The water in the Bajío is blue. Not because of its color, but because of its partisan bias. Four former governors, a former party leader, and a former president of Mexico, all from the PAN (National Action Party), have benefited from agricultural water concessions since 1996.
A MILENIO investigation reveals that six prominent figures from the National Action Party (PAN) benefited from around twenty Conagua concessions in the states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, Jalisco, and Aguascalientes.
The owners of these water privileges are Miguel Márquez Márquez, former governor of Guanajuato; Luis Armado Reynoso Femat, former governor of Aguascalientes; Ignacio Loyola Vera, former governor of Querétaro; and Francisco Javier Ramírez Acuña, former governor of Jalisco.
Former PAN national president Marko Antonio Cortés Mendoza has concessions in the central-western region of the country, as does Vicente Fox, former president of the country and former governor of Guanajuato.
They control 3.3 million cubic meters of water extracted in the Bajío region. Within the National Water Commission (Conagua), they are already known as “The Water Cartel.”
The amount of water these six PAN leaders can store is equivalent to the size of the Emilio López Zamora Dam, also known as the Ensenada Dam, which supplies the Baja California city. A reservoir of this size can supply a village of 330 people for 274 years.
According to official records accessed by this newspaper, the allocation of this resource in one of the driest areas in the country was handled by the Water Management Directorate of the Lerma Santiago Pacífico Basin Agency, as well as by the Local Directorates of Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, and Querétaro, which are part of the same national water basin.
A few days ago, President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo announced that she will issue a decree to regulate water concessions for small agricultural and livestock producers to provide them with legal certainty.
Of the 536,533 titles reviewed, 163,689 have expired. She commented that there were many excesses, such as that of the former governor of Chihuahua, the PRI member César Duarte, who monopolized the water.
President Sheinbaum also sent to the Chamber of Deputies a bill to issue a new General Water Law and a reform to the current National Water Law, with penalties of up to 12 years in prison for anyone who profits from it.
In the Bajío region, the water began to be colored blue—PAN blue—30 years ago, during the administration of Ernesto Zedillo, when concessions began to be granted to members of the party that would oust the PRI from Los Pinos after 71 uninterrupted years of presidential power.
Other water concessions were ceded when the PAN was in power. Francisco Ramírez Acuña, former governor of Jalisco from 2001 to 2006, holds a 25,000 cubic meter agricultural water concession in the municipality of Tototlán, Jalisco, expiring on December 31, 2029.
The governor of Aguascalientes from 2004 to 2010, Luis Armando Reynoso Femat, was granted three concessions in his name and those of various family members since 1996. Two of these water concessions expired in 2015 and 2017 and are located in the state capital. One of the agricultural water concessions, for 213,840 cubic meters, expires on October 28 of this year.
Miguel Márquez Márquez, governor of Guanajuato from 2012 to 2018, obtained three water concessions for agricultural use between 2000 and 2013. One of them has a capacity of 150,000 cubic meters; it began operating on December 23, 2009, and expires on December 24, 2029.
Former Querétaro governor (1997-2003), Ignacio Loyola Vera, benefited from a water concession years after leaving office. His permit went into effect on September 26, 2022, and expires on October 27, 2037; it can manage 9,855 cubic meters of water. The Querétaro Local Government—held by the National Action Party (PAN)—signed the authorization.
Óscar Arredondo Pico, a public policy consultant, comments that “it’s not a drought, it’s plunder. And this plunder began with Carlos Salinas de Gortari after his agrarian reform in 1992. This generated not only the distribution of land to private individuals, but also water, through the decree of the National Water Law.”
The water and anti-corruption specialist notes that, for example, the 10 concessions granted to Vicente Fox “are brutal,” compared to what the inhabitants of a municipality in Oaxaca consume, according to the parameters established by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2024, which is almost 18,500 liters per person per year.
Arredondo Pico says it must be remembered that Fox Quesada created the Career Civil System, which allowed, specifically in the case of Conagua, “for top-level officials to continue to be masters of their positions today.”
He explains that currently, “these public servants move between Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Baja California. They then become local directors of Conagua, then directors of a watershed agency. Sometimes they return to central offices, all under a logic of water distribution and plunder.”
Source: milenio
