VEHICLES SET ABLAZE AS MEXICANS PROTEST US WATER PAYMENT

Demonstrators in northern Mexico have burned several government vehicles, blocked railway tracks and set afire a government office and highway toll booths to protest water payments to the United States, Mark Stevenson wrote for the Associated Press (AP) on July 31, 2020.

Mexico has fallen behind in the amount of water it must send north from its dams under a 1944 treaty, but farmers in the northern state of Chihuahua want the water for their own crops. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday that the protests were being fanned by opposition politicians for their own motives. He said there was enough water to comply with the treaty and support local crops.

“Some people are taking advantage now for their own benefit ... opposition politicians, in this case,” López Obrador said. He criticized “the attitude of confrontation” and the burning of federal property, and promised “the farmers, the inhabitants will not lack water.” He noted that further west along the border — notably in the Colorado River basin — Mexico receives four times more water from the US than it gives under the treaty.

The protests appeared to be centered in the town of Delicias, Chihuahua, near one of the dams where water is being released to flow northward. Federal forces guarding the dam gates have clashed with protesters in recent weeks. Photos from Delicias showed that demonstrators used heavy equipment to drag pickup trucks belonging to the national water commission to nearby train tracks where they were flipped over and and set afire. Someone, apparently demonstrators, also set fire to a building where the commission has its offices, and flames ravaged a series of toll booths on a nearby highway.