YAQUI VALLEY, Mexico – More than a decade after a court ruling that an aqueduct violated the Yaqui tribe’s rights, the Mexican government has done nothing in response, say locals. The Independencia Aqueduct, which supplies water to several cities in the state of Sonora, is one of several projects the government has constructed along the Yaqui River’s course. The aqueduct transfers around 60 million cubic meters (2.1 billion cubic feet) of water from the El Novillo Dam in the municipality of San José de Gracia, outside the tribe’s territory in the upper Yaqui River, to the nearby city of Hermosillo. The Yaqui people have long struggled to preserve the Yaqui River, which is sacred to the Indigenous tribe and has been drained of all its waters in their territory after decades of overexploitation, unequal water distribution and droughts. For years, the Mexican government has tried to take greater control of the river by constructing dams and aqueducts that restrict its flow, with the first being the Lázaro Cárdenas (La Angostura) Dam in 1943. Mario Luna Romero, a Yaqui water defender and spokesperson for the tribe, told Mongabay that the 172-kilometer (107-mile) aqueduct was approved in 2010 without the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of the affected Yaqui tribe, even though the project would affect their water supply. “The real impacts of the project were never really evaluated,” Ursula Garzón Aragón, an environmental lawyer from the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (CEMDA), told Mongabay over a phone call. “Not just…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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