Mexico Reaches Water Deal With U.S. Before Saturday Deadline

(Bloomberg) -- Mexico reached a deal to supply water to the U.S. under a seven-decade-old treaty, ending an escalating stalemate ahead of a Saturday deadline, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said.

AMLO, as the Mexican leader is known, announced the agreement at his morning news conference Thursday. Under the deal, Mexico was able to supply the U.S. with water from more regions than previously allowed, including international dams. In turn, the U.S. offered more flexibility in case of water emergencies in Mexican states like Chihuahua, Roberto Velasco, the director general for North America at the foreign relations ministry, said in an interview.

“We needed to be sure that in every scenario we would be able to provide water to our people because the constitution establishes a human right to access of water,” Velasco said by phone. “So we agreed on a clause in which the U.S. allows Mexico to use volumes of U.S. water in the international reservoirs in case there was an emergency in Mexico, like an extraordinary drought or an accident in our hydraulic infrastructure.”

The deal also makes the water delivery schedule more flexible for Mexico, said Blanca Jimenez, director of Mexico’s national water commission. Pulling water destined for the U.S. from more sources reduces pressure on places like Chihuahua where farmers shut down a dam in protest, she said.

Mexico was under pressure to honor its obligations from the 1944 treaty and send water from its side of the Rio Grande to the U.S., with Texas politicians threatening to take action. Tensions at the border have included protests on the Mexican side by farmers suffering from drought and the shutdown of a U.S.-Mexico railway.

The “highly complex” negotiations involved more than 20 meetings between various parties involved, Velasco said. “We did some good diplomatic work and fortunately enough, everyone wanted to reach a solution. Everyone is interested in having their water -- we just needed to find a formula where we could do this,” he said.

AMLO has sought to maintain a positive relationship with President Donald Trump’s administration as Mexico faces its worst economic crisis in nearly a century and the U.S. holds a presidential election. The efforts included a trip to Washington in July to celebrate a new free-trade deal and avoid Trump making Mexico a punching bag on the campaign trail, as he did in his first run in 2016.

Read more about the Mexico-U.S. water dispute

In the simmering water dispute, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, had urged the U.S. State Department to help enforce the water deal, and State Representative Lyle Larson had proposed cutting off the Colorado River as it enters Mexico from Arizona. Access to the river is part of the treaty. The issue was a sensitive one in Mexico because much of the nation’s supply comes from Chihuahua, where droughts have hurt capacity to irrigate farms.

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