On May 29, 2021, a boom reverberated through Santa María Zacatepec, a small town near the city of Puebla, in central Mexico. At first, the sound might have been mistaken for one of the earthquakes or small volcanic eruptions that are common in the area. Then some local children told their mother that a strange hole had appeared in the farmland behind their house. When civil-protection officers arrived the next morning, the hole was about thirty feet wide, or the length of two cars parked bumper to bumper. Police cordoned off the area, but pieces of earth kept falling in.
In the weeks that followed, the sinkhole filled with muddy water and appeared to ingest the land around it. The residents of the house, which was soon perched on a cliff, had to move out. Dogs fell in and firemen rescued them; journalists showed up from far and wide. Tourists took selfies and paid five pesos to visit a hilltop viewing station that some locals had set up. They shopped for snacks, alcohol, and bottled water at a market that popped up around the sinkhole. The opening, which was almost perfectly circular, grew to more than four hundred feet wide, or longer than a football field, and a hundred and forty-six feet deep.
Santa María Zacatepec sits on top of the Puebla Valley aquifer, an underground basin that began forming more than two hundred and fifty million years ago. At seven hundred and eighty square miles, it is small in comparison to Mexico’s largest aquifers, but it is constantly refilled by rainfall that flows down from the surrounding volcanoes. Tens of billions of gallons of water are extracted from it each year. A few weeks after the sinkhole formed, CONAGUA—the Comisión Nacional del Agua, or National Water Commission, tasked with managing Mexico’s national water resources—issued a statement blaming it on natural causes. “No evidence exists that the cause of the sinkhole has been the overextraction of the aquifer,” the agency said. But, soon after, a scientific report, which was cited by the state government of Puebla, came to a different conclusion. It connected the sinkhole, in part, to the “intense subterranean water usage observed over the last fifteen years in the zone of Santa María Zacatepec.” (The report bore the logo of the National Polytechnic Institute, though the institute later claimed that it had not sanctioned the study.)
Twenty-three thousand people live in the rural municipality that surrounds Santa María Zacatepec, and, because many of them have no access to centralized tap water, they rely on shallow wells. But in recent years many businesses have tapped into the aquifer, from farms to pharmaceutical firms and textile factories. Extraction of the aquifer is regulated by CONAGUA, but, as the water is siphoned off for more and more uses, residents told me that they have needed to dig deeper.
One company in particular has become the target of a protest movement: Bonafont, a subsidiary of the Danone group that operates several water-bottling plants in Mexico, including one near Santa María Zacatepec. For years, Pueblos Unidos, a local alliance of water-rights activists whose name translates to United Peoples, has been protesting companies that tap into the aquifer. The activists point out that some residents, facing dry wells, now have little choice but to buy their own community’s drinking water from corporations. In March, 2021, they organized a demonstration that shut down Bonafont’s local plant. And when the sinkhole opened, two months later and only a mile away, they wondered whether they had another reason to protest.
On August 8, 2021, Pueblos Unidos cut through the lock on the plant’s main gate and rushed inside. They shuttered the compound and painted clausurado—closed—in red letters on Bonafont’s industrial well. At a press conference, they announced that the occupied site would become a community center known as Altepelmecalli in Nahuatl and Casa de los Pueblos in Spanish—in English, House of the Peoples. The next day, a Bonafont press release condemned the activists for “illegal entry” and “acts of vandalism and violence” against its facility and security personnel.
This past fall, after the sinkhole formed and the protesters occupied the plant, I visited Santa María Zacatepec and its surrounding towns. The drive on Federal Highway 190 was dry and hot and lined with truck-repair shops, building-supply stores, and rest stops.
When I reached the Bonafont plant, the teen-age son of a Pueblos Unidos member hopped in the car with me and directed me to his grandmother’s well. As we drove, he asked me what video games I like to play and pointed out houses where local huachicoleros—fuel bandits—were rumored to live. As we approached the town of Nextetelco, the land started to look greener.
Several Pueblos Unidos members had converged on the well to fill up their blue water barrels. (They did not drink the leftover water in the plant.) We peered into its depths as they explained how local wells are built. Brick stabilizes the walls, they said, and periodic cavities serve as footholds for anyone who needs to climb down. Locals, I learned, save up to afford the services of a pocero, or artisanal well digger; when they hit water, it’s common for neighbors to come drink and eat in celebration. Each well has a godfather who offers prayers and brings food to share, and if young children are having trouble speaking they’re given the water as a sort of tonic. After all the barrels were full, I followed a Pueblos Unidos pickup truck, which was now sloshing with water, back to the plant.
I met Miguel López Vega, a well-known pocero and Pueblos Unidos activist, near the highway in a makeshift kitchen. His hair was thick and brown and he wore a cotton necklace; he didn’t cover his face like most Pueblos Unidos members. As activists cooked and made coffee for those who were occupying the plant, López Vega told me that he started worrying about the water supply several years ago. In November, 2019, he said, he dug more than a hundred feet into the ground without finding water. He was alarmed when he ran out of climbing rope. “There should’ve been water there,” López Vega said.
The following January, López Vega encountered more empty springs. Small tunnels that used to send high-pressure water into his wells were now offering a trickle at best. He often had to walk away from dry holes without finding water for a family. Many would scrape together more funds so he could dig a bit farther, but he couldn’t guarantee them anything.
López Vega believes that these encounters were not caused by drought, which have affected the region for years. He started chatting with neighbors who worked at the nearby Bonafont plant, he told me, and was surprised to learn that it seemed to have plenty of water. He said the workers told him that they were expected to fill one garrafón—a plastic jug that holds twenty litres of water—per second. Social-media posts began to claim that Bonafont was pumping four hundred and thirty-three thousand gallons of water out of the ground each day. (In a statement, Bonafont told me that the company is “rigorously complying with the concessions and current rights granted by CONAGUA,” and that the numbers in social-media posts were “totally inconsistent” with the equipment in the plant and the water rights granted to the company.) López Vega is convinced that Bonafont has drained water from the places he digs wells. “As a pocero, it’s clear to me that it’s the same water,” he told me.
The woman behind us, who was cleaning herbs, made the stakes clear: you dig your well first, before building your house. Without one, the land was useless.
The activists who formed Pueblos Unidos have spent decades fighting for water rights in central Mexico. Many of its members are of Indigenous Nahua descent, and the oldest remember a time when they drank from the rivers and could pick peaches, plums, and apples from local trees. But farms and factories helped to industrialize the region. One member recalled that, in the nineteen-eighties, a group of Indigenous activists blocked the highway, a thoroughfare connecting Mexico City to Puebla, for eight days, to protest a hog farm that, according to Pueblos Unidos, was contaminating the groundwater. “The government only obeys us if we close the highway,” a seventy-three-year-old who participated in the demonstration recalled. The farm shut down, she said, though she added that the owner later opened another one down the road.
Back then, some Mexicans would have considered the idea of buying drinking water as absurd as buying bottled air. That started to change in 1985, when an earthquake near Mexico City killed thousands and wrecked the city’s infrastructure, cutting off access to tap water and contaminating it. Six years later, a cholera epidemic reached Mexico after killing more than a thousand people in Peru. The Mexican health authorities created TV spots, including the campaign “Corte al Cólera,” in which celebrities implored residents to wash their hands, avoid raw food, and boil or add drops of chlorine to their water. These disasters left a lasting message: don’t trust the water. After the earthquake, households started buying garrafones, which had previously been confined to office spaces, for domestic use.
The privatization of the public water supply continued in the decades that followed. In 1992, as more and more companies asked for access to the country’s seemingly inexhaustible water sources, Mexican legislators passed the Ley de Aguas Nacionales, or Law of National Waters. It empowered CONAGUA to grant water-extraction permits for longer periods to public and private users.
That year, Bonafont was formed in the state of Mexico. The lucrative global water business was starting to lure multinational companies. In 1996, the Paris-based multinational Danone purchased Bonafont. PepsiCo and Nestlé also entered the field, and Coca-Cola began selling water in Mexico under the brand name Ciel. (Ciel means “sky” in French, as if to suggest that the company does, in fact, bottle air.) CONAGUA issued more than three hundred thousand permits and concessions in the first decade after the Law of National Waters was passed. In 2006, Bonafont bought a Mexican bottling company that held a permit from CONAGUA to extract twenty-seven million eight hundred thousand gallons of water a year from its industrial well near Santa María Zacatepec.
In March, 2008, about fifty protesters blocked the entrance to the plant, but they left quietly the same day. In the mid-twenty-tens, the Puebla state government accelerated the privatization of tap water by allowing private companies to take over the distribution of water in cities and towns. In response, the activists formalized their efforts under the name Pueblos Unidos. In 2017, many more people showed up to protest outside Puebla’s state congress. Two years later, the group took a more drastic step. Claiming the right of Indigenous communities to govern themselves, Pueblos Unidos backed the establishment of an autonomous regional government. Protesters closed the local courthouse, effectively kicking out the local municipality official who, they said, was about to sign permits that would have allowed industrial wastewater to be dumped near a river. They replaced him with their own alcalde mayor. Still, the group had no way to stop extraction that was already going on. (The municipality did not respond to a request for comment.)
After meeting López Vega, I drove to the city of Puebla and saw bottles of water everywhere. A man hurried out of a coffee shop with four empty garrafones. Another pushed stacks of bottled water on a dolly; at a corner store, they lined the front of each aisle. In 2019, Mexico reportedly consumed an average of a hundred and three gallons of bottled water a year, per person, which was more than any other country. The garrafón has become an everyday household item, stocked in corner stores and delivered on demand. Trading in an empty jug for a full one can cost nearly a third of the daily minimum wage. And, though unofficial refill stations are common in cities and cheaper, their water quality is not properly regulated.
Corporations, public institutions, and communities hold more than half a million permits and concessions for water usage and extraction across Mexico, and a quarter of national aquifers have been deemed overexploited, which means more water is being pumped out than flowing in. In theory, CONAGUA is in charge of preventing overuse. But, according to Carlos Vargas Cabrera, of the water-rights nonprofit Agua para Todos, Agua para la Vida, the commission is susceptible to the moneyed interests and corruption that afflict many Mexican government agencies. A sector of the agency is now tasked with investigating irregularities in wells, which Vargas Cabrera described as a reason for optimism. But he added that “a tiger doesn’t become vegetarian overnight.”
By volume, the water that Bonafont extracted from the aquifer was arguably inconsequential—significantly less than the water usage granted to a nearby Volkswagen plant, which in turn extracts a fraction of the water that goes to laminate plants or agriculture. The company has said that its bottling plant uses less than one-tenth of one per cent of the total water extracted from the aquifer. In a statement, Bonafont pointed out that CONAGUA does not classify the aquifer as overexploited and calculates that it still has billions of gallons of water available for potential new water extraction permits each year. “The Puebla Valley aquifer does not suffer from water stress and has a sufficient amount to cover the current and additional concessions,” the company told me.
Still, the activists of Pueblos Unidos viewed the selling of a shared water source as symbolic of a troubling trend. Bonafont’s plant was situated near their wells, on a visible stretch of highway, and it tapped a water source that they viewed as belonging to everyone. “We have to defend it so we won’t be buying it soon,” a member of Pueblos Unidos told me. “I do not buy even one bottle of water.” When they marched to the plant in March, 2021, they chanted a rallying cry heard at water protests across Mexico: “No es sequía. Es saqueo!” “It’s not a drought. It’s looting!” Bonafont disputed the idea that the water was shared. The company told me that its well is much deeper than the artisanal ones and taps into different water resources than the community. “At no time do the water resources that Bonafont has under concession impact the availability of surface water or the municipal drinking water network,” the company said. It suggested that the many artisanal wells in the area could have contributed to the sinkhole.
During my visit to the occupied Bonafont building, a pump, which would normally whirr as it pulls water up from more than four hundred and sixty feet below the surface, was silent. A few members of Pueblos Unidos led me through the defunct bottling room, which was sterile and compact. A machine with what looked like metal udders—one activist said they called it “la vaca,” or “the cow”—hovered over empty and abandoned garrafones. A conveyor belt snaked out of the filling room to a loading dock, where trucks that normally deliver water around the region now sat idle. Underneath one of them, I spotted a rabbit.
Compared with other forms of natural-resource extraction, the bottling of water seems like a relatively gentle affair. It does not level mountaintops or cut huge scars into the landscape, like the mining industry, or coat the ocean with slicks that can burst into flames, like the oil industry. The laborers who bottle water do not seem to develop debilitating diseases in the course of their work.
But when the sinkhole opened in May, 2021, it seemed to pull the curtain back—to hint that something more was happening beneath the surface. Though the sinkhole’s precise causes were still a matter of debate, news outlets began to make the connection to Bonafont. La Jornada, a national newspaper, printed a warning from Puebla’s state governor: “The Bonafont Plant Will Close if It Caused the Sinkhole in Zacatepec.” Another publication ran the headline “Bonafont Illegally Extracts Water in the Sinkhole Area,” citing claims that it was extracting more water than permitted. El País, a leading Spanish newspaper with a Mexican edition, reported that overextraction of water likely helped cause the sinkhole. A satirical online reviewer gave Bonafont five stars on Google Maps and wrote, “Congratulations, you’ve created a nice sinkhole.”
The activists were buoyed by the media interest: suddenly, their local protest had national and even global relevance. They say that Bonafont did not formally respond to Pueblos Unidos and declined an invitation to a local gathering. In response, Bonafont told me that it sought to establish a dialogue with Pueblos Unidos from the beginning and offered a mediation, but the activists “refused any dialogue outside of their conditions, which basically came down to accepting unacceptable falsehoods.” Publicly, the company has suggested that Pueblos Unidos, not Bonafont, infringed on local water rights by preventing the distribution of its product. On August 6th, CONAGUA issued a statement saying that they had no jurisdiction in the matter of the protest. Two days later, the activists broke the lock and went inside.
I asked Vicente Nolasco, a researcher at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla whose focus is water, what factors could have contributed to the opening of the sinkhole. He told me that he had never seen anything like it outside of large cities, where highly pressurized water occasionally bursts through pipes and washes away the earth beneath roads. He said that the local soil includes finer materials such as volcanic ash, which are more easily washed away, and that small underground streams of water flowed through the area and weakened it. “Water always looks for an exit, it looks for its level,” he told me. He also said that, long ago, water pooled on the surface in a depression known as a jagüey.
Nolasco, like other experts who studied the sinkhole, concluded that its sudden appearance “has to do with the extraction in this place.” (CONAGUA disputed this.) There are more than a thousand active permits for extraction from the aquifer; in a decade, Nolasco told me, the volume of the Puebla Valley aquifer was cut in half. The state government of Puebla also acknowledged the role of extraction in causing the sinkhole. A proposition was presented to the federal Mexican legislature, asking to limit water extraction from the aquifer for at least five years and to review all permits and concessions granted in the area since 1960, but so far no such measures have been enacted.
There is no definitive analysis that links the water from the dry wells or the sinkhole specifically to Bonafont’s bottling room, or to any other particular extraction site. One reason for this may be that Bonafont bottles such a small fraction of the water extracted from the aquifer: the company is more a symbol than a clear culprit. Another is that water is inherently hard to trace; it shape-shifts, flows, and pools without regard for borders and boundaries. It is communal by nature, which may be why it’s distressing to see it contained, stacked, and sold.
On a clear, sunny day in November, I drove to the sinkhole. José Leovigildo Cinto Tepale, the Nahua representative who temporarily served as alcalde mayor of Santa María Zacatepec, led the way on his motorcycle. (The Indigenous effort to replace the local government ultimately failed.) We parked about five hundred feet from the hole, behind a fence that marks where the land has been deemed safe to stand on. Wind whipped up strands of caution tape nearby.
The sinkhole looked like a black wound in a green field. We sensed its scale by comparing it to the house that was now dangling over the edge, its roof covered in white specks that turned out to be herons. Two police officers approached us, asked what we were doing, and warned us that we could not enter. We saw hardly any visitors except a couple that showed up to take a selfie.
Cinto Tepale has short hair, a wide face, and a serious expression. He had told the story of the sinkhole so many times that it had taken on the familiar rhythms of a Biblical story or a myth. He predicted that the Puebla region will go the way of Mexico City, on the other side of the volcanoes, where entire neighborhoods have lost access to water. Perhaps Santa María Zacatepec is both a vision of the past and a possible future—a town that could easily sustain itself with a vast, local supply of drinkable water, but where residents fear that their shared resource is being lost forever. “The companies will have their wells, and our families are going to be buying water out of necessity,” Cinto Tepale told me. As he spoke, he gestured at low-lying industrial buildings beyond the horizon.
Local, rural, and Indigenous defenders of nature often face fierce resistance. In 2016, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran activist of Lenca descent, was murdered after a grassroots campaign against the development of a dam. In 2019, the activist and journalist Samir Flores, a Nahua member of the People’s Front in Defense of the Land and Water, was murdered in the Mexican state of Morelos. According to one report, more than two hundred environmental defenders were killed in 2020; more than two dozen died in Mexico. One of them, Óscar Eyraud Adams, an activist of Kumeyaay descent, was murdered in September, 2020, after protesting water extraction in the Mexican state of Baja California.
“The moment is going to arrive when we’re going to be fighting for water,” Cinto Tepale said.
The problem, for Pueblos Unidos and many groups like it, is knowing whom, exactly, to fight. There’s no way to prove that water is being stolen from their wells; no one arrived at their homes to take it. It can seem futile to point fingers at any one company, when so many are extracting it with CONAGUA’s blessing. Anyone who wants to cast doubt on the activists can blame the drought and invoke climate change, a crime with so many culprits that each of them can evade accountability. If everyone is responsible, then no one is.
Early on the morning of February 15, 2022, hundreds of National Guard members and state and local police stormed the occupied Bonafont plant. Activists who were inside told me that the officers pointed guns at them, warned them to keep their cell phones down, and told them to get out. Everyone complied. A barricade that the activists had built from scaffolding, tires, and garrafones came down. Murals on the walls were whitewashed, and a new fence went up at the edge of the highway. Private security guards stood watch with dogs. Bonafont told me that the operation had been court mandated and was carried out “without any violence.” In a press release, the company also said it will “not re-establish operations until the social conditions of respect for the rights of all and civilized coexistence, which allow us to maintain our activity in the state, exist.”
The sinkhole should be a reminder of this conflict. As we peered through the chain-link fence, however, it seemed almost idyllic. The herons shuffled their wings and rose in unison. Cinto Tepale and I fell silent. When we left, the herons stayed. Now that the sinkhole has been fenced off, it has become a little oasis for them, free from human intruders—a quiet patch of land where, at least for now, there is water to share. ♦
