The state of Hidalgo, north of Mexico City, is home to a place that was once a paradise and has become a living hell for its inhabitants. The waters of the dam and the wells are completely contaminated. The authorities know this, but they have ignored the population for years, with a dramatic result: the explosion of diseases such as cancer.
The environmental and health disaster in Hidalgo is the topic that has won this year’s Breach/Valdez Journalism Award in the Human Rights category, an award given by the French Embassy in conjunction with other actors such as the UN. The investigation is entitled ‘Hidalgo’s Forgotten Ones. Cancer, pollution and wastewater’ and its author is Carlos Carabaña , a Spanish journalist from Focus, the investigative unit of N+ of Televisa-Univisión.
One of the testimonies in the report that accompanies the devastating images of the state of the water in the dam and the dramatic stories of its neighbors, victims of deadly diseases such as cancer, due to pollution, says:
“This was a paradise and now it is an area of ecological devastation. All the sewage from all over Mexico City comes here and all we have is disease and poverty.”
Cancer cases have tripled in ten years
326 million cubic metres of wastewater arrive at this dam every year. “It is a story of abandonment,” says Carabaña. A story that begins with the decision of Miguel Alemán’s government to build a dam in the 1940s. To do so, the town that was in the centre of the valley was relocated to the banks.
“At first it was a tourist destination, a very beautiful place,” says the journalist. However, in the 1970s a decision was made that was fatal for the population. “The decision was to divert wastewater from Mexico City, from all the industrial corridors in that area, which are many, the hospitals, a refinery and a thermoelectric plant, into that dam,” he explains. The result is a real dump that has led to serious contamination and, worst of all, that contamination has filtered into the seven drinking water wells. Carabaña complains:
“There is a huge list of diseases, but the most serious is that cancers in the area are skyrocketing. You walk through the town and they tell you that this person died of cancer, his father also had it, his brother has it and it happens in every house. What we found with official documents is that cancer cases had tripled above the Mexican average in the area in the last ten years.”
Water treatment plants that never came to work
In this report they present official documents, analyses that show the contamination and for decades nothing was done. All the Administrations knew about it, but they abandoned the citizens. They were already aware of the presence of arsenic in drinking water in 2007. He says:
“These are analyses from the Local Health Authority Conference with high levels of arsenic in people’s drinking water, in the water they receive in their homes. In 2010, we have some initial analyses that already speak of contaminated wells and, in 2018, we have other more complete analyses of the seven water wells that are contaminated and all these documents were sent to the then governor Omar Fayad.”
It was after the report on the wells that five water treatment plants were installed. The authorities opened them and it seemed that the problem had been solved, but no:
“When we started to investigate, we realized that none of the five plants were working. We obtained inventories of the plants, of the material they had. They had almost nothing. Then we visited the plants. At five we saw that they were closed, that there were no chemicals. Even in the valves you could find cobwebs.”
The impact of Carabaña’s report led AMLO to sign a decree
Before leaving office, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree declaring an environmental restoration zone of 35,000 hectares. Carabaña explains:
“The Mexican government now has a legal and binding obligation by presidential decree to fix the area.”
A victory for the residents who have been protesting for years to get the authorities to do something, and also a victory for investigative journalists. “We gave them support, let’s say, by putting media pressure on the matter,” he says.
The decree will have to be implemented by the new administration of Claudia Sheinbaum. They have eight months to draft a plan with a budget and detailed points with the idea of returning this area to conditions similar to those of the contamination. We will have to be patient to see the results since the government has 12 years to implement it.
Source: translated from France24 in Spanish
