A Charred Life 
The End of the River
Our state is defined by its legendary waterways, and none has inspired as many cherished myths as the mighty Rio Grande. But after a decade of drought, cut off from its headwaters and sucked dry by irrigation, this Texas treasure is beginning to disappear—and with it, a vital piece of our history.
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A dry cycle and an unsightly dam are not the only things that have siphoned water from the Rio Grande. Tamarisk, or the misnamed salt cedar (it does carry salt, but it is not cedar), was brought from North Africa and Central Asia to the American plains in the nineteenth century to help stabilize riverbanks. With lacey, light-green foliage and a frail lavender bloom, a single tamarisk is not unattractive. But brakes of the pest brush are taking over the Rio Grande and many other rivers in the West. "They use twice as much water as the native willow and cottonwood," Harris says. That is because they grow so thickly and spread so far from a river's bank. Prolific tangles of the brush block the waterways and create bizarre wetlands in desert terrain, consuming much of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Big Bend.
Harris and I drive south from Elephant Butte, following the dam-released river on Interstate 25. In a while we cross the state line into El Paso. The riverbed here is paved and forbiddingly wired off by border security. We follow a road into an industrial strip just across the river from the Juárez slums. In cheerful contrast, the Hacienda Cafe adjoins a lot where historic markers stand. The owner, Chip Johns, walks out to greet us. He wears a cowboy hat, a big belt buckle, and sharp-toed boots. "Don Juan de Oñate came across the river right here in 1598," he proclaims. "There were soldiers and priests, one hundred thirty families, seven thousand head of livestock. The first mares ever seen in Texas."
It's difficult to imagine such a pastoral scene at this site now. The population of Juárez and El Paso exploded past 1.5 million in the past decade, and the growth has not been pretty. Here, average rainfall is less than nine inches a year, and the abundant aquifers that were expected to help with the water needs have been diminished at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, the groundwater and the river have become increasingly polluted. By the early nineties, rates of hepatitis, tuberculosis, and dysentery in El Paso County were running three to five times the national average.
Just upriver from the Hacienda Cafe, the river's bend toward the Oñate crossing is dominated by a large black complex, the infamous century-old Asarco copper smelter. Its American owners closed the smelter in 1999, citing low copper prices, but the TCEQ and the Environmental Protection Agency had beleaguered the smelter with repeated assertions of contamination. The day Harris and I arrive, El Paso evening newscasts blare a story that the EPA has found that much of the soil around the smelter—which is near downtown—contains high levels of lead and arsenic. Lawns will have to be dug up and trucked away in the emergency cleanup, and the groundwater is endangered. But beneath Asarco's cracked windows and dormant smokestack, I watch boys from Juárez swimming happily in the river.
The Rio Grande, which Mexicans call the Río Bravo, is a treasured trout stream in Colorado. Its gorge outside Taos is one of this country's most stunning natural spectacles and whitewater chutes. Just upstream from Elephant Butte, a wildlife refuge called Bosque del Apache swarms each fall with millions of migratory birds. But throttled by the Elephant Butte Dam and its irrigators, the Rio Grande is almost dead when it reaches El Paso and Juárez. Water released downstream from their punishment is mostly treated effluent. And then the tamarisk stakes its claim. Ensnarled by salt cedar, a 216-mile stretch of the Rio Grande from Fort Quitman to Presidio has been reduced to a trickle which goes completely dry at times. The stretch, the first major section of the fabled Rio Grande in Texas, is now commonly called the Forgotten River.
ONLY THE RIO CONCHOS CAN RESCUE the Rio Grande. This reality hasn't sneaked up and surprised anyone. Back in 1944, to address the increasingly disappearing flow of the Rio Grande south of El Paso, the U.S. and Mexico signed the treaty for Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande. The pact placed the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), under the direction of the State Department, in charge of overseeing all formal water agreements between the U.S. and Mexico. Under the treaty's provisions, to ensure that the Rio Grande would always have water to provide relief for the mushrooming border towns and cities that needed drinking and irrigation water, Mexico would release one third of the water from the Río Conchos and five other Rio Grande tributaries—an annual average of 350,000 acre-feet. For this, Mexico would still own two thirds of the Conchos water. (Near Yuma, Arizona, Mexico also gets 1.5 million acre-feet from the Colorado River.) The Amistad and Falcon reservoirs would be built on the Rio Grande to store the water and check floods, and the Conchos would set the border stream flowing again.
In June, a few weeks before my trip to the Rio Grande's mouth, I drove south from El Paso to Delicias, a pleasant town south of Chihuahua City that has long been home to the Conchos' richest farming country. A young woman named Karen Chapman, who works for the Austin chapter of the New York-based green group Environmental Defense, came along to help with introductions and translation. "Chihuahua had three years of crippling drought in the mid-nineties," she briefed me. "But when the weather improved in 1997 and the reservoirs began to stabilize, authorities allowed the farmers to use more water to irrigate fields and recoup losses. The treaty obligation of three hundred fifty thousand acre-feet a year is an average, measured in five-year cycles. The Mexicans thought they could make it up. Then it stopped raining again, especially in 2001."
Dozens of Conchos tributaries snake through the Sierra Madres Occidental range of Chihuahua and Durango. Home to Tarahumara, Pima, Yaqui, and other indigenous tribes, the river's watershed is best known for mines and vast ranches, but the upland Conchos valley has been farmed and irrigated since the seventeenth century. Yet this is parched country, and when I last traveled here, two years ago, the vistas were sand-colored and desolate. But in June, the short-grass range and sparsely wooded peaks had greened up spectacularly. The summer monsoons, fragrant afternoon showers moved east by fronts off the Pacific, came early, and the rain kept up. We passed a high-sided truck loaded so extravagantly with fresh hay that it looked like a McDonald's carton stuffed with french fries. The streets of Delicias were full of storm water when we arrived. People looked happy walking in the rain.
The next morning, in a spare downtown office, we met Ricardo Valdez, the district chief of the Comisión Nacional de Agua (CNA), the national water commission. "In Mexico, all water belongs to the federal government," he began, attempting to explain how Mexican water-rights laws differ from those in Texas and the U.S. Owning land in Mexico doesn't guarantee you access to the water. With quasi-governmental authority and great political power, irrigation districts in Mexico manage landowners' water privileges. Valdez said, "The district in Delicias has eighty thousand hectares"—about 200,000 acres—"that are irrigable, but realistically only forty or fifty percent of those qualify. We have problems with salinity, and this drought has been severe. We try to increase efficiency by lining the irrigation canals and leveling the fields, but that costs money. And water is just one element in the production chain. With free trade, we have to compete in the global market. Many hectares have been taken out of production."
Later in the morning, employees of the CNA took us to the Madero reservoir, in the hills above Delicias. Our guide told us that the small lake had risen about 25 feet since the summer rains began. Still, he said, Madero stands at just 34 percent capacity, and other Conchos reservoirs are doing no better. Agriculture commissioner Susan Combs has been offering satellite photographs as proof that the Chihuahuans have been hoarding water and turning the countryside green all along. She says that the Chihuahuans have rushed into production crops that require great amounts of water and that they open their gates and just flood the fields, an obsolete and wasteful way to irrigate.
I know little about farming and less about interpreting satellite photographs. But I saw the Madero Lake two years ago, and the water level was far higher then than what I saw in June, even after all the rain and the 25-foot rise. And to modernize the way Delicias farmers irrigate would mean investing millions of dollars in new equipment, capital that just hasn't been available.
Still, around Delicias I encountered sprawling pecan orchards and fields of tomatoes, chiles, onions, cotton, and one of the world's thirstiest crops, alfalfa. Our CNA guide took us to a farm where peacocks strolled the grounds and workers were sorting garlic in a barn thick with the smell. The head of the family farm was on an errand; his daughter walked out from the office. About thirty, Rosa María Ruiz is shy but confident. She listed the crops of the three-hundred-acre farm with precision and pride. Chapman asked her if she had heard much discussion of Mexico's water debt and the dispute with farmers in Texas. "We're all aware of it," Ruiz said. "But it's too complex. Nobody is paying much attention to it."
One of the major complexities at play is Mexican electoral politics. Only by 1929, twelve years after the Mexican Revolution ended, was order fully restored by the oligarchy of generals and plutocrats that would come to be known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI was rewarded with overwhelming support from the electorate for 71 years. The most durable rival to emerge was the conservative, business-oriented Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), and it gained footing as the principal opposition by winning races in Chihuahua in the seventies. In 2000 Vicente Fox, a rancher, Coca-Cola magnate, and governor in Guanajuato, expanded the PAN base and sent a thunderbolt through the nation when he was elected as the first PAN president in the nation's history. Fox is fluent in English and has a long-standing friendship with President Bush. While trying to deliver the reforms and economic recovery he has promised his country, Fox wants to advance trade, win concessions on immigration, support the war against terrorists, and maintain cordial relations with the U.S.
But by the time the PAN won its landslide in Mexico City, the PRI had figured out how to win in Chihuahua. The state's incumbent PRI governor, Patricio Martínez, has challenged drug lords and survived an assassin's bullet. He has a populist streak and an oratorical flair, and the way to cultivate and flaunt support in Chihuahua, he seems to figure, is not to roll over for a bunch of Texans. Besides, why make things easy for the president of the PAN? Fox is limited to a single six-year term, and someone has to emerge as the PRI's candidate in the next election. Why not a charismatic governor who stands up to the United States? "Neither war nor boycott nor discord is going to put one more liter of water in the valley of the Río Bravo," Martínez said in one speech. "The sky is denying us all."
A political ally of the governor is Rogelio Bejarno, the head of the local irrigation district. Seated behind a large desk in his Delicias office, Bejarno is a tanned and broad-shouldered man with rugged features and a movie star's smile. He is a farmer, rancher, and former mayor of Delicias. He told us bluntly that all these questions about the Conchos had begun to bore him. "It does not bother me a bit if Texans are upset," he said. "Our people have suffered. They've had to reduce planting. Here, if the land is not productive and people don't use their irrigation rights, they lose the water. It's reassigned. Many have given up."
"What happens to them?" I asked.
Bejarno tilted his head and smiled. "They sell their land and go work in Texas."
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