One Community's Water Fight Underscores Distrust of Mexican Government Hector Becerra - The Los Angeles Times
go to original July 7, 2014

A resident strings wire across a road to slow down any police vehicles trying to enter San Bartolo Ameyalco on the outskirts of Mexico City. (Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press)

The church bells rang out, a normal occurrence in a community where the sound usually beckoned residents to weddings, funerals or religious services. But the clanging on this morning was different: frenetic, insistent, relentless.

The sound signaled an alarm — and a call to arms.

More than 1,000 armored anti-riot police had begun to move into the outlying Mexico City colonia. Residents, meanwhile, prepared to meet them, armed with rocky projectiles they had created by swinging large hammers into the pavement, sidewalks and planters.

More than 100 people were injured, some seriously, in skirmishes that day in late May in the isolated highland community. Most of the badly hurt were police, beaten by angry residents in fighting caught on television cameras.

The protesters said the government was seeking to steal a rare commodity: fresh volcanic spring water that has fed much of the town since before the Spaniards came. They insist that politicians want to move water to Santa Fe, a nearby wealthy community of gleaming corporate high-rises that grew out of a smelly dump about a generation ago and in many ways represents the way the Mexican government would like the country to be seen — as economically ascendant.

The conflict underscores the chronic distrust many Mexicans have of their government, and fears that the country's engines of economic growth may be stalling, even as President Enrique Peña Nieto proclaims this to be "Mexico's moment."

Read the rest at The Los Angeles Times

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