Sol Mexico Magazine

Mexico sends firefighters to help battle devastating Los Angeles wildfires

As flames continue to ravage Los Angeles, Mexico announced on Saturday it has sent firefighters to help.

In a post on social media, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo said the group left on Saturday morning.

“We are a generous and supportive country,” she wrote.

“You carry with you the courage and heart of Mexico.”

On Friday, the BC Wildfire Service announced it was deploying a senior management team to help fight the Los Angeles wildfires, at the request of California fire officials.

Premier David Eby confirmed the deployment in a post to social media, adding the team would be “departing imminently.”

“We’re also working to send ground crews as part of a national response,” Eby said.

“California has been there for us, we will be there for them. That’s what good neighbours do.”

Hundreds of firefighters continue to battle the blazes in Los Angeles where 11 people have been confirmed to have been killed.

Mexican president might avoid Trump’s ‘day one’ tariffs

 

6.2 magnitude earthquake strikes southwest Mexico

 

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‘Forgotten’ – How one Mexican city struggles against big industry for water

San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico – The famous red and white logo can be seen on almost every street.

It is painted on the front of mom-and-pop stores. It is on the side of delivery vans and 18-wheeler trucks. It even appears stamped on the sides of bottles being drunk by toddlers.

But the ubiquitous branding for the Coca-Cola company is not just a sign of its popularity in the Mexican city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, nestled in the highlands of Chiapas. Some say it is also a sign of peril.

Coca-Cola is Mexico’s most popular drink, racking up billions of dollars worth of sales each year.

But climate change is forcing communities like San Cristóbal into a painful reckoning with Coca-Cola and other multinational businesses that use huge amounts of water to make their products.

“Water flows toward the money and to companies like Coca-Cola, not to the people,” said Fermin Reygadas, the director of Cántaro Azul, a San Cristóbal-based nonprofit that helps supply clean water to rural villages in Chiapas.

San Cristóbal, a city of 200,000 people, is home to a bottling plant run by Femsa, a food and drink conglomerate with rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in much of Latin America.

It has permits to extract more than 300,000 gallons of water, or about 1.14 million litres, every day from the nearby Huitepec volcano basin.

But that demand has led to severe water stress. Although Chiapas has the most water per capita in all of Mexico, more than one in three people in rural areas do not have access to running water.

More broadly, Mexico is projected to face water shortages in 20 of its 32 states by the year 2050 as a result of climate change and severe drought.

Already, as of 2020, 11 states suffer from water scarcity. The country’s capital, Mexico City, is at risk of reaching “day zero” — a term used to describe the complete loss of water from taps.

As a result, conflicts over water rights have flared between locals and companies like Coca-Cola and the French multinational Danone.

In the state of Puebla, for instance, Indigenous activists have occupied a Danone-owned bottling plant in protest of the nearly 1.4 million litres it extracts from the local aquifer.

Critics blame the industrial extraction for the growth of a sinkhole nearly 400 feet — or 122 metres — wide, though the company has denied any connection.

Impoverished communities are often hit hardest by the water shortages.

Gloria Álvarez, a resident of a low-income neighbourhood in the hills above San Cristóbal known as Las Peras, said the dry spells can last for weeks.

During times when her taps run dry, the mother of six must travel 30 minutes or more by bus to find water for drinking, cleaning and bathing.

With her husband usually busy at work, she transports heavy containers full of water to their two-room home by herself.

“We’re forgotten about here,” said Álvarez, 43, standing on the dirt road in front of her house. “Nobody cares.”

Even those living in the centre of San Cristóbal face the chronic disruption of their water supplies. Ismail Jiménez, a 23-year-old resident, said he receives water for just three hours every two days.

Sometimes, he has to wait for a full week to receive running water in his home in downtown San Cristóbal, only a few hundred metres from the Santo Domingo de Guzmán church, a popular tourist site.

The uncertainty makes life particularly stressful. Jiménez, a trainee accountant living with his wife and son, explained that he has been forced to go to important work meetings without having bathed.

“The companies take too much water,” said Jiménez. “We need it.”

Even those lucky enough to receive water through their taps usually cannot drink it.

The groundwater in San Cristóbal has been impacted by sewage pollution in recent years, with researchers finding evidence of faecal contamination.

As a result, salmonella, a bacteria that can cause diarrhoea, is now endemic. A 2017 study by researchers at ECOSUR university found that water in the local wetlands also contained high levels of pathogens.

Just 7 percent of households in Chiapas believe their water is safe to drink, according to a national survey conducted in 2023.

“People don’t trust the tap water here,” said Reygadas, the leader of the water safety nonprofit. “The water sources are like open sewers.”

The situation forces many to buy bottled water instead — or drink soda.

Reygadas credits that consumer demand with creating a “vicious circle” that has allowed the government to get away with scant efforts to improve the quality of public water supply, while fuelling corporate water extraction.

According to a 2019 paper by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the state of Chiapas had the highest soda consumption in the nation.

The study found that chiapanecos guzzled approximately 683.8 litres (180 gallons) of Coca-Cola per person a year, enough to fill multiple bathtubs. By comparison, it found that United States residents drank 98.4 litres (26 gallons) per person.

Every half-litre bottle of Coke requires 35 litres (9.2 gallons) of water to produce, according to an official 2010 report by Coca-Cola and the environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy.

Approximately 28 litres (7 gallons) are used to raise sugar beets to sweeten the beverage, 7 litres (2 gallons) are needed to manufacture the plastic bottle, and 0.4 litres (0.1 gallons) form the basis for the product itself.

But the report relied on data from the Netherlands and acknowledged that water use can vary from place to place, particularly when different ingredients are used.

A spokesperson for Coca-Cola did not reply to a query about whether the 2010 report was still accurate but pointed to the company’s latest business and sustainability report, which claims that water use efficiency has improved by 10 percent since 2015.

The company also said it aims to reach “100% regenerative water use” by 2030 for the 175 facilities located in areas facing “high levels of water stress”.

Yet, as Mexico experiences more extreme weather as a result of climate change, the question of how local groundwater is used has become hard to ignore. And many in San Cristóbal are left to question: What is in it for them?

The permits for the Coca-Cola bottling factory are part of a deal with the government dating back decades.

The rapid development of Mexico’s soda industry began with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. That deal eased investment from the United States and ushered in a wave of globalisation.

That same year, the plant in San Cristóbal opened. Critics say the terms of its permits are biased towards Coca-Cola.

“How can they take millions of litres of water and leave none for us?” said DK Dens, a local graffiti artist whose murals include depictions of giant Coke bottles drinking the earth’s oceans with a straw.

According to a 2017 report by a coalition of environmental and civil rights groups, Femsa pays 2,600 pesos or $155 for each water permit in Mexico.

The report’s authors call that amount “absolutely ridiculous” when compared with the profits the companies make off the water.

Eduardo Gomez, a professor who wrote a study about Coca-Cola’s political influence in Mexico, credited the favourable deals to “the ease with which industry leaders have access to congressional and bureaucratic institutions”.

He pointed out, for example, that Vicente Fox was head of Coca-Cola Femsa before being elected Mexican president in 2000.

Mexico’s National Water Commission (CONAGUA), which is responsible for granting water concessions, did not respond to requests for comment about criticisms of the permit-granting process, how long the permits last and the extent of its deals with Coca-Cola across the country.

Coca-Cola now has a 70-percent market share of production and sales of soda in Mexico.

The Femsa-led operation runs more than 20,000 convenience stores nationwide, according to Marcos Arana, director of a nonprofit focused on improving healthcare for Indigenous communities in Chiapas. It even provides fridges to small shops that sell its products.

“They’re like narcomenudistas,” said Arana, likening the strategy to Mexican drug cartels who create large networks of small-time dealers. “That’s how Coca-Cola’s business model works. You can’t escape it.”

Femsa did not respond to requests for comment about its business practices in Mexico and in San Cristóbal in particular, including how it would respond to Arana’s allegations and what it is doing to minimise its impact on water shortages.

Daniela Puerta, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola Mexico, declined a request for an interview but said in an email, “We always abide by local laws and regulations.”

“We recognize the water access challenges in San Cristóbal, and, for nearly a decade, we have been working with local communities and NGOs to help improve water access,” she added.

Other factors such as poor infrastructure and rapid urbanisation have also played a role in the water shortages, according to Raúl Rodríguez, president of Mexico’s Water Advisory Council.

“The state and municipal governments must invest more economic resources to ensure the supply of water to the population,” he said.

But despite the concerns about water access, Coca-Cola is proving hard for some people in San Cristóbal to quit.

“I don’t see why we should stop drinking it,” said Manuela Dias, an Indigenous Tzotzil woman whose family of five cultivates corn and vegetables in the hills above San Cristóbal.

“Anyway, there’s nothing else for us.”