The Mexican national water authority, Conagua, has declared a state of emergency in four states in northern Mexico. The country is currently going through its worst water crisis in 30 years and over half of the country is in drought. Many people are forced to rely on pipas (water trucks mainly run by the city authorities) just so they can wash, clean dishes, and flush the toilet. However, the water that the pipas deliver is mostly too dirty to drink so those people who can afford it have to buy bottled water. This has tripled in price over the last three months and is similar in value to gasoline. In addition to the ongoing climate crisis, which is already affecting reservoirs globally due to the increasingly hot summers, there is another factor leading to Mexico’s water shortages: Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola, as well as other brewers and soft drink companies, has factories in Mexico, namely in Monterrey and Chiapas. Monterrey’s drinks sector uses nearly 50 billion litres of water a year from public reservoirs, over half the annual water consumption, and for which they pay less than three cents a litre. Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attempted to address the issue in July by asking drink companies to stop production and allow the public access to the water. Heineken responded by allocating only 20% of its supply to the people and Coca-Cola said that people were free to come and collect water directly from their mineral water factory, but this is too far away for most people to get to.
The failure to seriously tackle the way that the soft drink companies are monopolising drinkable water exemplifies the contempt that the Mexican state and the corporations hold for the working class and indigenous communities of Mexico. Many former executives of Coca-Cola have gone into past Mexican governments: the former president of FEMSA (Coca-Cola’s main bottler worldwide), Vicente Fox, was Mexico’s president in between 2000 and 2006. One of Coca-Cola’s bottling companies, Arca Continental was founded by the family of Juan Ignacio Barragan, the current director of water and drainage in Monterrey state.
It is not just through water consumption that Coca-Cola is causing serious damage to millions of people across Mexico. A 2019 study by Yale University shows that the average Mexican is drinking 163 litres of soft drinks every year, making them the biggest consumers of soft drinks globally with a consumption rate around 40% more than in the US, which is second. It can’t be a coincidence then, that according to the International Diabetes Federation around one in six Mexicans have diabetes. Furthermore, a peer-reviewed article published in 2018 in the Public Library of Science found that almost three quarters of the working class Mexican population over 18 suffers with at least one diet-related non-communicable chronic disease such as diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
In some parts of Mexico, Coca-Cola is easier to find than water, and is almost as cheap. In Chiapas, Coca-Cola is even used as a healing component in religious ceremonies, illustrating the extent of the grip that Coca-Cola has on drink consumption by Mexico’s population. There, Coca-Cola extracts 300,000 gallons of potable water a year while people have just heavily chlorinated water one or two days a week. Meanwhile diabetes has become the second biggest killer after heart disease, cases rising 30% between 2013 and 2016.
The water crisis in Mexico is only going to be worsened by climate change. Due to Mexico’s geographic location, it is susceptible to extreme changes in climate which lead to intense weather conditions such as thunderstorms and tropical cyclones that can cause flooding. Climate change has also led to an increase in the annual temperature of Mexico by 0.6 °C since the 1960s. As of 15 April 2021, nearly 85% of the country is facing drought conditions. Large dams throughout Mexico are at exceptionally low levels, depleting water resources for drinking, farming, and irrigation. The plunder of deep water wells that contains clean fresh water by Coco-Cola’s bottling plants is exacerbating this crisis for the benefit of the Mexican ruling class and imperialist investors.
Yara Osman
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 290 October/November 2022
