Environmental Violence,Water Rights,and (Un) Due Process in Northwestern Mexico

The Political Ecology of the Yaqui River Valley

Writing in 1764, the Jesuit missionary Juan Nentvig described the Yaqui River as the Nile of Sonora. Unlike all the other “mediocre streams” that disappeared into the sand long before reaching the coast, the Yaqui River irrigated ample indigenous fields in its lower course and still flowed into the Gulf of California. Nentvig (1764) considered it Sonora’s main river and the foundation for Spanish development. The Hiak Vatwe, as it is called in the native language of the Yoemem, runs for 850 kilometers from the western Sierra Madre to the gulf. Two hundred fifty years and many hydrologic infrastructure projects later, Nentvig’s assessment still holds true: the Yaqui is one of the largest river systems in northwestern Mexico, and its water is a sought-after resource.

For centuries the Yaqui River deposited loamy soils from the mountains in the lower Yaqui Valley. The valley is some 450,000 hectares long and has a semiarid climate and average annual precipitation of 320 mm. Approximately 70 percent of the annual precipitation falls during the summer months, from June to September, with most of the remaining rain falling during the winter months. Mean potential evapotranspiration (~2,000 mm) greatly exceeds precipitation (Addams, 2004). Despite the semiarid climate, extensive fertile soils and abundant surface water make this valley a coveted agricultural oasis in a desert scrub forest. It is simultaneously valued indigenous territory, a productive national breadbasket, and, above all, highly contested ground.

To paraphrase Thomas Sheridan’s (1995: 41) analysis of the political ecology of Arizona, the history of the Yaqui Valley has been one long manipulation of gravity with dams, canals, and pumps built to challenge the natural constraints of the arid landscape. During the twentieth century the landscape of this region was transformed with large-scale, centralized infrastructure projects aimed at controlling and redirecting the flow of water. Three large dams were constructed on the Yaqui River system, and an extensive network of canals, ditches, drains, and diversion dams was built on the southern bank of the river, directing water away from the Yaqui towns and fields. Regional growth was promoted by a speculative mentality and the conviction that seasonal water flow could be redirected and water shortages addressed on the supply side. As in many other areas across the Greater Southwest, hydraulic technologies defied gravity, allowing water to flow “uphill” toward power and money (Hundley, 1988; Kahrl, 1983; Wilder and Whiteford, 2006; Worster, 1985). Elected representatives, government-paid planners, and private capital investors have historically been the dominant stakeholders in regional water politics. However, the locations of these “uphill” sites have varied through time in response to the rhythms of capital.

For most of the twentieth century, export-oriented agriculture was the force that drove the increasing manipulation of water. Indigenous modes of production based on small-scale irrigation and flood-recession agriculture, livelihood systems, and social spaces were largely displaced by the production of the modern agro-industrial state (Banister, 2010). But today agro-industrial landscapes are being supplanted by urban, suburban, and industrial spaces whose sustainable growth is threatened by severe drought (Gober, 2005; Hirt, Gustafson, and Larson, 2008; Sheridan, 2006). Notwithstanding these temporal particularities, large-scale development of water infrastructure often does not represent the interests of the full range of regional constituencies, with the interests of rural poor and Indian communities constituting the most conspicuous omissions (Brown and Ingram, 1987).

Colonization and Armed Struggles Over the Environment

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Yaqui Valley witnessed a Mexican and foreign rush for indigenous lands, unforgiving wars, and massive indigenous exodus as the Yaqui homeland was forcibly colonized and radically transformed by government-backed settlers and developers of export-oriented agriculture (Aboites, 1987; Erickson, 2008; Hewitt de Alcántara, 1978). The expropriation of Yaqui lands and the radical transformation of the waterscape with the construction of canals and dams took place during the authoritarian regime of President Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), who endeavored to turn Mexico into a modern nation. Under the motto of “Order and Progress,” ⁴ Diaz advocated a developmentalist ideology that had land colonization and hydraulic development at its core. In theory, control over the natural environment was to facilitate the domination of the barbaric indigenous character. Rural landscapes appropriated and physically transformed under radically different production regimes would not only produce increased revenues but also construct a new image of the polity. As Banister (2010: 75) explains, this spatial epistemology sought to rework and harness nature in both its human and its nonhuman forms.

In Sonora, where the Yaqui Valley was coveted for agricultural development and the Yaqui were up in arms in defense of their territory from the 1830s on, the call to subdue the wild land and its people was particularly strong. State policies encouraged private investors to carve a new agrarian civilization out of the fertile but seemingly idle indigenous terrain (Tenorio-Trillo, 1996). Uncultivated Yaqui lands were labeled “vacant public lots” and granted to private investors as private property. Indigenous bodies and lands were to be stripped of their wildness by turning them into laborious units under an agro-industrial regime (Banister, 2010). These decades constitute the darkest chapter in the history of modern Sonora and a tale of environmental violence in its most traditional sense. Paradoxically, the prolonged armed conflict between Yaqui and federal troops that ensued crystallized early colonial representations of the Yaqui as the most fearsome and indomitable of Indian groups. Even when mainstream accounts play down the brutality exercised by the state during this historical chapter, most Sonorenses have a story of a relative who killed or was killed by a Yaqui.

The Yaqui Valley climate supported a year-round growing season for subsistence agriculture, but large-scale commercial agriculture as envisioned by investors was challenged by the high evapotranspiration and minimal precipitation (Addams, 2004). Thus an expansive irrigation network was required to accomplish the development goals crafted for the area. In the late 1800s military cartographers were sent to survey and map the valley, divide it into parcels, and design a network of irrigation canals and reservoirs (Dabdoub, 1980). Mexican and foreign private entrepreneurs were invited to settle on the southern bank of the river on communally held Yaqui lands that had previously been cultivated with floodwater irrigation. Water rights equivalent to one-third of the flow of the lower Yaqui were granted as concessions to U.S.-based companies promoting agro-industrial development based on irrigation technologies (Evans, 1998). The diversion canals that were built to irrigate the colonized southern bank reduced water availability on the north bank. This negatively impacted Yaqui’s subsistence farming and further fueled their armed resistance.

By 1893 the struggle had morphed into guerrilla-style warfare (Moctezuma, 2001). The Yaqui had the advantage of familiarity with the rough scrubland and mountains, and therefore the federal government deployed a team of military engineers to destroy the riparian forests and open routes in every direction, even into the Bacatete Mountains (Dabdoub, 1964). As the Yaqui military opposition intensified, state officials agreed with speculators: for export-oriented agriculture to meet its full potential, indigenous resistance needed to be crushed by any means necessary. The objective of the government was then no longer to pacify the Yaqui but to eliminate them via deportation. Yaqui laborers working for Mexican farms were registered, and anyone without a license was captured and deported (Dabdoub, 1964). It is estimated that from 1898 to 1910 approximately 7,000 Yaqui men, women, and children were sent as indentured servants to the sugar and henequen plantations of southern Mexico (Padilla, 1995; Spicer, 1980; Turner, 1910). With the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, armed hostilities dwindled as many Yaqui men joined the revolutionary ranks.

Despite—or maybe because of—persecution and mass displacement, the Yaqui persisted in their cultural practices and traditional demands (Spicer, 1980). Although the concept was not yet embodied in international law, the Yaqui were fighting for their right to self-determination. Theirs was a struggle to maintain control over the material and organizational bases of their eight towns on the lower Yaqui River (McGuire, 1986). After the Mexican revolution, Yaqui authorities resorted to official channels in requesting autonomy and the return of their lands. However, some Yaqui factions still kept their weapons close at hand. In 1926, for example, a group of Yaqui tried to stop the train on which Álvaro Obregón was traveling as part of his last presidential campaign. Their goal was to force him into negotiations, but Obregón’s guard thought it was an attack and the event rapidly turned into a skirmish.

In 1937 President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) finally responded to Yaqui demands. In a long-awaited letter addressed to the Yaqui governor at Vicam (quoted in Fabila, 1978), he wrote:

The government recognizes that your bellicose attitude, from the time of conquest onwards, was always in fair defense of your lands, part of which were progressively passed onto various people through sales or donations made by previous administrations. . . . The Yaqui Tribe should be given definite possession of all lands and sufficient water for the population that it has today living in Sonora, as well as for the Yaqui contingents that for different reasons are outside the state.

Subsequently, in 1937, Cárdenas granted the tribe exclusive communal property over 485,235 hectares of land on the north bank of the Yaqui River and all the water required for its irrigation. ⁵ Through this decree he established the Yaqui Reservation, the first and only Indian reservation in Mexico. While in the ejidos peasants were granted collective usufruct rights to land but the government retained the title and the power to abolish such rights if the land was not under cultivation, the presidential decree, in theory, granted the tribe absolute property rights over the reservation land and its resources.

In 1939 a second presidential decree granted the tribe use rights to up to 50 percent of the water of the Angostura Dam and all runoff not controlled by the dam. In light of this, the National Irrigation Commission was charged with expanding the irrigation system on Yaqui land while the construction of the Angostura Dam was completed. These orders were finally ratified in 1940 via a presidential resolution specifying the boundaries of the indigenous territory and serving as title to it. The resolution also reinstated the tribe’s water allotment, giving it (DOF, 1940).

up to half of the volume that will be stored at the Angostura Dam in order to irrigate its own lands. Extractions should correspond to the agricultural needs of their arable zone on the right margin of the aforementioned river, independently of their use of the waters not controlled by the Angostura Dam. The right over water hereby granted to the Yaqui Tribe authorizes its population nucleus to make use of the waters that correspond to them as the lands in their property which become open to cultivation require it.

Cárdenas’s stipulations have not yet been met. Upon completion of the Angostura Dam in 1942, two other dams were constructed downstream from it, also outside Yaqui territory. The Oviáchic Dam, with a capacity of 2.99 billion cubic meters (2,423,222 acre-feet), was built in 1952, and the Novillo Dam, with a capacity of 2.93 billion cubic meters (2,371,336 acre-feet), was built in 1964 (CONAGUA, 2008). The Angostura is on the Bavispe River, which is a tributary of the Yaqui in the upper basin; the Oviáchic is at the confluence of the Moctezuma and the Yaqui, and the Novillo is on the main course of the Yaqui in the lower basin. These dams came to control water previously available to the tribe that was redirected toward nonnative private agricultural fields on the south side of the river. The end of large-scale hydraulic construction coincided with the advent of the Green Revolution in the Yaqui Valley, which became the cradle for the development of high-yielding varieties of wheat. As intensive agriculture expanded, social conflicts and inequality intensified, and by the 1970s large Mexican landowners had become highly capitalized and were producing the majority of the nation’s wheat (Bartra, 1975; Hewitt de Alcántara, 1978). In contrast, Yaqui smallholders suffered from the combined effects of capital shortage and water monopolies and had to rent out their land, becoming wage laborers in their own territory (McGuire, 1986; Sanderson, 1981; Scott and Banister, 2008). Today the irrigable surface of the tribe’s irrigation district is 100,000 hectares, but only 24,000 hectares are normally under irrigation (Luna, 2007; Moctezuma, 2001). Studies by Wong and Valencia (1995) and Merino (2007) already indicate a relationship between land rentals and public health problems such as intestinal parasites, malnutrition, and obesity in Yaqui towns. Although the tribe managed to regain a portion of its historic land, little could be done without water and hydraulic infrastructure. For that reason a cry of indignation resonated across the Yaqui Valley when Governor Guillermo Padrés launched a new comprehensive hydraulic plan for the state, the Sonora Sistema Integral (Sonora SI), and proposed the construction of the Independencia Aqueduct.

The Contemporary Waterscape and the Independencia Aqueduct

Sonora SI involves the construction of 22 infrastructure projects aimed at addressing water-provisioning problems across the state. These new hydraulic developments are a response to the mounting pressure generated by rapid population growth and climate change. Over the past 100 years, the Sonoran desert has experienced more than a dozen severe droughts (Cayan et al., 2010), and during the past decade droughts have been more severe and more widespread. Climate experts observe that precipitation has averaged 22–25 percent below the twentieth-century mean and temperatures have increased between .5 and 1°C (MacDonald, 2010). These conditions have had an across-the-board impact, but the water-rationing regime imposed on the capital city of Hermosillo has elicited the most political concern because it hinders development plans. The construction of the Independencia Aqueduct is intended to bring water from the Yaqui River to support development in Hermosillo. The 145-kilometer-long aqueduct will annually transfer 75 million cubic meters of water from the Novillo Dam to the intermittently dry Abelardo L. Rodriguez Dam in the Sonora River basin. For 12 kilometers water will flow under pressure through a 1.22-meter-wide steel pipe, and for the remaining 133 kilometers it will flow by gravity through a 1.32-meter-wide pipe.

Hermosillo’s residential, manufacturing, and service sectors are rapidly expanding despite the city’s defective water infrastructure network and limited freshwater supplies. Since 2005 residents have recurrently experienced water rationing. In the past decade the city has progressively expanded its hydraulic reach by buying water rights from nearby agricultural areas (Scott and Pineda-Pablos, 2011). When the combined demand for water for urban and irrigation purposes exceeded available supplies in the Sonora River basin, resulting in intermittent drying and filling of the Abelardo L. Rodríguez reservoir and salinization of the coastal fringe of the aquifer, the city had to turn to new sources to maintain its growth rate. With the Independencia Aqueduct, Hermosillo’s hydraulic frontier will reach the Yaqui River basin and the Yaqui homeland.

This infrastructure project speaks of Mexico’s transition to neoliberal environmentalism. Neoliberal reforms to environmental policies—including water legislation—were centered on the principles of marketization, decentralization, privatization, and sustainability (cf. Bakker, 2005). Under the 1917 Constitution, water was a public good held in trust by the federal government (S. Whiteford and Melville, 2002); however, the 1992 reform to Article 27 and the new national water law of the same year made water an economic good open to privatization and market transactions. The new law retained national ownership of water but created private usufruct rights. To that effect, it regularized water rights as time-bound (5–30 years) renewable concessions, established a public registry of water rights, and institutionalized a system of tradable water rights (Aboites, 1998; Castro, 2004; Valencia et al., 2004). The law also established water rights as use-specific and required rights holders to keep records of their water use and pay for the rights according to the volume of water used. All water rights holders are classified as either natural or legal persons. Without regard to indigenous water governance or historical agreements, indigenous communities are considered legal persons, as are ejidos, corporations, and industries (Garduño, 2005). Through these guidelines and institutions, the new water law circumscribed the role of the state to allow the rules of the market to reallocate water toward higher-value and more efficient uses (Wilder and Lankao, 2006: 1980). Informed by this economic logic, the Independencia Aqueduct project seeks to increase economic efficiency by reallocating water to what is considered a higher-value sector in terms of revenue-to-investment ratio (see Briscoe, 1997). The aqueduct will allow water to flow “uphill” toward Hermosillo and away from the agricultural producers in the Yaqui Valley. Direction in water flow reflects a shift in the regional axis of power from its old hub—the agro-industrial Yaqui Valley—to urban and industrial Hermosillo.

The aqueduct project also marks a drastic shift in the state’s official discourse on water availability. The narratives of crisis and absolute water scarcity pervasive during Governor José Eduardo Bour’s administration (2003–2009) have been replaced by a discourse that presents Sonora as having an overabundance of water but suffering from poor management and uneven distribution. Whereas in the mid-1990s and early 2000s desalination was being considered as a solution to Hermosillo’s water supply problem, through Sonora SI the state is opting to solve the distribution problem by transferring water from the water-rich Yaqui Valley to the dry metropolis. This approach overlooks the fact that relative conditions of water scarcity are manufactured by asymmetric competition between water users and political-economic interests (Donahue and Johnston, 1997; Kaika, 2003; Mehta, 2001; Swyngedouw, 2004). In addition, it is a step back from policies that were turning attention from engineering water supply to managing water demand (see Walsh, 2011). While international institutions now recognize that large-scale hydraulic infrastructure has not brought the economic growth and social welfare it promised, in Sonora the modernist confidence in grand hydraulic projects as the solution to risk and the road to prosperity is still alive.

In early 2010 the state government launched a media campaign in support of its flagship project. It rented billboards and ran television, radio, and newspaper ads endorsing Sonora SI and the Independencia Aqueduct. One message was recurrent throughout the campaign: “Sonora is one land confronted by two worlds.” These two worlds were depicted as radically different in terms of their water availability and management capabilities. Using gorgeous high-resolution footage and project-tailored maps, the campaign divided the state into two caricaturized regions: the water-rich South, epitomized by the lush Yaqui Valley, and the water-scarce North, epitomized by thirsty Hermosillo. One television commercial began with a shot of barren lands in northern Sonora; cracks in the desiccated soil and a few lonesome trees exemplified thirst and desperation. The camera then traveled to southern Sonora, where the Yaqui River rushed down the Sierra Madre into extensive agricultural fields denoting water abundance. In another commercial, an aerial shot zoomed onto the Novillo Dam. As water spilled over the dam’s curtain, the text read: “Each year 2,298 million cubic meters of water are wasted. 943 million cubic meters could be recovered. This is three times the water needed for domestic consumption in all of Sonora.” The subtext is clear: farmers in the Yaqui Valley are inefficient water managers monopolizing a resource desperately needed by the people of Hermosillo. The campaign highlights the uneven distribution of water between these two regions and the unifying potential of water provided that human engineering, capital investment, and community support create the appropriate conditions for interbasin transfers.

The idea of relative water overabundance is strategically mobilized to provide a hydrological justification for the construction of the Independencia Aqueduct and play down its strong neoliberal logic. In the economic and technical assessment of provisioning alternatives for Hermosillo, the state water commission determined that the Yaqui River was the most suitable water source. State-employed hydraulic experts presented the following three figures from the Yaqui Valley to support their recommendation: (1) 947 million cubic meters of water per year are wasted because of deficiencies in the distribution network of the irrigation district: (2) 357 million out of the 599 million cubic meters of groundwater allocated to the agricultural sector annually are not extracted; and (3) in the summer of 2010 the dams along the Yaqui River reached 100 percent of their storage capacity, which forced managers to release monthly volumes that by September had added up to 415 million cubic meters. The report concluded that the Yaqui River basin had an overabundance of water related to inefficient patterns of water usage and it was only logical to redirect that excess water to Hermosillo.

However, all the water in the Yaqui River basin is allocated, and therefore to transfer 75 million cubic meters of water to Hermosillo the state government had to buy agricultural water rights. Confronted by the strong opposition of agricultural producers in the lower Yaqui River basin, the state water commission opted to buy the rights from the agricultural producers in the riverine towns along the Bavispe River, a tributary of the Yaqui in the upper basin. In a public ceremony on August 2010, the director of the national water commission assured the attendees that “not even one drop of the water granted to Irrigation District 041 [located on the southern bank of the lower Yaqui and belonging to large-scale farmers] will be touched.” Irrigation District 018, located on the northern bank of the river and belonging mainly to the Yaqui tribe, may be impacted by the aqueduct, but the water authorities neither addressed Yaqui concerns nor considered their current water needs or the tribe’s water rights in backing this large-scale hydraulic project.

Water Conflicts

In April 2010 Governor Padrés, with the full support of the state and national water commissions, presented the Independencia Aqueduct as the vehicle bringing water sufficiency and progress for all Sonorans. The supporting materials issued at the onset of the project failed to acknowledge the Yaqui Tribe, its ancestral territory, and its historical water rights. Tribal authorities were not meaningfully consulted as part of the environmental impact assessment and the tribe’s undelivered water allotment was not accounted for in the hydrometric calculations mentioned above. Thus the aqueduct brought unresolved historical grievances to a boiling point and triggered a new round of state attacks seeking to end Yaqui resource claims. When some Yaqui authorities responded with lawsuits and street protests, the state government embarked upon a powerful campaign to discount their political voice, question their standing as an ethnic group, and ultimately discount their historical water rights.

Across the world, indigenous people increasingly rely on legal channels to defend their collective rights and denounce instances of environmental violence. In August 2010 traditional authorities from the Yaqui towns of Vicam and Potam filed independent lawsuits against the president, the governor, and the directors of the national and state water commissions for neglecting their right to prior consultation and dismissing their historical water rights. One suit was filed in a district court by a group made up of private agricultural producers from Irrigation District 041 and tribal representatives. The plaintiffs requested the dismissal of the environmental impact assessment issued in favor of the aqueduct for failing to guarantee the community’s right to prior consultation. For this suit the Yaqui formed an alliance with large-scale agricultural businessmen from Ciudad Obregón, the same producers whose land south of the Yaqui River used to be part of Yaqui territory. This collaboration attracted criticism from some Yaqui groups and from the media, who labeled these Yaqui activists puppets of the powerful landowners from the South. The other suit was filed by representatives of the Yaqui Tribe in an agrarian court in Ciudad Obregón and sought restitution of the 1939 collective water rights before any water from the Yaqui River was diverted to Hermosillo or elsewhere.

In both instances tribal grievances were based on the state’s failure to consult with indigenous peoples according to its obligations under Mexico’s General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection and the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169. The procedural and substantive features detailed under Article 7 of the convention require Mexico to ensure that indigenous people are directly involved in decisions that impact the economic development of their resources (Hopkins, 2012). The regulations for conducting environmental impact assessments, under Mexico’s General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection, specify the procedures for meeting these consultation requirements. Given that the aqueduct will annually consume 75 million cubic meters from the Yaqui River, which runs along Yaqui territory and to which the tribe has water rights by presidential decree, the tribe should have been consulted as part of the environmental impact assessment, and it was not.

In both cases the court ruled in favor of the tribe and granted injunctions to delay the implementation of a decision until a verdict is reached in the follow-up amparo lawsuit (DOF, 1936). Unique to Mexican law, an amparo lawsuit is a powerful provision for protecting individuals from state authorities’ abuses. Its objective is to resolve all controversies that may arise from laws or administrative decisions that may violate individual guarantees corresponding but not limited to the rights stipulated in the constitution (Baker, 1971: 94; Zamora et al., 2004: 264). The plaintiff must demonstrate that a public authority is responsible for the injury (Baker, 1971: 95; Zamora et al., 2004: 265) and that the injury may be reparable if action is taken (DOF, 1936). In the cases surrounding the Independencia Aqueduct, halting construction would allow for the reinstatement of water rights and prior consultation before any radical environmental transformation is undertaken in the Yaqui River basin. In one instance the court issued a precautionary measure prohibiting the diversion of water from the Yaqui River basin and thus would have stopped all construction until a final determination was reached. In the second case, the court granted the plaintiffs a second injunction that found the environmental impact assessment invalid and consequently halted construction. However, openly contradicting the courts, the governor ordered construction to continue. With the pronounced support of President Calderón and Hermosillo’s foremost media outlets, he pledged that “nothing and no one would stop construction . . . because this structure is for the collective good.”

Supporters of the proposed rural-to-urban water transfer rejected Yaqui complaints, claiming that they, not the Yaquis, were the defenders of human rights and the environment. Calderón and Padrés argued that the aqueduct was legally valid and morally necessary, branding opponents “caciques” seeking to monopolize a public good. Water, they argued, was a resource that could not be owned by any one group and should be mobilized first to meet citizens’ fundamental right to an adequate standard of living. In defending the aqueduct, they drew on the 2012 reform of Article 4 of the constitution, which added the human right to water to the list of individual guarantees protected by the state. The new clause required the state to secure the right of “every person to access, use, and cleanse water for personal and domestic consumption in a manner that is sufficient, healthy, acceptable, and accessible.” This amendment observes the general comments made by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recommending the incorporation of the right to water into the guarantees that are essential to a livelihood.

Project advocates argued that without the Independencia Aqueduct about a million Mexicans living in Hermosillo would go thirsty, and this would be unacceptable and unconstitutional because water for human consumption was a fundamental human right and had priority over agricultural use. This argument was fallacious in two ways. First, Hermosillo is indeed struggling to meet its present consumption rate and anticipated demand, but its residents are not facing immediate water scarcity. Although the production of water has decreased dramatically over the past 15 years because the reservoir and some wells are drying up, per capita water intake remains at 300–345 liters per day, among the highest in Mexico (Pineda-Pablos, 2006; Salazar and Pineda-Pablos, 2010; Wilder et al., 2012). Potable water provisioning in Hermosillo is more plentiful and reliable than in the Yaqui Valley area. (This is not to say that all of Hermosillo is connected to the water supply network or that water rationing is not a source of discomfort for local households, especially in low-income neighborhoods where households lack cisterns.) Second, as defined by international law, the fundamental right to water entails access to water for drinking, basic sanitation, and subsistence food production. In the case of water scarcity, domestic consumption has priority over agriculture. This is also stated in the national water law, which stipulates that in time of emergency and extreme drought the national water commission should take the necessary action—usually temporary—to ensure water supply for domestic and urban public use. However, the fight surrounding the Independencia Aqueduct is far from a straightforward conflict between domestic water consumption in Hermosillo and irrigation in the Yaqui Valley. In Hermosillo, approximately 15 percent of water is destined for the industrial and service sectors, and in the Yaqui Valley struggles over water rights are not solely for agricultural purposes. For the Yaqui Tribe, water is a means to subsistence and self-governance.

As is the case with most other indigenous peoples in Mexico, Yaqui communities are considered water users analogous to agricultural producers because they are accepted as stakeholders in water management via the river basin councils. These are basin-specific administrative spaces that allow for the participation of water users under an integrated water management framework. Voting seats on a council are granted to every water sector (agriculture, industry, public urban, etc.), and representatives of civil society have a right to speak but not to vote (DOF, 1994; 1997). While river basin councils are a step in the right direction for incorporating users into the decision-making process, they overlook the groups’ comprehensive relationship to Yaqui River water as a source of life, the means for agricultural production, and the historical backbone of their traditional eight towns.

To discredit Yaqui demands and resource rights, Mexican authorities question the authenticity and sovereignty of the tribe in the media and in the courtroom. First, they repeatedly refer to the presence of two competing government bodies in some Yaqui towns, highlighting that dual governments do not fall within the customary indigenous governance system and therefore are neither authentic nor representative. In the mid-1990s internal tribal political conflicts intensified when President Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000) expropriated 2,688 hectares of Yaqui land in order to regularize private and ejido land holdings that were occupying Yaqui territory. Traditionally elected Yaqui authorities opposed Zedillo’s 1997 decree, contending that it really enabled the total expropriation of 40,000 hectares, thus further violating their territorial boundaries. Another Yaqui faction, largely composed of young professionals, accepted Zedillo’s decree and the 40 million pesos offered by the federal government as compensation. This group maintained that Yaqui autonomy would be achieved by gaining control of government-funded development projects, and therefore they closely collaborated with the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and the National Indigenous Institute, the federal entities leading the expropriation process. In 2002 the indemnification negotiations were canceled when six of the eight Yaqui towns rejected the settlement agreement. By that time, internal political divisions had crystallized and the towns of Vicam, Potam, and Rahum now had two governments each. Today these political divisions are strategically exploited by the Mexican state to question the persistence of Yaqui customary law while challenging the representational authority of voices opposing the aqueduct. Customary law is a dynamic political construct that reflects divergent economic, institutional, and cultural objectives as well as internal group power relations. The Yaqui Tribe, like any other society, is heterogeneous: group members may have different affiliations and views on how to deal with specific issues. In this sense, reference to internal contradictions to question a group’s right to self-government and, by extension, its rights to use and manage natural resources is particularly out of place.

As the ultimate blow in this battle over water rights and indigenous sovereignty, state actors supporting the aqueduct sought to deprive the tribe of its legal standing. In April 2011 Mexico’s attorney general requested the Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History—INAH) to issue an expert report certifying that the communities of Vicam and Potam were effectively Yaqui. The INAH responded that it could not provide an expert report of that nature. State authorities misinterpreted this response, taking it as a conclusive negation of the indigeneity of the Yaqui communities of Potam and Vicam. In theory, if an expert testimony could not validate them, then the Yaqui Tribe did not exist in these communities. As the denial of the existence of the tribe made headlines in every newspaper in Sonora, INAH researchers held a press conference to address the misunderstanding. They explained that the attorney general’s request was out of place because the INAH lacked the capacity to certify the existence or nonexistence of any ethnic group, the right to self-ascription being contemplated in the constitution and many international treaties to which Mexico is a party.

Closing Remarks

Over the past 100 years water in Mexico has been transformed from a symbol of national progress and an object of engineering control into the object of national security. In twenty-first-century Sonora, the political ecology of water is influenced by drought and neoliberal reforms. These natural and political processes have created a context in which Yaqui indigenous people and Hermosillo’s municipal sector come face to face over the control of water from the Yaqui River. Although the valley is no longer witness to armed warfare, it remains a violent environment that outsources its battles to courtrooms and the media. I have argued for broadening our understanding of structural violence to recognize injuries inflicted on collective actors through legal and media channels. In this case the object of violence is the tribe as a collective agent, and violence is exercised by ignoring Yaqui’s rights to prior consultation and their historical water claims and challenging their indigenous authenticity and right to self-determination.

The human rights discourse mobilized by the state governor and supported by the president present a partial reading of water rights and constitute a form of oppression aimed at benefiting the interests of a given sector to the exclusion of others. This is an example of the structural violence in which the state is emphasizing the need of urban Hermosillo dwellers to have a 24-hour water supply over the needs of Yaqui people for subsistence. In the Yaqui towns access to potable water is below average, and drinking water shows high salinity levels (Luna, 2007). To my knowledge there are no comprehensive studies on the effects of the lack of potable water and poor water quality in the Yaqui towns, but elsewhere studies indicate that water shortages create serious public health issues (Arar, 1998; Plate, Strassman, and Wilson, 2004; L. Whiteford, 1997; 2005; S. Whiteford and Cortez, 2005). Through their logic state authorities reveal the common tension that exists between individual guarantees and collective rights and illustrate the contradictions between the formal enunciation of the right to water as a universal entitlement and the practices that often render this formal principle meaningless for political and cultural minorities. As Bakker (2007) has argued, a human rights approach to water is individualistic, state-centric, and compatible with capitalist political economic systems rather than conducive to the recognition of diverse resource management systems.

Opposition to the Independencia Aqueduct is a fight over historical recognition of collective indigenous water rights, and it is ultimately a defense of a resource on which people’s basic livelihoods are dependent. The proposed water diversion from the Yaqui River basin and the ensuing conflict between representatives of the Sonoran state government and representatives of the Yaqui Tribe constitute a clear example of structural environmental violence. With five lawsuits pending, the Independencia Aqueduct was inaugurated by President Felipe Calderón on November 26, 2012, five days before his administration ended. Yaqui activists have continued to voice their disapproval by blocking the international highway and collaborating with the U.S.-based Pascua Yaqui Tribe in order to take their case to international organizations such as the International Human Rights Commission. The conflict surrounding the Independencia Aqueduct and the Yaqui’s collective water rights will shape the production of Sonora’s geopolitical space and set a precedent for the government’s stance vis-à-vis indigenous rights and indigenous people in Mexico. Moreover, the legal reallocation of water rights and the interbasin movement of water will reshape the Sonoran landscape and people’s livelihoods as it dries up “low-value” agricultural fields in the Yaqui Valley, dredges a 145-kilometer-long aqueduct across the desert, and transforms the arid landscape of Hermosillo into an urban oasis dotted with factories and green lawns.