A bruising legal battle could unfold after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) declared that Jalisco alone should receive precious H2O from the Zapotillo Dam, under construction on the Verde River in the Los Altos region of this state.
Visiting the stalled project last weekend, Lopez Obrador promised residents of three villages (Temacapulín, Acasico and Palmarejo) that the height of the dam will be limited to 80 meters and that their communities will be safe from inundation. Engineers have stressed repeatedly that the dam needs to be 120 meters in height in order to fill a reservoir with a realistic quantity of water to pump to both the Guadalajara metropolitan area and the city of Leon in Guanajuato, as per an original accord. This could not happen, they have insisted, without flooding the three aforementioned communities, which have a combined population of more than 3,000.
An agreement signed by the state governors two years ago reassessed the water allocation, giving Jalisco 76 percent of the dam’s water, and Leon 24 percent.
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