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Dirty Water in Guadalajara: SIAPA, the Repression, and Workers’ and Popular Control
For months, the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area has faced a serious water quality crisis. SIAPA—the local water system has been delivering turbid water—brown or black in color–to hundreds of neighborhoods. This water has a sewage odor and includes sediment including fecal coliforms, nitrates, and heavy metals. The pollution mainly comes through the old supply system bringing water from Lake Chapala, which has been contaminated by wastewater discharges in the Las Pintas Canal and Reservoir. Potabilization Plant No. 1 in Miravalle—built in the 1950s—is unable to adequately treat that raw sewage-tainted water.
There is a significant discrepancy between what SIAPA will admit and the magnitude reported by the population and by independent organizations. While SIAPA acknowledges impacts in around 180 neighborhoods. Independent citizen monitoring of complaint records, however, points to more than 475 neighborhoods with quality problems.
The government of Jalisco, headed by Pablo Lemus of Movimiento Ciudadano, took weeks to recognize the magnitude of the problem and only did so after citizen reports, blockades, and social pressure. Governor Lemus dismissed the director of SIAPA and announced emergency measures: temporarily suspending the use of water from Las Pintas and the old system and imposing rotational cuts, and advancing works such as a replacement Chapala-Guadalajara aqueduct and the expansion of potabilization plants. For the next six months, SIAPA will cut the water supply in shifts across different neighborhoods: some receive water while others go hours or days without it. Thousands of families are left without water at the tap while the government promises improvements in quality and presents an investment plan that rose from initial estimates of 25 billion to more than 42 billion pesos.
This increase in the estimated cost, together with the expected duration of the rotational cuts and the history of public-private partnership schemes in strategic infrastructure in Mexico, creates a real risk that the crisis will be used to open spaces for private participation or forms of indebtedness that subordinate the service to profitability criteria. This is not an accusation of proven intent in this specific case, but a risk documented by previous patterns and by the insufficient transparency regarding the terms of the announced works.
On October 11, 2026, a massive march that left from the Minerva Roundabout toward Casa Jalisco was repressed with tear gas, high-pressure water cannons, and dozens of detentions. There were confrontations: some people threw objects at the police and barriers were torn down. The Jalisco government acknowledged 39 detentions and accused a “shock group” of around 400 hooded individuals of having provoked the violence in order to delegitimize the march. That figure and that narrative are not independently supported by available reports and videos; an organized bloc of that size would have been clearly visible and documented. Human rights organizations and families denounced that both people who participated in the confrontations and others who were simply present were detained, and they reported broader lists of detainees. As of October 12, 2026, twelve people have been released and remain subject to open proceedings, while others are still detained.
This repressive response is not an isolated fact. In different contexts, governments of different political signs have prioritized megaprojects, concessions, or investment schemes that facilitate forms of partial privatization or private business under the cover of the public, and have responded to social protest with criminalization. Water is subordinated to profitability, public debt, or negotiation with private capital, while the population pays with its health, its time, and its money, forced to buy bottled water or filters. Parties that present themselves as opposition criticize privatization and demand public investment, but in practice they usually limit themselves to the institutional framework and to negotiation within the rules of the existing State, without fundamentally questioning the logic that turns water into a commodity or an object of concessions.
The solution cannot be reduced to trusting solely in better technical management of the same state apparatus or in the simple arrival of another party in government. Technical improvements, greater public investment, and transparency are necessary and immediate, but under current conditions they run the risk of remaining subordinated to the same criteria of profitability, indebtedness, and opacity. Water must be managed under the control of SIAPA workers, the affected neighborhoods, and the communities, with full transparency regarding water quality, independent audits, and real veto power over any project involving debt or private participation. This requires equitable distribution for all, together with the collective care of the resource. It is only possible in a sustained way as part of a broader struggle for the power of the working class: nationalizing water resources under workers’ control, breaking with the logic of concessions and business deals, and advancing the democratic planning of infrastructure based on social needs rather than profit.
The climate crisis and the environmental destruction caused by capitalism constitute a major threat to humanity. The situation in Guadalajara is a local example of how access to basic goods becomes precarious for the majority while the logic of accumulation is preserved. It is not only about improving SIAPA within the current order, but about building the social force capable of imposing collective control over water and over the economy as a whole.
Solidarity with those resisting in Guadalajara—and with all struggles for water and against environmental destruction in Latin America and the world—demands the independent organization of the working class and popular sectors, capable of imposing fundamental solutions beyond the promises of governments. It also demands the immediate release of all people detained for demanding clean water.
Clean water for everyone now!
Equitable distribution and care of water, no rotational cuts or shutoffs!
Water is not a business: workers’ and communities’ control over SIAPA!
No more water with excrement or heavy metals!
Immediate release of all people detained for demanding clean water!
Police out of the protests for clean water!
No privatization or public-private partnerships: public water under popular control!
The Las Pintas reservoir and canal and the old system contaminate, the government represses!
Independent organization of the neighborhoods and SIAPA workers!
Water for life and collective care, not for capital!
Socialists Without Borders
October 2026