Mostly, the village languishes. The plight of El Mayor typifies what is happening around the world as politics and engineering shape access to dwindling water sources. Commonly, water flows uphill toward money. And the little village is just one example among uncounted others all over the globe where disputes over water may end up at the center of high diplomacy between neighboring nations. Each year, Mexico gets only 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado River water, one-tenth of what is drawn off above the border.
Mexican farmers use it all, leaving only a trickle in the riverbed.
To increase the Colorado's flow toward the Gulf of California, Mexico's National Water Commission diverted the tributary Hardy River, which runs by El Mayor. The owners of two tourist camps persuaded engineers to design a levee that leaves them a small lake. But the village a few miles downstream was cut off, leaving only a pesticide-laced sludge at the end of the Hardy. Campoy, along with scientists and activists on both sides of the border, is fighting to save the rest of the delta from the fate of El Mayor. There is new hope, he says, but it could go either way.