Lagunero Citizen Meeting ratifies position against illegal trafficking of water rights

After an unsuccessful dialogue with officials of the Basin Agency, Northern Central Basins, of the National Water Commission (Conagua), farmers from several ejidos in the Lagunera region decided to hold a permanent sit-in at the facilities of this federal government office. with the purpose of complying with a Court ruling in which several irrigation modules are ordered to restore individual rights to surface water, within Irrigation District 017.

Given these events, Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero (ECL), a citizen group that has been building a Citizen Agenda on Water in the Lagunera Region for almost two decades, expressed its solidarity with the farmers involved in this fair protest, demanding that Conagua comply. to the ruling that favored them.

ECL researchers ratified their position against the illegal trafficking of individual surface water rights that is practiced within and between users and managers of irrigation modules, an issue that is part of said Agenda.

They explained that this problem, derived from the transmission of these rights that was carried out after the reform of the National Water Law of 1992, in which their commercialization was promoted, a transmission that was frequently carried out in disadvantageous conditions for the ejidatarios who owned them, upon expiration of the legal period they had to be returned to the ejidatarios and/or successors who acquired them as part of the presidential resolutions that provided land and water to the ejidos.

They pointed out that, unfortunately, over time these individual rights were alienated among users of the irrigation modules, until today when they are used by people who monopolized them. These facts are the tip of the iceberg of illegal trafficking of surface water rights that became a normalized practice in which the directors of the water associations that manage them and Conagua officials were involved, so for the original users and/or the successors to recover them required filing trials in Agrarian Courts and Civil Courts.

The researchers warned that this practice is common within irrigation modules and constitutes a form of hoarding of surface water that is used to irrigate crops on properties assigned to Irrigation District 017 of the Lagunera Region, being one of the forms of management of this resource marked by the opacity, corruption and impunity that characterizes Conagua since the transfer of rights and volumes of water was allowed by said law, which turned it into a form of privatization and hoarding of water. fact of a good considered as public in the legislation itself on the matter.