l
he protests against the reform of the General Water Law reveal much more than the defense of a right: they showcase groups that, for decades, have built economic and political power around the use of water.
Reviewing what is happening in irrigation district 005 (DR-005), located in the south-central region of the state of Chihuahua, helps to understand why certain farmers and businessmen are so vehemently opposed to any change aimed at regulating water equitably.
This region has been a historically unequal territory. Since the Colony, the Spanish despoiled and practically extinguished native peoples such as the Conchos and the Tapacolmes. During the Porfiriato, the appropriation of water and land was consolidated in few hands, and not even the Revolution was able to reverse that dynamic: Villa’s agrarian law was ignored and, with the creation of DR-005 in 1941, an agricultural elite emerged that called themselves Victors of the Desert, while hundreds of peasants were left without land.
Over time, user associations and limited liability companies concentrated irrigation management, and this control was significantly modified in the 1990s with the transfer of operations from the federal government under the mandate of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The change was part of a broader decentralization policy, contemplated in the National Water Law of 1992, with an attractive discourse, but in practice it opened the door to a privatization process. de facto of the water.
DR-005 covers 75 thousand hectares and more than 9 thousand users, but the dominant crop is walnut: around 15 thousand hectares are dedicated to pecans. It is estimated that between 800 and a thousand concessionaires own orchards, many of them larger than 20 hectares. Companies such as Nueces Delicias, Golden Pecans, Pronuez Porras or Huerta Santa Lucía, among many more, lead the business.
Walnut production involves enormous resources. In 2024 it reached a value of approximately 390 million dollars and, by 2025, it could exceed 400 million. All this in a crop highly dependent on water: each kilogram of walnut requires between 5 thousand and 7 thousand liters.
The nogaleros boast the generation of 30 thousand jobs annually, but they hide that more than two thirds are temporary jobs: day laborers who live in overcrowded conditions, transported in unsafe trucks and paid, on average, 300 pesos a day. Only a few permanent positions reach monthly salaries of between 6 thousand and 12 thousand pesos.
The profits have motivated irregular practices: clandestine sale of water, falsification of documents, transmission of concessions without verification and use of agricultural permits to sell pipes. The National Water Commission has detected nearly 7,000 irregularities in Chihuahua alone and maintains closures in municipalities such as Julimes, Delicias and Meoqui, where illegal wells, river diversions and extraction in closed aquifers proliferate.
Clandestine seizures have been documented along the San Pedro River, illegal dams that stored hundreds of thousands of cubic meters, and irregular titles granted during past administrations to justify extractions in overexploited areas.
Opposition to the presidential initiative comes, above all, from those who have accumulated wealth thanks to flexible concessions and poor oversight. They fear that the new law will prevent inheriting or selling private rights, review usage records and punish water crimes.
In short, the heart of the conflict in this part of the country, in large part, derives from the cultivation of the walnut tree and its product, the walnut. This activity is promoted by a small sector protected by the law inherited from the Salinist era: the same ones who, since the taking of La Boquilla and in the recent protests, have presented themselves as central actors in the claims against the new General Water Law.
They refuse to accept that the new legislation does not hinder walnut production, but rather requires that it be carried out with full respect for human rights and with the economic and social equity that the region has demanded for decades.
For all this, it can be stated that the conflict in DR-005 is not only technical or legal: it is historical, political and deeply unequal. The reform does not seek to destroy assets or punish honest producers, but rather to regulate water fairly. Those who protest the loudest do so because they fear that their privileges will be exposed and that illegal practices that for years fed fortunes will be stopped.
* Historian
