After enduring years of drought and ‘invading’ fruit farmers in Mexico, these locals are taking matters into their own hands.
Desperate Mexican villagers are taking direct action on commercial avocado farms that are drying up streams while a severe drought drags on.
Rivers and even whole lakes are disappearing in the once green and lush state of Michoacan, in the mountains west of Mexico City. Drought has combined with a surge in the use of water for the country’s lucrative export crops, led by avocados.
In recent days, subsistence farmers and activists from the Michoacan town of Villa Madero organised teams to go into the mountains and rip out illegal water pumps and breach unlicensed irrigation holding ponds.
A potential conflict looms with avocado growers – who are often sponsored by, or pay protection money to, drug cartels.
How are Mexican residents taking on commercial farms?
Last week, dozens of residents, farmworkers and small-scale farmers from Villa Madero hiked up into the hills to tear out irrigation equipment using mountain springs to water avocado orchards carved out of the pine-covered hills.
The week before, another group went up with picks and shovels and breached the walls of an illegal containment pond that sucked up water from a spring that had supplied local residents for hundreds of years.
“In the last 10 years, the streams, the springs, the rivers have been drying up and the water has been captured, mainly to be used for avocados and berries,” said local activist Julio Santoyo, one of the organisers of the effort.
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