Chihuahua – The members of a single family in Los Jagüeyes, Namiquipa, consume almost half of the volume of subsoil water assigned to Irrigation District 090, located in Ojinaga, since Conagua granted them 43 million cubic meters (Mm3) annually, with almost a hundred titles for extraction.
The permit registry of the National Water Commission (Conagua) lists records for a family of Mennonite origin of 94 titles, with volumes ranging from 3,300 cubic meters to one million 200,000, processed from 1995 to 2023. It is the Kornelsen family is the concessionaire of these volumes of water for planting thousands of hectares, while others, both in Namiquipa and Riva Palacio and other parts of the state, do not have the vital liquid for agricultural use, denounced agrarian activist Eraclio “Yako.” Rodriguez. The former federal deputy and leader of El Barzón also explained that the concessioned volume is much greater than that available to other producers in various regions of the state, but in addition there is no order or regulation in the actual consumption of groundwater in the entity. Rodríguez explained that the depletion of aquifers in the most productive areas of the state is largely the responsibility of the National Water Commission, which during the last decades awarded concessions without availability, due to existing corruption that has not been eradicated from the dependence, despite the seriousness of the situation facing the entity. Despite this, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) intends to invest around 1,500 million pesos in a new substation that will serve to meet the excess demand for energy in the Riva Palacio region. The activist criticized the parastatal’s decision to guarantee greater electricity supply to regularize wells that are the product of Conagua’s corruption and that are obviously unsustainable due to the deficit shown by the aquifers. In addition to this substation in Riva Palacio, he reported, the CFE plans the construction of others in Bachíniva, Ascensión and Janos, with the same intention of meeting the excess demand caused by the wells that operate with those concessions. According to official information from Conagua, in Namiquipa the current concessions to extract water from the Santa Clara aquifer are 380, with a concessioned volume of 140.3 million cubic meters. Of the total, 100 concessions were granted between 1994 and 2000; 36 in the period 2001-2013 and 244 between 2014 and the current year. In the same aquifer, but in the part that corresponds to Riva Palacio, of a total of 150 concessions to extract 42.7 million cubic meters, 35 were granted more than 20 years ago; 13 in the period 2001-2013 and 102 in the last decade.
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