Mexico City – Despite being located in some of Mexico’s wettest climes, more than a third of the country’s Indian households lack drinking water while 60 percent have no sewer service, a deficiency the government claims it is remedying.
President Vicente Fox’s administration says that in the past five years, it has brought potable water to just over a fifth of the Indian homes that did not have such access.
Mexico, which in March will host the 4th World Water Forum, has among the most abundant freshwater resources in Latin America. Most of this water is located in Chiapas, Veracruz, Guerrero and Oaxaca states, which have the biggest concentrations of the Indians who make up 10 percent of the country’s population of 107 million.
Officials said this week that by December, when Fox will step down at the end of his six-year term, the Mexican government will have invested more than $1 billion in providing rural indigenous communities with potable water and carrying out other projects in those areas.
According to non-governmental organizations, 35 percent of Indian households in Mexico do not have access to clean drinking water, compared with 15 percent of non-Indian homes.
Additionally, 60 percent of the homes of indigenous people lack access to sewer service, while the figure for whites and mestizos is 14 percent.
Officials from the National Water Commission, or CNA, the federal agency that coordinates the national drinking water and sewage program, have said special technology is being used to deliver potable water to remote indigenous communities, to store and purify rain water and extract well water and make it fit for human consumption.
But NGO’s say the government’s plan does not address the root problem of providing potable water to the Indians, but rather is opening the door to privatization of water supplies, part of what they claim is a global tendency to put strategic resources in the hands of private entities.
Mexican Indians are also “threatened by domestic and foreign landowners and business leaders who seek to monopolize the water basins,” the head of the Chiapas-based Community Action Center for Economic and Political Research known as CIEPAC, Onesimo Hidaldo, told EFE.
Hidalgo said some Mexican business leaders and international soft-drink giants, “like Coca Cola,” want to gain control over the sources and basins of fresh water and other natural resources of Chiapas state, which borders Guatemala.
But government officials told EFE that Mexican law contains safeguards preventing municipal authorities from indiscriminately granting concessions for the exploration and exploitation of freshwater basins.
One of these safeguards requires the CNA to issue a “technical and environmental” report before regional officials can authorize soft-drink bottlers and other private entities to use freshwater resources.
Soft-drink multinationals have operated for nearly a century in Mexico, which is one of the world’s biggest markets for their products.
