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ENVIRONMENT-MEXICO: No Funds for Dying River Basin

Patricia Vega Villavicencio * - IPS/IFEJ

TOLUCA, Mexico, Dec 8 2006 (IPS) - The Lerma River, Mexico’s longest river and a source of drinking water for the capital, is dying. Fatally infected by a number of sources of pollution, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into efforts to revive it, to no avail.

The 1,270-km Lerma River, whose source is in the state of Mexico, runs through five states before flowing into the Pacific Ocean. The most heavily polluted 47-kilometre stretch of the river is located in the central state of Mexico, where it receives wastewater from 33 different municipalities.

Its formerly clear waters used to be home to carp, bullfrogs and freshwater shrimp, among many other species. But now the river is “in a state of coma,” though not quite dead yet, said the coordinator of the Lerma-Chapala-Santiago Basin Clean-Up Commission, Jorge Jiménez Campos.

The state company Reciclagua Ecological Treatment System for Regeneration of Industrial Wastewater admitted that the river is no longer biologically capable of processing the waste poured into it, through self-regeneration.

In the last 16 years, the local government of Mexico state, which borders on the federal district of Mexico City, has spent 714 million dollars on wastewater treatment plants and has only managed to clean up 27 percent of the 125 kilometres of the Lerma’s course across the state.

Then a clean-up commission was created, which decided to build oxidation, or stabilisation, ponds.

Construction of treatment plants began in 1990 as an initiative of state governor Ignacio Pichardo (1989-1993), and were continued under his successors Emilio Chuayffet (1993-1995), César Camacho (1995-1999) and Arturo Montiel (1999-2005), until 31 treatment plants had been completed in the 33 municipalities.

The governors’ commitment ended when the oxidation, or stabilisation, ponds were handed over to the municipal governments, and fell short of providing any oversight to make sure they operated properly.

In fact, no public body in Mexico state took responsibility for ensuring that the plants are in working order. Today, only 40 percent of them are still in operation, according to Luis Eduardo Mejía, head of the engineering division of Mexico’s National Water Commission (CONAGUA), and spokespersons for the Secretariat of Water and Public Works.

At present, Governor Enrique Peña’s state administration is not interested in reactivating the oxidation ponds, because they are liable to cause flooding, explained Secretary of Water and Public Works David Korenfeld.

In contrast, experts at CONAGUA and the Lerma Basin Clean-up Commission chided the state government, pointing out that the treatment plants lack pumps, trained personnel to operate them, and the financial resources to cover the cost of the electricity they use.

The labour and investment sunk into the plants have been wasted, and only the municipal governments can rescue the treatment systems, they said.

But in Mexico, city governments have always had too many environmental obligations to meet without the budget to do so, complained José Marcos Aguilar, a state CONAGUA delegate.

Worse still, the oxidation pond technology was not the best option, according to the founding president of the Mexico state Ecological Movement, Roberto Gómez.

Mexico state government documents justify the choice, saying that the stabilisation ponds used the lowest reaches of the Lerma River, to collect all the water in the region and acting as ecological and regulatory arteries.

The ponds, together with drainage systems, were intended to keep the rest of the land free from floods, so that they could be used for agriculture and livestock. The state of Mexico stood to gain great profits because it was assumed that the new lands to be made available in this way would be potentially highly productive.

But Luis Eduardo Mejía, assistant manager of CONAGUA, said that stabilisation ponds were not the best system for the purpose, and that now German experts were studying new methods.

During all this time, successive administrations of the state of Mexico have repeatedly declared that the Lerma River basin was being cleaned up, but “unfortunately they invested in the symptoms and not the cause,” Aguilar acknowledged.

Documents about the possible restoration of the Coordinating Commission for Ecological Recovery of the Lerma River Basin, originally created in 1990 when its director was former governor Jorge Jiménez (1975-1981), show a muddle of duplicated efforts, and include an assortment of projects that are unrelated to environmental conservation.

The Commission’s progress reports refer to the number of works undertaken, but do not mention the amounts invested. Furthermore, the costs of other projects, such as road construction and enclosure of canals in pipes, are indiscriminately included in the mix.

Environmentalists are concerned that Pichardo’s failed project may now be uncritically duplicated. They say that the incumbent state government plans to continue its predecessors’ strategy, in spite of having to deal with one of the country’s most polluted rivers, as even the Lerma Basin Clean-up Commission itself admits is the case.

When he took office in 2005, Governor Peña said he intended to build more treatment plants, although he has not yet said what kind of technology would be used.

The first wastewater treatment project in the state of Mexico was agreed on Apr. 13, 1989, between the national administration of then president Carlos Salinas and the states of Mexico, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán and Querétaro, which the Lerma River flows through.

Gómez, the environmental activist, dismissed this attempt. “Exactly the same aims were re-stated in Toluca in August 1990, at what was called the First Meeting of the Consultative Council for Land Use Planning and Clean-up of the Lerma River Basin,” he said.

In Toluca, efforts were made to recycle wastewater from 40 municipalities and 175 industrial plants in the industrial corridor of the basin, with treatment plants that did not work, including two that were granted in concession to the Ecosys I and Ecosys II companies, he explained.

Now they want to build 40 more, “without the political will, and without funding,” but probably in order to benefit private concerns anyway, Gómez said.

Korenfeld confirmed the existence of these plans. Over the next five years it will not be possible to build treatment systems in each of the 125 municipalities in the state of Mexico, but it will be possible to instal 40 new plants throughout the state, which will jointly serve all the municipalites, he said.

The cost per plant, not including the purchase price of the land, will be approximately nine million dollars, depending on the technology used, experts said. The state government hopes to treat 50 percent of its wastewater, said the secretary of Water and Public Works.

In another interview with José Manuel Camacho, an executive member of the board of the Mexico state Water Commission, he said that the goal is to treat 20 litres of water per second.

The state official said that all the plants would be outsourced as concessions under the Service Provision Projects financial scheme, which means granting concessions to private firms for up to 30 years.

Carlos Díaz, the coordinator of the Inter-American Water Resources Centre at the Mexico State Autonomous University, complained that local authorities do not request advice from experts, despite the millions of dollars that have been invested in research on the Lerma River.

There appears to be no prospect for a cessation of hostilities on the Lerma River. Environmentalists have calculated that 90 percent of its waters are contaminated, and they predict that no recovery will be possible unless strategies are changed.

*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS – Inter Press Service and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists.