US Corporations Pump Aquifers Dry as Police Kill Water Defenders in Rural Mexico

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https://truthout.org/articles/us-corporations-pump-aquifers-dry-as-police-kill-water-defenders-in-rural-mexico/

US Corporations Pump Aquifers Dry as Police Kill Water Defenders in Rural Mexico

Farmers are risking their lives to fight back against the US-owned factory farms that are destroying Mexico’s water.

By David Bacon , TRUTHOUT
Published July 26, 2024

On June 20, more than 200 angry farmers pulled their tractors into the highway outside the Carroll Farms feed plant in the Mexican town of Totalco, Veracruz, blocking traffic. Highway blockades are a traditional form of protest in Mexico. Every year, poor communities mount dozens, seeing them as their only way to get powerful elites to hear their demands.

At first, the Totalco blockade was no different. Farmers yelled at the guards behind the feed plant gates, as they protested extreme water use by Carroll Farms and its contamination of the water table. Then the police arrived in pickup trucks. They began grabbing people they thought were the leaders. One was Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man who’d led earlier protests going back more than a decade. After he was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded it and rescued him.

“Then four police grabbed me,” recalls Renato Romero, a farmer from nearby Ocotepec and a protest leader. “I was rescued too. But then more police arrived and began beating people. We put our bodies in front of their guns and said, ‘Shoot us!’ And they began shooting.” Two young brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez, were killed, their bodies found beside their family’s tractor used in the demonstration. Each had been shot several times, one of their widows said. Others were wounded by gunfire. The farmers had no weapons. As they fled back into town, the police chased them, Romero says. “They followed people in the streets, and went into homes, shooting. Afterwards you could see the high caliber shells on the floors of the houses. They didn’t try to talk. They just wanted to terrorize us.”

This bitter confrontation and the death of two campesinos is more than simply a bloody tragedy south of the border. It is one more example of the impact U.S. food corporations have had on local farm communities as they’ve expanded in Mexico. That process is felt north of the border as well, in the spread of disease, the displacement of local communities and resulting migration, and even in the national politics of both countries.

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