Víctor M. Quintana S. and Martín Solís B.
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or just the problem of basic grains now occupies farmers. There is also concern about the implications of the initiative to reform the General Water Law and the National Water Law. This begins to be analyzed and discussed in open parliament in various places in the Republic. For this, we must start from the most significant impacts of neoliberal institutions in the administration of water and energy.
One of them is the reality of double theft. We do not speak in baseball terms, so in vogue these days. This is a double dispossession of the nation: its water is stolen and electricity is stolen in large volumes. More explicitly, electricity is stolen to illegally extract water from the subsoil for agricultural use. Wattchicol to make possible the aguachicol.
In response to a request for information dated February 19 of this year, the Federal Electricity Commission recognizes that from January 2018 to December 2024, 5,880 agricultural wells operated in the country to which the supply of electrical energy was suspended for never having contracted said service. Pure and simple electricity theft. These are the official data from the CFE, but, as García Márquez would say, the reality is worse: it is estimated that in the state of Chihuahua alone there are more than 5 thousand illegal wells and it would not be strange if throughout the country there were almost 20 thousand agricultural wells that operate without a water concession.
All this is the first aspect of the problem. Very serious, but unfortunately not the only one. Because the owners of those wells did not pay a single cent for electricity, even though they could have accessed the PEUA subsidy (Special Rural Energy Program for Electrical Energy for Agricultural Use). They did not do it because they did not have a concession, that is, they did not have permission from the federal government to extract that water from the subsoil.
That is where the other theft takes place: that of national waters.
How much water can the owners and/or operators of illegal wells loot? A first calculation: calculating that each of these wells has a 100 horsepower motor (pump), extracts 35 liters per second and works 274 days a year, the total water extracted from the subsoil would be 825 thousand cubic meters per year. Multiplied by 5,880 wells, the total water resource plundered from the nation would amount to 4,851 million cubic meters, more than the entire storage capacity of the La Amistad International Dam, on the Rio Grande, the seventh in capacity in the country. And the amount of energy looted from the nation would be 4 thousand 241.36 gigawats with a value of 5 thousand 160 million 890 thousand pesos.
This double phenomenon of water theft, aguachichol, and electrical energy, wattchicolconstitutes a great looting of the Nation. It is overexploiting our aquifers and causing failures due to excessive energy demand, especially in the north of the country, affecting the domestic and industrial sectors. Furthermore, it discourages producers who want to pay properly for the energy they consume, since they see how some of their neighbors do not pay a cent for it with total impunity.
If at least 5,000 illegal wells were effectively combated and closed, the nation, spending only on measurement, inspection, and legal processes, could save more than 5 billion pesos in electrical energy and a volume of water at least double the 2,600 million cubic meters that will be recovered with the modernization of 16 districts of the National Irrigation Technification Program, whose investment will be almost 57 billion weights.
We leave for another installment to deal with the impacts of neoliberal water legislation in terms of over-concession and exploitation above the concessioned volumes.
The new water legislation in process must take into account these impacts caused by the neoliberal water and energy regime. It must ensure that the population understands that the only way to preserve and equitably access the commons is through a State policy that regulates, administers and sanctions those who plunder them and that this is not socialism or statism, just preservation of the general interest or the common good, as others say. For this, it is necessary that the institutions that the State has to implement this policy, such as the National Water Commission, be equipped with the tools, material, technological and human resources to carry out this task. The law is not enough. If there is no means to monitor compliance, we will have aguachicol and wattchcicol for a while.
