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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And even if the Chihuahua reservoirs are full, as Combs insists, and the area around Delicias is green and rich at the expense of U.S. farmers, the rest of the land along the Conchos varies greatly. Between Chihuahua City and the river's mouth at Ojinaga are a hundred miles of exceedingly dry and almost empty country. Here Pancho Villa rode to fame in the Mexican Revolution, pursued by the leftist correspondent John Reed and the punitive expedition of General John J. Pershing. In a massive cordillera a few miles from the border, the Conchos flows through a chasm, Cañon del Peguis, that is as awesome as any in Big Bend. Below these mountains, the irrigation ditches resume again, but there is none of the lushness. There are no peacocks and damn few chickens. The people in this stretch of the valley are desperately poor. When you drive through this country, the surreal reality becomes all too clear: The fight is about water in the desert, a place where there really is no water to begin with. And given the seeds of resentment that were planted here more than 150 years ago, it is easy to understand why the few farmers left scratching out a living with Conchos water would want to hold on to every last drop.
REAL LIVES AND FUTURES ARE at stake in this conflict. On the Texas side of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, about 1,700 farmers rely on their irrigation rights; at an average 26.5 inches a year, the rainfall is too meager and erratic to support commercial production. Joe Aguilar farms three thousand acres of vegetables, cotton, corn, and grain at Peñitas, near Mission; he irrigates about one thousand acres. Aguilar works the land his dad cultivated. He hopes his daughter will continue to work the farm but wonders if there will be one. Aguilar is a reserve constable and a school board member. He's no firebrand, but he is deeply alienated. Last April he and a few other growers got to meet President Bush at his Crawford ranch, and Aguilar told the president that he was going to take part in a tractor blockade of bridges over the water issue. The president wished the men his best and said he was trying to help.
The four-hour shutdown of three international bridges in May was peaceful; cops stood aside. The Texas farmers had hoped they would be met by growers in Tamaulipas who have also been left low and dry by the watermasters in Chihuahua. But the Texans' hope for a united front in both valleys would not be rewarded. Tamaulipas farmers later blocked bridges with their own tractors, but Texas farmers claim their Mexican counterparts were protesting to keep the water, not give it to Texas.
Efforts by farmers on both sides to get their governments to move on the Conchos water fight have had little effect. Their politicians seem more inclined to dance around the subject. In early June Fox planned to visit Texas, meet with Governor Perry and President Bush, and address the Legislature. The Mexican congress, however, which was aggravated by the water conflict and U.S. rhetoric and which has purse control over presidential travel abroad, vetoed the trip. Then the IBWC signed Minute 308, an agreement with the agency's counterpart in Mexico, the Comisión Internacional de Límites de Aguas, in which the Mexicans agreed to release 90,000 acre-feet. But the agreement was more about posturing than about taking real action; it referred to water that was already stored in the lakes of Amistad, above Del Rio, and Falcon, above Roma. The order required no more release downstream from the Conchos reservoirs, and it could be rescinded at Mexico's request if drought on the Conchos worsened. Secretary of State Colin Powell received a letter from Texas growers calling Minute 308 a "colossal failure" and an "embarrassment to our country."
Trying to ease the tension, the State Department sent Dennis Linskey, its director for U.S.-Mexico border affairs, to the Valley. Joe Aguilar told me that he spoke up at the July meeting: "I asked him, 'Have we been sold to Mexico, and if we have, for how much?' He thought I was being sarcastic."
Later that month Carlos Ramirez, a former mayor of El Paso and the head of the U.S. section of the IBWC, was being excoriated in a Washington meeting by Texas congressmen and their aides. Exasperated, Ramirez blurted out that President Bush had called him directly and ordered him to sign Minute 308. So far, Ramirez still has his job, but the leak made it clear to Valley farmers that Bush wasn't necessarily looking out for their livelihoods. And in August Fox canceled another planned trip to Texas. He attributed the cancellation to Texas' execution of a Mexican national, but Aguilar and other Valley farmers were planning a public demonstration against him and the president in Crawford.
With more success than Bush and the frustrated Governor Perry, Susan Combs has positioned herself as the Valley growers' most prominent champion. In her fifties, the Republican agriculture commissioner is a tall, attractive West Texas rancher and Vassar graduate. She is a skillful politician, and in a state dominated by Republicans, she could someday seek higher office. "If the Mexicans are not going to give us the water," she told me, "then by God we ought to ante up and help our people in the Valley. How about the filling stations? How about the grocery stores? How about the guys who fix the trucks? How about all the collateral damage? We really could turn the Valley into a parking lot."
Combs's attitude toward Chihuahuan politicians is undisguised contempt: "From everything I'm hearing, their position is, 'We're not going to let the gringos have it.' They've got a governor in Chihuahua who says, 'If the rain falls here, it's mine.' He does not believe he has to be a partner in the treaty. What kind of neighbor is that? All we hear from them is 'Gimme water. Gimme money.' They're like irresponsible toddlers."
"So you stick by your statement that Chihuahua is a rogue state," I remarked.
"Sure. Yesterday I called them "renegade." Whatever. Starts with an r."
On October 2 Mexico officially defaulted on a Rio Grande water debt of almost 1.5 million acre-feet. A week later, Combs released new satellite photographs from the University of Texas Center for Space Research which showed, she claimed, that a tropical storm had increased Mexico's storage to 2.5 million acre-feet. Fox's point man on the water dispute is Alberto Szekely, an urbane Mexico City diplomat. "Talk to the author of that study, at the Center for Space Research," Szekely told me over the phone in response to Combs's new pronouncements. "He will tell you those figures refer to our total storage capacity and don't allow for silt. Our storage in the reservoirs is exactly what we say it is."
"What is the solution to Mexico's water debt?" I ask.
"The solution," he answers lightly, "is that Mexico will work out a schedule of repayment over the amount of time allotted by the treaty, which is five years."
The Mexican and U.S. presidents finally met for 45 minutes at an Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Baja California in late October. Bush wanted Fox's support in the U.N. Security Council vote on Iraq. Fox wanted Bush to make some concessions on immigration. Neither leader yielded on those issues and—to the amazement of Valley agriculture figures—the Rio Grande and the water debt were not prominently mentioned as items on the agenda.
"Look," says Jo Jo White, the manager of the Valley's Mercedes irrigation district, "We realize that with trade, immigration, drugs, terrorism, and the rest, the concerns of Rio Grande Valley farmers are a pretty small part of the equation. But we really do feel like we've been abandoned by our government. We're at wits' end. This situation with the Conchos has been going on since 1996, and the worst could be yet to come. We really could lose our citrus and sugarcane production down here."
White is prominent in an organization called Texans for Treaty Compliance. For the past three or four years, they tossed around a plan for just scrapping the 1944 treaty. Let Mexico keep the Conchos water, their argument ran. Under the treaty, the U.S. releases about a tenth of the flow of the western Colorado, 1.5 million acre-feet a year, to Mexico. Cut them off and pipe Colorado water from Hoover Dam over the desert and Rockies, to the Rio Grande, at a pipeline construction cost of $1 million a mile. It is a desperate idea predicated on the notion that Arizona and California, who have tremendous water problems of their own, are going to give up supply to help farmers in South Texas. Drought has set in all over the West. Even Combs predicts that because of the lack of snowmelt in the southern Colorado Rockies, the U.S. will likely be facing its own water debt to Mexico.
At his farm near Mission, Joe Aguilar tells me that he believes the presidents of both countries have good intentions, but he fears their hands are tied by their allegiance to multinational produce companies. Aguilar has been selling acreage and buying trucks to start a small transport firm, trying to diversify. Like most area farmers, he's beginning to understand that his government could dodge this issue for years, and there is no relief in sight.
Ironically, in their fight over the Rio Grande, the Texas farmer and the Chihuahua politician, Patricio Martínez, wind up sounding like each other. "If we're ever going to get any help," says Aguilar, "it's going to have to come out of the sky."
THE DAY GILBERTO RODRIGUEZ TOOK ME to Boca Chica, he said that as a boy he could remember a tiny Mexican village beside the river's mouth. His reminiscence made me think of Paul Horgan's masterful book, Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, and its passages on a similar hamlet, the long-extinct Bagdad. It was a cluster of reed huts plastered with mud and oyster shells and occupied mostly by smugglers, until some hurricane swept it away. An Army lieutenant from Indiana named Lew Wallace was ordered to stand watch on Bagdad in 1846, during the U.S.-Mexico War. Later in life, as a retired general and the territorial governor of New Mexico, he would orchestrate the manhunt for Billy the Kid while writing the best-selling novel Ben-Hur. But that disease-ridden bivouac on the Gulf had the young soldier wondering if he had any future at all. In Horgan's book, Wallace described the sight of fresh troops "marching by, flags flying, drums beating, and hurrying aboard boats as if they smelled the contagion in our camp or feared an order for them to stop and take our place. There was not a soul among us so simple as not to see that we were practically in limbo."
The fighters of the Rio Grande's water war are caught in their own drumbeats and limbo. They are trying to stick it out, hoping that relief will finally come, but increasingly, they're left only with desperate plans such as piping water thousands of miles or blockading international bridges. About the time Mexico defaulted on its debt to the U.S. and the presidents chose to avoid the subject, three fed-up Mexicans dug a four-hundred-foot-long ditch with shovels through the sandbar at Boca Chica, enabling the Rio Grande to run free for the first time in nearly a year. But within a week the tides and currents just laid the sand back in strips. The bar was intact. Days later, heavy rains set in, and muddy floodwater again washed out into the surf. But as the year warms up, the flow will again grow feeble. The Rio Grande has become the river that can no longer find its way to the sea.
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