This is the first part in a two-part piece on the quality of Mexico City’s water. Read part two here.

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In spring 2017, a delegation from the Pacific Council made a very special visit to Mexico City. We met with cabinet secretaries, diplomats, journalists, and business executives. The trip was enjoyable and highly informative, but I came away with a nagging question: why can’t a city and nation of bright, enterprising people get something like the capital’s water quality right?

To my California mind, whatever investment was required to make the water drinkable for visitors would be more than made up by the revenue from increased tourism and business travel. On the other hand, if I was going to be critical, I felt I had a responsibility to try to learn at least a little of what I was talking about. So I committed myself to investigating the question more deeply.

What I found was perplexing, frustrating—and utterly fascinating. I share what I discovered here. Some names have been changed.

Two Different Experiences, Both are Right

Miguel, a well-educated, successful businessman whom we met on the trip, told me flatly that, “The water in Mexico City is potable. I drink it all the time straight from the tap. The whole ‘Third World infrastructure’ trope isn’t accurate.”

Miguel is extremely bright and personable, and he bristles at what he rightly perceives to be a hugely inaccurate and derogatory image of Mexico and Mexicans held by many in the United States. He misses no chance to challenge what he considers an unfair stereotype, and he feels that stories in the media about Mexico’s looming water calamity only add to this distorted picture of his country.

But while Miguel wakes up in the morning, thirsty from a warm night, and enjoys a refreshing draught of clean tap water, Julia, in another part of the city, will have been on the street since 3 a.m., waiting for the water truck.

She’ll perspire as the day heats up and will wait another two hours before the truck arrives. By then the line will stretch the length of a soccer field. The poor quality water she will receive from a thick hose extending from the pipa, a tanker truck, won’t last a week. Fights will break out among the customers, and women will be selling spaces in line to other women. Being from the wrong political party might mean that one of them won’t get any water at all.

To understand this debate and to appreciate the challenges and dilemmas facing Mexico City, it is helpful to know some of the strange, nearly incredible history of this unique urban center.

Whose experience is typical, Julia’s or Miguel’s? More importantly, who is right—those journalists, scholars, and other observers who say that Mexico City is facing a dire water crisis? Or others, like Miguel, who insist that the city is most certainly not running out of water and that, while there may be some areas, like eastern Iztapalapa where Julia lives, which are not “up to par,” the massive government and private investment in the city’s water infrastructure has paid off?

According to Professor Fernando González-Villareal of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), a leading expert on Mexico City water, in a phone call early last year, “both are right.” One thing is certain: the realities of this brilliant, puzzling, paradoxical city are invariably complex.

To understand this debate and to appreciate the challenges and dilemmas facing Mexico City, it is helpful to know some of the strange, nearly incredible history of this unique urban center and the many unusual features which were part of the landscape when people first turned a small island in the Valley of Mexico into what, in the 21st century, has become the Western Hemisphere’s largest metropolis.

The City of the Lake

The whole enterprise was improbable at the outset: the peculiar project of creating land on which to live and grow crops by piling up the soil in the middle of a lake. For thousands of years, human beings had inhabited the Valley of Mexico, an attractive terrain with plentiful game and edible plants, all naturally protected by an encircling wall of mountains.

Situated on the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, the flat landscape in the valley floor, at an elevation of 7,382 feet, was dotted with numerous lakes. Some of the surrounding mountain peaks rose to a height of over 18,000 feet. The fertile and inviting expanse became one of the most densely populated areas on the planet around the same time as the beginning of the Christian era in Eurasia.

Nearly a millennium and a half later, in the 15th century, the tribes known as the Mexica, later called the Aztecs, arrived in the valley. The newcomers made up in ferocious fighting skills what they lacked in numbers. By a mixed strategy of cunning, deception, obsequiousness, and a carefully cultivated reputation for fierce and especially cruel combat, they began a campaign which would ultimately end in their leadership of the so-called Triple Alliance and ultimately their dominance over all the other tribes in the region.

The city owed its existence to a sophisticated feat of engineering, the construction of a vast series of dikes and dams, aqueducts and canals—an artificial, manmade affront to the natural order.

Before reaching this lofty status, however, in the beginning they had to serve as slaves for other ascendant tribes, and they traded their valued warrior skills for support, prestige, and eventually release from bondage. They went into battle, as an example, at the behest of the leadership of the important Culhuacán tribe, conquering the Culhuacán’s archrivals, the Xochimilcas. So successful were the Aztecs in battle that Coxcoxtli, ruler of the Culhaucán, although appalled at their brutality, agreed to an Aztec request to allow one of his daughters to marry the Aztec chieftain.

This was a political gambit on Coxcoxtli’s part to keep these hardy, resilient fighters on his side. The maneuver turned out to be grave miscalculation. Coxcoxtli did not realize that the Aztecs had been building up resentment, not unwarranted, at their ill-treatment at the hands of the Culhaucan and other tribes over the previous decades.

Coxcoxtli traveled to an Aztec temple to participate in the wedding. When he arrived, he was met by the appalling sight of one of the Aztec priests wearing a garment of newly flayed human skin. To his unbearable horror he realized the skin was that of his daughter. As it would turn out, in devising novel and gory ways of terrifying their adversaries, the Aztecs were just warming up.

For centuries it all worked, more or less, with human ingenuity taking on each new challenge created by an ever-increasing population and the unintended consequences of a system constantly being adjusted and reworked without ever having the benefit of adequate long-term planning and design.

As they settled in the valley and their numbers grew, the Aztecs began vigorously transforming the fresh water lakes in the Basin of Mexico by building up chinampas, arable extensions of the land in the reedy, sometimes brackish water. The aggregations of chinampas ultimately became the ground on which the city was constructed. Thus, from the very beginning Mexico City had a fraught and complicated relationship with water.

The city owed its existence to a sophisticated feat of engineering, the construction of a vast series of dikes and dams, aqueducts and canals—an artificial, manmade affront to the natural order. For centuries it all worked, more or less, with human ingenuity taking on each new challenge created by an ever-increasing population and the unintended consequences of a system constantly being adjusted and reworked without ever having the benefit of adequate long-term planning and design.

Mistakes Were Made

The Aztecs managed resources well, with techniques for excreting excess saline from the water and with the ability to manage flooding, build floating gardens, and conserve rainwater. They successfully provided sufficient clean water for their agricultural and urban needs.

When the Spanish arrived not long after the Aztec ascendency in the region, the heretofore intimidatingly ferocious Aztecs essentially handed over the Valley to the “Conquistadors,” a name by which they might not even be known today if the Aztecs had not paved the way for the Spanish to do their conquering—first, by creating a countryside full of non-Aztec peoples who hated their arrogance and cruelty and who would thus join forces with the invaders. Also, perhaps more significantly, by ceding control to the newcomers because of the Aztec leader Moctezuma’s superstitious belief that the invaders were either gods or had been sent by gods. 

In the subsequent colonial period, the Spanish were poor stewards of the area’s water resources and profligate and shortsighted in their water usage, always drawing on available supplies for their needs with no thought toward conservation. Mexico eventually achieved its independence from Spain, but the new leaders of the country chose to retain the Spanish operational infrastructure. The mismanagement and the misgovernance continued.

Another serious problem occurs because of the practice of draining the natural aquifer on which the city sits at a faster rate than the water is replenished.

Over time, the habitable land was continuously drained of excess water, creating ever more livable space, but providing inadequate provisions for the discharge of the city’s waste. In a contained basin surrounded by mountains, sewage and wastewater have no natural way to exit. In meeting this problem, impressive efforts of engineering and improvisation came into play.

The city presently handles its waste with an elaborate series of pumping stations located at strategic points in a 7,000-mile system of concrete sluices and sewers. The culverts and sewers, however, tend to clog up, overflow, and flood. The city addresses these problems by hiring sewage divers, people whose job in life is to swim through the fetid sludge of human waste, dead animals, toxic industrial chemicals, car parts, discarded furniture, and other detritus to clear the pipes and drains. One of these divers told a reporter that he comes across two or three human bodies a year.

Another serious problem occurs because of the practice of draining the natural aquifer on which the city sits at a faster rate than the water is replenished, a process which creates subsidence, literally the sinking of parts of the city. This subsidence was noted as early as 1891 but was not seriously studied until decades later.

Another serious problem occurs because of the practice of draining the natural aquifer on which the city sits at a faster rate than the water is replenished.

In the middle of the 20th century, Mexico finally faced up to the subsidence problem and instituted a variety of regulations and incidental fixes to ameliorate the situation, but the city still continues to sink to this day, presently at a rate of about three feet a year. There are streets where the effects of the subsidence are strikingly visible. In some areas buildings, part of the National Palace itself, and the bell tower of the cathedral at the large plaza known as the Zócalo, are tilted, leaning at an awkward angle.

In other neighborhoods, there are rows of structures which have a marked dip in the middle, several buildings clumped together which are lower than those on either side. In some locations the city pavement is cracked, literally split apart. A couple of years ago, a child was gobbled up by a widening crevasse. At least 15 of the city’s elementary schools have fallen in.

A solution to the subsidence problem is simply to stop the pumping. Ever short of water, however, the city continues to drill deeper and deeper, undermining the beds of clay on which the city rests.

Climate change is worsening. Whatever improvements for its water system which Mexico City is able to generate and implement, it will still fall behind unless it can accommodate the additional strains caused by a warming planet.

Climate change exacerbates the problem of the water supply. Rising heat and the spread of drought conditions generate increased evaporation, which in turn raises the demand for water. And, of course, climate change is worsening. Whatever improvements for its water system which Mexico City is able to generate and implement, it will still fall behind unless it can accommodate the additional strains caused by a warming planet.

Another significant stressor on Mexico City’s water delivery system is the inadequate maintenance in the system’s sprawling and aging infrastructure. It is estimated that nearly 40 percent of the city’s water is lost just through leaks.

All the accidents and twists and turns of Mexico City’s tangled history and geography contribute to the present circumstances, but the over-riding confounding factor in aggravating and multiplying a difficult problem is the vast numbers of human beings now crowding into the space. At over 21 million, the city’s population is greater than 48 of the 50 U.S. states. It is the largest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere.

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Seth Freeman is a Pacific Council member, a writer/producer for television, a journalist, and a playwright, and he has a Master’s degree in Public Health from UCLA’s Fielding School.

Read part two of this series here.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.