Alma E. Muñoz and Emir Olivares
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, November 27, 2025, p. 4
There are producers who have concessioned water for irrigation and sell it to municipalities with a profit of 300 million pesos per year, which “cannot be… No to privileges, yes to the law and the rule of law,” remarked President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.
Given the mobilizations against the General Water Law, in the morning the people criticized that those who seek to continue hoarding the liquid try to generate the idea that there is chaos, which will explain that in the six-year term of the PAN member Felipe Calderón “a lot of concessions were made, and those who were in charge of the Conagua (National Water Commission) in the states are now demonstrating.”
The director of the organization, Efraín Morales, warned that those who oppose the legislative changes “defend their interests, because they are the ones who for many years, under the protection of political and economic power, have hoarded large quantities of water.”
They are “very concerned” and generate misinformation campaigns, but the National Water Law initiative “will be discussed in the coming days in the Chamber of Deputies and work is being done to enrich the proposal,” he mentioned.
He recalled that concessions for agricultural use ended up “used in industrial parks, on golf courses or even taken to real estate developments without State control; this has generated great disorder and damage.”
The President specified that the reform does not affect the inheritance of concessions. “Now they are trying to say that an ejidatario will not be able to give that water to his children if he has a well on his plot. False. Of course it can be done, but not that hoarding anymore.”
He questioned that the owners of irrigation concessions, which do not pay, as stipulated by law, do not use the water. “They sell it to the municipalities and then you see the farmers of some irrigation districts in their cars and trucks because they earn 300 million pesos a year for selling water to a municipality. That cannot be.
“Of course there are some who demonstrate now (because) they want to continue maintaining that privilege. Well no. We manage to transform public life for all Mexicans, particularly for those who have the least.”
Sheinbaum Pardo stated that there are “large farmers, the big ones, who have water concessions” and with the reform they will no longer be able to sell liquid to a third party, nor will they be able to transmit it “just like that”, for example, to real estate developers. Now they will have to go to Conagua.
He indicated that if there are errors in the bill, “there is a working group in Congress for that. Let it be corrected.”
He also considered “ridiculous” the argument of PRI deputy Rubén Moreira, that private water wells cannot be exploited. “Everyone leads the fight they want. We maintain that water is a human right and a resource of the nation that must be ordered.”
Yesterday it was also reported that the construction of an aqueduct of around 21 kilometers began to provide water to the city of Colima for approximately 30 years, with an investment of 1,780 million pesos.
