The PAN proposes sentences of up to 12 years in prison for “huachicoleo de agua”

The initiative is from deputy José Antonio García García, former councilor of Huixquilucan, State of Mexico, and if it succeeds, the criminal category of water theft would be created, which does not exist in current legislation.

Currently, the National Water Law establishes that this conduct is an administrative offense that merits sanctions of the same order.

Nor is it foreseen that a judicial authority can hear this type of case. That is why the document seeks to reform article 368 Sextus of the Federal Penal Code, and article 51 of the Organic Law of the Judicial Power of the Federation in its section 1 subsection ñ).

With these changes, federal judges and magistrates will have the power to hear this type of illicit, although the water management system is a concurrent function between the different levels of government.

The proposed wording establishes that “a penalty of three to eight years in prison and a fifty to five hundred day fine will be imposed on anyone who, for profit, removes, exploits, transports or markets drinking water from the federal hydraulic infrastructure, without having a legal title. of concession or authorization of the corresponding authorities and laws”.

But if the crime is committed by a public servant in the exercise of his functions, or if the theft of water damages the hydraulic infrastructure of a network that supplies, in whole or in part, a population center, the penalty will increase to a half, that is, a year and a half or up to four additional years, with which the most serious sentence would be 12 years in total.

In addition to the social damage, since entire communities are left without water, the legislator proposed millionaire losses. “The theft and sale of water illegally has become for thousands of people a way of profiting to generate their gold mine, generating millionaire losses to the public treasury, and affecting and leaving millions of people without water,” he said. the.

Annual losses of 3 billion pesos are estimated for only three entities: Tamaulipas 700,000,000 pesos; State of Mexico, 1,000 million pesos, and in Baja California, 1,234 million pesos, but “at the national level it is estimated that the millionaire losses due to the huachicoleo of water can range up to 10 or 20 times more”.

According to the PAN member, in recent years this behavior has increased and it is known that in states such as Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Zacatecas “the clandestine intake of the liquid increased between 70 and 110 percent in 2021, when more than half of the national territory was declared in a situation of extreme drought”.

The legislator reported that agencies responsible for water in various entities have registered that in Hidalgo so far this 2022, 1,800 clandestine taps have been detected; in the municipality of Monterrey, Nuevo León, more than 3,000, and in Coahuila, 918 irregular intakes, and even in Ecatepec it is estimated that more than a million liters a day are stolen to sell it illegally.

Added to this scenario are figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), according to which “only a third of the homes in our country – some 471, 226 – receive water daily; 302, 709 every third day; 259, 200, twice a week, 222, 851, once a week; 92,005 from time to time and more than 170, 352 homes do not receive water”.