toward pumping the water out of the Huentitan Canyon and presumably cleaning it too.

Additionally, the original plans called for a second dam to also be built in the Los Altos region that would supply Leon, Guanajuato, a thirsty industrial city near former president Vicente Fox's San Cristobal Ranch. The original location would have flooded out San Gaspar de los Reyes. The plans were changed in 2005, though, after locals and migrants from the town living in the San Francisco Bay area raised a fuss.

Besides cleaning up the lake and ensuring a stable supply of water in a full Lake Chapala - instead of say, depleting the lake by allowing farmers in Guanajuato to irresponsibly draw so much from the Rio Lerma in order to grow strawberries for export - SIAPA, the Guadalajara area waterworks, could try fixing its leaky pipes, although with so many customers refusing to pay their water bills - customers can't be cut off - the utility is often lacking resources to repair all it's infrastructure.

Global warming blamed for bus accident in Puebla

The government of Puebla found a new villain for the tragic bus crash in the state that claimed an estimated 60 lives: Global warming. Never mind that Puebla highways traverse the torturous Sierra Madre and aren't always in the best conditions. This crash was caused by a mudslide - something perhaps aggravated by deforestation.

Perhaps the most harrowing trip I've ever taken in Mexico was going from Mexico City to Papantla, Veracruz via the Sierra Madre of northern Puebla. I highly recommend Papantla, the home of vanilla, the famed voladores and the El Tajin ruins. But the road there is at times frightening.

Blaming global warming, though, seemed apt on July 7, the day former vice president-turned-full-time-scold Al Gore threw his Live Earth concerts.

I confess to never liking Al Gore. He's always passed off as a man of towering intellect, yet his college transcripts suggest otherwise. Gore is receiving a lot of favorable treatment these days, which is no doubt driven by an immense sense of buyer's remorse after the 2000 U.S. election - which should never have been close.

For an alternate view, this New York Times piece is revealing: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?ex=1184040000&en=7df896e2a7a46ed6&ei=5070

Saving the heart of Chihuhua's forests

I went tree planting with the residents of a remote Indigenous village in the rugged sierra of Chihuahua state last month. The area was charred by forest fires a few years back and normally in Mexico, reforestation efforts aren't very successful. Here's my account from today's Miami Herald Mexico Edition:

By David Agren, near Bocoyna, Chi

Josefina Torres Lagarda recalls the night several years ago when a wildfire swept towards her tiny farm in the remote sierra of Chihuahua state. The blaze mercifully spared her home and land, where she and her husband grow corn, beans and oats and raise animals, but the aftereffects have been harsh. The blackened nearby hills still are still barren – even with reforestation efforts two years ago. Due to soil erosion, swift streams that form during the rainy season now wash out much of her crop.

"We've barely harvested anything over that past few years,” she explained.

Torres' problems with erosion and deforestation are hardly unique in Chihuahua, the republic's biggest state. Although arid in parts, pine and oak forests cover much of the state's rugged sierra, site of the Copper Canyon and home territory for the indigenous Tarahumara. Unfortunately, poor forest practices are rife and environmental concerns are often an afterthought in much of the region as timber barons wield enormous influence and clandestine loggers take to the forests in large numbers. Murky interpretations of agrarian laws, ejido conflicts and the exploitation of indigenous peoples living in the woods further complicates things. Government-sponsored land management plans are often ignored.

The results, according to Chihuahua-based experts working in the area, have been troublesome for the local indigenous populations and the environment.

Most of the old pine forests in Chihuahua have already been cut down,” Manuel Sosa, professor of natural resource sciences at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, adding that the soil in many parts of the state is now extremely thin.

To change things – at least on a small scale – Sosa and a Chihuahua-based NGO, Fuerza Ambiental, A.C., started working on a reforestation program in the 80-hectare burned-out area near Tuchiachi, an indigenous village only accessible via a beat-up single-lane road running from the Chihuahua-Creel highway up into the woods. Earlier this month, under Sosa's guidance, some 20 residents of Tuchiachi and the town governor fanned out across three 1,000-square-meter grids and walked shoulder-to-shoulder downhill, counting the up-and-coming trees sprouting from the thin soil. Later, many of the young trees were measured.

While lunching on sandwiches afterward, Sosa told the community members that the zone they had just inspected contained an average of 510 trees per hectare. He called the results encouraging, but added the forest still needed a more time to recover.

Gina Uribe Zuñiga, an anthropologist and founder of Fuerza Ambiental, explained that local reforestation efforts are often poorly executed. Many residents in the affected areas usually lack knowledge and expertise in overseeing a recovery. In the case of Tuchiachi, many of the trees were planted too close together. Many of the seedlings also arrived dead. She said Conafor, the national forest commission, “Threw money at (the problem),” and didn't do much else in Tuchiachi.

To increase the odds of success in Tuchiachi, Fuerza Ambiental is training some of the promising locals in advanced management techniques. While participating in the tree counting, Uribe commented, “I want to show (Conafor) another way ... what's really going on in the region.”

Uribe and her partner in Fuerza Ambiental, Cliff Mathies, started working with the residents of Tuchiachi about two years ago. Fuerza Ambiental focuses its efforts on helping with reforestation and restoring creek beds, inventorying natural resources and helping indigenous communities assert their rights. Uribe and Mathies initially proceeded slowly in Tuchiachi as many residents were somewhat wary of outsiders offering help. After more than a year of establishing relationships, the locals started attending consultation sessions, which Mathies, said were important for succeeding and establishing trust.

“We've done a year and a half of diagnosing, speaking with (the locals) and having them tell us what they need,” said Mathies, who initially came to Chihuahua in the mid 1990s as part of a model-forest program sponsored by the Canadian government. (He said powerful forestry interests and waning government enthusiasm in Mexico scuttled the program.)

Many of the concerns centered on the forest, which Mathies described as “the lifeblood of the sierra,” along with water and soil erosion.

"The impact of soil erosion in the sierra is often noticed far beyond the sierra in Chihuahua's major cities and even the neighboring states. Fuerza Ambiental originally started working in the sierra with the goal of improving the local watershed, which supplies Chihuahua city and Ciudad Juárez with water and feeds both the Rio Grande and rivers flowing west towards the rich agricultural areas of Sinaloa and Sonora on the other side of the continental divide. (Improving water flow to the Rio Grande via the Conchos River in Chihuahua was seen as a way of helping Mexico repay a previous water debt.)

"Almost everyone in the state depends on the sierra (for water),” Manuel Sosa explained.

Closer to Tuchiachi, Josefina Torres Lagarda expressed hopes the reforestation efforts would abate the water rushing through her land and help restore the local area.

"We hope that the mountain is cared for ... that we save the heart of the forest.”

Mexican firefighers to help resolve labor crunch in Alberta

The Alberta and Jalisco governments signed a twinning agreement in the late 1990s that originally concentrated on agriculture, but later grew to include education and business links. The two jurisdictions are now cooperating on fighting forest fires as the Alberta government will help establish a training center in the Primavera Forest just west of Guadalajara. The Mexicans trained at the center will eventually make their way north to battle blazes in Alberta during manpower shortages, which are forecast due to the province's red-hot economy. With fire season in Jalisco about to start and Alberta's beginning in the late spring - just as the rainy season arrives in Mexico - the arrangement should work well.

I recently wrote on this for the Miami Herald Mexico Edition: http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/23530.html

As an aside, no Alberta publication to my knowledge has bothered to report on this arrangement ... good news stories out of Mexico unfortunately don't fit anyone's news agenda these days.

Puerto Vallarta parking problems continue

The Puerto Vallarta municipal government started turning four of its public parks into parking garages in 2005. The work is pretty much done and new, concrete-intensive parks now sit atop underground parking garages at three locations. The projects have been controversial for some people, who argue that a rash of development in the central part of the city is jeopardizing the charm and ambiance that made Puerto Vallarta so popular. Here's what I wrote on the subject for the Miami Herald, Mexico edition.

BY DAVID AGREN/The Herald Mexico
El Universal
Sábado 27 de enero de 2007

PUERTO VALLARTA - Over his three years as a vendor near this town´s Playa los Muertos, Pedro de Jesús Álvarez has noticed more and more traffic pass through the area and parking spaces become increasingly scarce.
To remedy the situation and accommodate a growing number of tourists arriving in private vehicles, the Puerto Vallarta municipal government unveiled a polemic solution several years ago: Convert four of its public parks - three of which were either in or adjacent to the Historic Center - into parking garages. New concrete-intensive parks would be built on top of three of the underground garages.

Álvarez´s old business location, Parque Lázaro Cárdenas, was dedicated as an underground parking garage by outgoing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Mayor Gustavo González Villaseñor in late December, capping a pro-development term in office, during which time the seaside destination has grown immensely in popularity with both domestic and international tourists and building has been rampant.

According to the local tourism board, the once sleepy fishing village on a spectacular bay now trails only Cancún in tourist preference and 3.5 million people visit Puerto Vallarta each year.

The ongoing modernization of the Historic Center - site of the famed Malecón - and nearby Zona Romántica, though, unsettles some longtime residents and environmental groups, who accuse the municipal government of charging ahead without drawing up a proper development plan and recklessly approving projects that could, if not carried out with caution, turn Puerto Vallarta into another Acapulco.

Read the whole article at: http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/23166.html