By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez
“Un Salto por la Vida” (A Leap for Life) is a civil society collective from El Salto, a municipality in the state of Jalisco, which we visited a year ago as participants in the Re-existe festival at ITESO University in Guadalajara, Mexico. Its residents and activists had foreseen the contaminated water crisis that erupted last Sunday in Guadalajara for years. The brutal pollution and growing shortages have been caused by the industrial mirage of the so-called Mexican Silicon Valley, an environmental aberration continued to be promoted by governments and companies in the region, leaving a trail of environmental and social destruction that has been documented by residents, organized civil society, and universities in Western Mexico.
Gradually, the outcry from families—with children and the elderly sickened by the devastating impact of chemicals in "drinking" water—gave way to resistance from civil society. Scientific studies provided the foundation for social activism to promote the right to water as a priority in the struggle for human rights at a time when modern society seems unwilling to awaken from the nightmare of development.
“The wars of the future will be wars over water,” I recall a historian predicting at the beginning of the millennium. And what seemed like a distant dystopia a quarter of a century ago has become everyday reality in every corner of the planet, from Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine to Wallmapu in the southern tip of the American continent.
In Mexico, Lake Texcoco and the Lerma-Santiago River basin have become a painful thorn in the side, especially due to the voraciousness of the megacities that devour everything in their path. But at the same time, both territories have become breeding grounds for rebellion when their inhabitants put their finger on the wound and begin a painful but hopeful path of socio-environmental intervention to save a lake with an ancient history and a vital basin in the central-western part of Mexico.
The “Charter of Lake Texcoco” was an initiative proposed a decade ago by the People’s Front in Defense of the Land and the residents of Atenco, along with their students, activists, and artists, to sing an elegy to water that would give voice to their struggle and make their vision of the territory visible. The poet, academic, and activist Al-Dabi Olvera paved the way for me years ago to understand this poetic-political resistance through the narrative practices we carried out under his guidance at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City with the research project called Narratives of Resistance. That Charter begins by saying:
“I’ve known about the lake since I was born; it’s my parents’ legacy,
It's the life we have, the one we want our grandchildren to live.
Anáhuac is to be between waters,
fish, frogs and axolotls, ducks, chichicuilotes and swallows.
There was no shortage of quelites, quintoniles, and purslane.
The people knew how to live with the waters,
collecting the ahuautle, the tequesquite.
That lake is called freedom.”.
It was an elegy to lost water and a song to water regained. Years later, that lake has finally been declared a nature reserve by the federal government, and its wetlands are being restored thanks to the arduous and constant work of the community, in partnership with the current government, which we hope will continue in the years to come, beyond today's partisan political interests.
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In our age of Artificial Intelligence, water is being transformed into a coveted commodity. An indispensable "product" for the digital industry because data centers require it: a single standard data center consumes 25 million liters of this vital liquid annually to cool the computers that power "the cloud." A cloud that is more of a hellscape of semiconductors and digital networks at the service of the powerful. Indeed, ecological devastation is already occurring alarmingly in areas of Texas and Ohio, and is multiplying from China to Argentina, wherever the lords of the digital super-industry need it to establish their data businesses where water is plentiful. In these territories, Israeli power is strategically expanding to sell technology, replicating its voracious business and its power over local governments in the name of supposed progress and water security.
The water sequestered by fracking is yet another contradiction of this extractive economy. To extract gas from increasingly deeper underground regions, it is necessary to inject unprecedented quantities of water. The life force of water is transformed into a weapon of death at the service of the devastating oil and gas energy industry, which is currently controlled by the United States, China, and Russia across the globe.
And to make matters worse, the water used by the soft drink industry is another head of the capitalist hydra, as the Zapatistas call it, which transforms a precious resource into poison with every soda placed on the tables of the poor. Mexico is the world's largest consumer of soft drinks, and, as a sad example, Chiapas, the state with the highest poverty rate, is also where soft drink consumption is highest, leading to malnutrition and disease. This is a lamentable example of the Illichian principle of counterproductivity: it takes wasting two hundred liters of water—in the entire water chain, from sugarcane or corn cultivation for processing to the production of the soft drink—to put a single bottle of Coca-Cola on the market. The city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas carries water in its soul, with its Tsotsil name Jobel or land of wetlands: bodies of water that still survive despite the exploitation of springs and the terrible public administration that privatizes wells, monopolized today by Coca Cola, and urbanizes those bodies of water inhabited by reeds, birds and increasingly rare amphibians.
To complete this picture of the environmental horror that has water held hostage in our time, it is necessary to mention the sewage from the drains of the world's metropolises, which have transformed rivers and basins—once home to wetlands, streams, and rivers—into channels of chemical, organic, and energy waste from the plastics, steel, and semiconductor industries. But the most macabre aspect of these flows is that they have also become receptacles for the human remains of people disappeared by criminal organizations, thus becoming rivers of iniquity.
Thus we find ourselves thrown into socio-environmental chaos by the machine civilization, now disguised as an algorithm of voracious power.
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And amidst so many painful splinters in the body of Mother Earth and our people, where are there signs of comfort and hope to rescue and heal this wounded socio-environmental body?
The resistance of the people of Atenco in Texcoco and El Salto in Jalisco is like spores spreading through valleys and canyons around the world, giving rise to new organisms in their wake. They do so on a small scale, but a real one. Their methods of organization, their protest marches, their rituals of caring for Mother Earth and the most vulnerable people and creatures in the community are already signs of another way of being, one that transcends greed.
Without romanticizing these movements, knowing that they also experience tensions over power, control of the narrative, and obtaining resources from the state and international solidarity funds, we recognize that other languages are being babbled there with their decolonial verbs: eating, learning, organizing… and waiting.
Now it's up to each of us, individuals and communities, to live and tell our own stories of resistance. What is your water story?
Jobel, October 17, 2026
