Mexican farmers take on avocado growers in fight for water during drought

As a drought in Mexico drags on, angry subsistence farmers have begun taking direct action on thirsty avocado orchards and berry fields of commercial farms that are drying up streams in the mountains west of Mexico City.

Rivers and even whole lakes are disappearing in the once green and lush state of Michoacán, as the drought combines with a surge in the use of water for the country's lucrative export crops, led by avocados.

In recent days, subsistence farmers and activists from the Michoacán town of Villa Madero organized teams to go into the mountains and rip out illegal water pumps and breach unlicensed irrigation holding ponds.

A potential conflict looms with avocado growers — who are often sponsored by, or pay protection money to, drug cartels.

Last week, dozens of residents, farmworkers and small-scale farmers from Villa Madero hiked up into the hills to tear out irrigation equipment using mountain springs to water avocado orchards carved out of the pine-covered hills.

The week before, another group went up with picks and shovels and breached the walls of an illegal containment pond that sucked up water from a spring that had supplied local residents for hundreds of years.

"In the last 10 years, the streams, the springs, the rivers have been drying up and the water has been captured, mainly to be used for avocados and berries," said local activist Julio Santoyo, one of the organizers of the effort. "There are hamlets in the lower part of the township that no longer have water."

Santoyo estimated that about 850 of the plastic-lined, earthen containment ponds have sprung up in the hills around Villa Madero, usually soon after planters have illegally logged or burned the native pine forest. Pines help the soil retain water, while avocado trees deplete it.

Francisco Gomez Cortes said residents of his hamlet, El Sauz, had been asking the landowner for 15 years to allow the spring to flow downhill to their community.

After a year in which Mexico received only about half its normal rainfall, residents became desperate, and last week they worked up the courage to hike up the hill and rip out pumps and hoses for the avocado orchard.

"We don't have enough water for human consumption," Gomez Cortes said.

"It's sad to walk down these trails that are now dry, when they once had trees and springs," he said. "They haven't even left any water for the [forest] animals that nest along the banks."

In a sign of how seriously the local government is taking the potential threat, the group was accompanied by the mayor of Villa Madero, who blamed outsiders for the problem.

"There are people who aren't from this town, who come to our township and are invading us," Mayor Froylan Alcauter Ibarra said. "They are taking water away from the people who live downhill, and they don't realize these are the poorest people."