If you were dying from thirst would you follow the rule of law and die?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.laweekly.com/features/12893/greed-runs-through-it/

Greed Runs Through It

One man’s journey to the end of the Colorado River

Andres Lopez Gonzalez sits in a dusty plastic lawn chair in back of his tarpaper-covered home in El Mayor, south of Mexicali. Nearby, his wife patiently makes beaded jewelry and his daughter does schoolwork.

Gonzalez holds his hands close to himself in the cold morning air, but dirt beneath his nails is still visible, revealing the life of a workingman struggling in a land with little water. His house has a single kitchen faucet that delivers water too polluted to drink. The yard has no lawn, shrubbery or flower beds. Just an outhouse.

If only a little more fresh water flowed down the Colorado River Delta, he says, it would help restore the population of prized corvina, which he fishes on the sun-drenched sparkling waters of the nearby Gulf of California. Lack of fresh water has caused the corvina population to collapse. To help put groceries on the table and pay for the bottled water the family must drink, Gonzalez supplements his fishing income with assorted odd jobs.

In his aspirations for a better future, Gonzalez is just like Southern Californians. But he and others across the Colorado Delta and Mexicali Valley cannot take water for granted like us, because they live at the brunt end of a salty river that no longer reaches the sea on a regular basis. White patches of salt cover some farm fields on the delta, and in some places, the remains of burned vegetation line the barely flowing river.

Gesturing with his hands under the bright sun, Gonzalez says he’s not sure if people in the U.S. use too much Colorado River water. “I just see we don’t get much water.”

Now, however, the U.S. is crushing the hopes of Gonzalez and his neighbors for a little more water and the better future it could bring. The U.S. is beginning projects that will further cut the already diminished flow of fresh water to Mexico from the Colorado River. With minimal international consultation, the U.S. — along with the Metropolitan Water District and other water agencies — is turning down the spigot to Mexico to divert more water for new housing developments in Los Angeles and cities across Southern California. In so doing, water managers not only will starve Mexico for water, but likely will set up Los Angeles and urban Southern California for water shortages by enabling more growth than the river ultimately can support. snip

Based on what was thought to be an average water flow of 17 million acre-feet a year, the 1922 law of the river allotted 7.5 million acre-feet of the Colorado’s water to the lower-basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada, and an equal amount to the upper-basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. In 1944, the U.S. entered a treaty with Mexico granting 1.5 million acre-feet a year to its southern neighbor. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1964 split the lower-state share of 7.5 million acre-feet a year, entitling California to 4.4 million acre-feet; Arizona, 2.8 million acre-feet; and Nevada, 300,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot supplies about two Southern California households for a year. snip

West of Mexicali lie a series of small farming communities that will be wiped out once water authorities in the U.S. line the All-American Canal to stop the “waste” of some 70,000 acre-feet of water that now seeps from it and flows to Mexico. There, farmers pump it out of the ground to water their fields. The lining will immediately affect 10,000 acres of farmland and eventually cut water to 34,700 acres, which support more than 7,100 Mexican families, according to Enrique Rovirosa, an economist who lives in Mexicali. He has worked with the Council of Economic Development, a business group in Mexicali, and the U.S. groups Citizens United for Resources and the Environment and Desert Citizens Against Pollution to contest the project in a suit filed in a federal district court in Nevada against the U.S. government.

Typical of the farmers who would be wiped out is Jose Leopoldo Hurtado, who has lived in the Mexicali Valley for 64 years and still farms the land cultivated by his father. He grows cotton and wheat, irrigating it with well water. The lining of the canal will render valueless the three wells he has built at a cost of $150,000 each, not to mention ending his days as a farmer. Other farmers in the area grow vegetables, and many ship their crops to the U.S. for the tables of Los Angeles.



Come on now all you rule of law people. Lets hear it. If you were living in Mexico and the USA cut your water off would you follow the USA rule of law and stay down there with your family and die from thirst? Or would you break that USA rule of law and bring your family up north here to get some of that cool life giving water.

Don

[Inland]

1. Why, I'd break the law. And go to jail, same as if I stole Mexican water.

So what's your point?

[pnorman]

2. Thanks for that!

I get LA Weekly email announcements, but I missed that one.

As much as petroleum, WATER will be a major factor in global fighting. Hee's some good reading from several years ago, that's even more timely today: http://dieoff.org/page67.htm

Here's an excerpt:

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Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another way vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water--the most important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks. The project's centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").

Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge. On a recent visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the high-voltage electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of giant humming transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees. The emerging power of the Turks was palpable.

Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be spread more evenly within the society. . . . It is true, we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behavior."

Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in southern Anatolia--near the site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey, as presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?

I very much doubt it.
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pnorman

[Minnesota Libra]

3. You are focusing on the southern border, I usually don't make...........

....a distinction between illegal aliens coming over the southern border or northern border. Nor do I make a distinction between race, color, or any other distinction. Illegal aliens are illegal aliens regardless of their skin color, the part of the world they come from, or which border they come over.

I wish everyone would get that through their head, I AM NOT INTO RACE OR COLOR. I am speaking strictly from the point of view of the law.

Now dealing with your article - why don't we just go back to the beginning of time and return the land to its original owners? Let's not just pick a place in history and call that good. Lets do it right if we are going to do it at all.

How about that??