Mexico lies along the same latitudes as the Sahara, and nearly half its land is bone dry. It has less drinking water per capita than Egypt, and 60 percent less than it did 50 years ago. Roughly 12 million people, one out of eight Mexicans, the poorest of the poor, have no easy access to drinking water at all. Those who can afford it pay dearly to have it trucked to their homes. Those without the money have to drink what they can find.
Bad water kills thousands every year.
The national water commissioner, Cristobal Jaime Jaquez, says 73 percent of Mexico's water, underground and above, is contaminated and a danger to public health. Mexico does not have that kind of money, nor even enough to maintain the water-treatment facilities it already has. Mexico City, home to nearly 20 million people, is draining its immense underground aquifer, lowering it by as much as 11 feet a year and causing some of the city's most famous buildings, like the National Cathedral, the largest and oldest in Latin America, to bend and droop like a reflection from a funhouse mirror. With the aquifer close to depleted, the city now pumps water nearly a mile uphill, from as much as 125 miles away, and half of that trickles away in leaks and cracks. The lost water would be enough to slake the thirst of the whole of Los Angeles.