Acuña authorities have already requested that a work table be installed in which members of the three levels of government participate.
“We request the intervention of our president Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, so that extraordinary extractions are suspended and that human consumption is privileged above any other use,” said the mayor of Acuña.
The mayor said that there are political and economic pressures, including the recent statements of President Donald Trump and the commitments assumed by Mexico in the framework of the 1944 Water Treaty. ” However, none of that justifies to put the human right to the water of our population at risk, “he added.
Manolo Jiménez, governor of Coahuila, supported the mayor of the mayor before media.
“We sympathized 100 percent. We completely agree with the mayor of Acuña, when I saw the news I spoke with people from Conagua, I spoke with the Secretary of Agriculture and I am looking for the Secretary of the Interior because the most important thing is that people have water,” he said.
“There is nothing more important than the people of Acuña, than the people of Piedras Negras and the nearby municipalities have water and that Mexicans have water for human consumption,” he added.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Friday that Mexico will make an “immediate delivery” of water to Texas farmers after the threat of her counterpart Donald Trump to impose sanctions and tariffs on the Latin American country if she does not meet a treaty on the use of the resource in the common border zone.
In the dispute over the distribution of water between the two nations, Trump has accused Mexico of breaking a 1944 treaty, which must send 1.75 million water acres to the United States from the Rio Grande (or Bravo) through a network of interconnected dams and basins every five years.
“To Texas farmers, who are the ones who are asking for water, there will be an immediate delivery of a certain number of millions of cubic meters that can be given according to the availability of water that exists in the Bravo (River),” said the president in her daily press conference.
The current five -year cycle ends in October, but Mexico has sent less than 30% of the necessary water, according to data from the Bilateral International Limit and Water Commission (CILA).
Sheinbaum said that Mexico will deliver this year “an important amount of water” to the neighboring nation, but clarified that he does not believe that the treaty should be renegotiated because it is “fair” and announced that the parties will soon reach a consensus. “I think that these days you will reach a reasonable agreement, I do not think it will be a topic of conflict.”
The president said that the Cila is looking for alternatives to technically comply with the treaty and that there are aspects that Washington has not fulfilled, such as the expansion of a water treatment plant in California, within the framework of a commitment for which Mexico had to build another equivalent installation that “is about to end.”
-With Reuters information.
