By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

COLONIA ANAPRA, Mexico –– Ruben Segura, mayor of tiny Sunland Park, N.M., looked through a chain-link border fence into this city of shacks, where
thousands of people live without running water, and he had an idea.

Why not give them some water?

Sunland Park is a blue-collar community of 13,000 where many people live in mobile homes or modest ranch houses, and everyone has access to running water and
flush toilets.

Anapra, filled with Mexican migrants who work in maquiladora factories and live in tin shanties, has no running water or sewers. Instead, people here get by on
trucked-in water and endure open pits of human waste and the constant threat of water-borne disease.

To Segura, the son of a Mexican mother and an American father, sharing with Anapra seemed no more radical than passing the water pitcher at the family dinner
table. But the idea soon succumbed to a web of the kinds of complications that arise every day along the border where two large countries are trying to share a small
supply of water.

Conflicts over access to a clean, cheap and sufficient supply of water are becoming a defining feature of life along the 2,100-mile U.S.-Mexico border, and of
relations across it. While for many outsiders the border is synonymous with drug trafficking and illegal immigration, when people who live here talk about
confrontation between Mexicans and Americans, or tension between urban areas and farmers, or cooperation to solve problems, the dominant subject is water.

Thousands of factories and millions of people migrating to both sides of the border in recent years have put intense pressure on the water supply. Drinking-water
supplies are running dangerously low. In the cross-border megacity of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, officials say the main aquifer is in danger of being
exhausted in the next 25 years. Water is so precious that builders of a new El Paso high school were harshly criticized for planting too much grass.

Human and industrial waste have polluted water and raised disease levels to much higher than national averages in both nations. A dispute over agricultural water
rights in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, on the eastern reaches of the border, is threatening to explode into a diplomatic confrontation between Mexico and the United
States at a time of unusually warm relations.

"Fresh water is going to be the key resource challenge of the 21st century on the border," said David E. Lorey, a border specialist at the Hewlett Foundation in
Menlo Park, Calif. "People are going to wake up to this very fast. Within the next decade it's going to be front-page news every day."

Water has always been a prime concern along this vast stretch of land, some of it empty as an echo and some of it poisonously overcrowded, at the intersection of
the world's richest nation and another struggling to lift itself out of poverty.

The border area gets precious little rainfall and draws water from a few key rivers--mainly the Colorado in the west and the Rio Grande in the east--and a few
underground aquifers. Even before the current growth, the region had barely enough water and inadequate infrastructure, especially on the Mexican side where such
basic services as sewage treatment were virtually nonexistent.

Rush to Border Now Mexican and American workers are flooding to the border at gold-rush pace, with about 1.8 million new residents in counties and cities on
both sides in the last five years. Paul Ganster, of the San Diego-based Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy, said the border's current estimated
population is about 12.3 million, with about 6.5 million on the U.S. side and 5.8 million on the Mexican side. Those figures are expected to double in the next 20
years.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the border cities of Laredo and McAllen, Tex., grew faster in the last decade than any metropolitan region in the United
States except Las Vegas. The growth has brought hundreds of thousands of new jobs and increased trade between the United States and Mexico to more than $200
billion a year.

Since the 1994 enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the region's dizzying growth has made its problems more obvious. New
development makes old border town decay look even seedier, flashy new wealth makes Anapra and other vast pockets of poverty seem even more left behind, the
massive new shopping malls of McAllen butting up against the crumbling neglect of Reynosa, Mexico, make the nations' economic divide startling and clear.

In the ragged hills of Anapra, across the border from Sunland Park, water is trucked in by the city and pumped into open 50-gallon drums sitting in dirty front yards.
Between 10,000 and 25,000 squatters--no one is sure how many live here--are willing to manage without running water for jobs in the maquiladora plants
assembling televisions and CD players.

The jobs are bringing people like Braulio Munoz, who lives in a one-room concrete shack in Anapra. His drinking water comes from a concrete cistern foul with dirt
and debris. To relieve himself, Munoz walks across a plank to a shared outhouse perched over an open pit of stinking human waste.

"We breathe the same air and we drink the same water," said Segura, the Sunland Park mayor. "We cannot shy away from the reality that they are living in a
desperate situation."

A Dream Job But Munoz, a 53-year-old father of eight, has what he wants. A month after leaving his village in southern Mexico where he was a farmhand, he now
works in a brand-new factory that makes appliance motors, where he has air conditioning, a five-day work week, free lunch, a free bus ride to work and double his
old salary.

"It's like a dream for me; it's wonderful," said Munoz, proudly showing off his laminated employee I.D. card. "I would like to have water to take a shower. But I have
work, and that's what I care about most."

On both sides of the border, booming populations have caused water quality to deteriorate. U.S. health officials say the rates of two water-borne diseases, hepatitis
A and shigellosis, along the U.S. side are three times the national average. Things are far worse in Mexico. Ciudad Juarez reports about 650 cases of hepatitis A a
year, almost 10 times the rate in El Paso.

Today, disease is particularly a threat in Anapra and the many poor colonia neighborhoods on both sides of the border, where new arrivals often live without running
water or sewers. Only a handful of communities on the Mexican side have sewage treatment; none of those systems would meet U.S. health standards.

Ciudad Juarez, the largest city on the Mexican side and growing by about 60,000 residents a year, opened its first two sewage treatment plants only this year.
Before, raw waste from its 1.2 million people was simply pumped into canals. The new plants have improved that mess, but they still provide only basic treatment
that does not remove many industrial and chemical contaminants.

Juarez's treated sewage still flows into canals, which carry stinking "black waters" 50 miles into the farmlands south of the city. Farmers who use the water for crop
irrigation say it is so contaminated with industrial chemicals that they can no longer grow fruit and vegetables for human consumption.

"Water is the absolute prime consideration for our future," said Laurance Nickey, former health director in El Paso and presidential appointee to a binational
commission studying border health issues.

"We share everything: air, water, hazardous waste, pollution, infectious disease," Nickey said. "What affects one side of the border affects the other. Transportation
being what it is, if there is a large outbreak of hepatitis A in Reynosa, it can travel with the trucks up to Houston, to Chicago, to New York."

To answer criticism that NAFTA would only make the border's health and environmental problems worse, the governments of Mexico and the United States created
and funded the North American Development Bank to improve water and sewer works near the border.

The bank finances municipal infrastructure plans with direct loans or by arranging private financing or public grants from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the
past five years, 42 projects worth about $1 billion have been approved, and 27 of those have been completed or are under construction.

Critics say the money has been too little, too late, and private companies who own maquiladora plants--many of them American--are not assuming enough of the
responsibility for disposing of waste and cleaning up the water.

But others say the magnitude of the problem was difficult to predict, and progress is being made to alleviate environmental damage.

"Maybe the experts didn't expect this success," said Juan Hernandez, Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox's chief adviser on border issues. "Why haven't we built
more bridges? Why haven't we made passage of trucks more efficient? We've been slow in getting infrastructure set up."

Water shortages are causing havoc for Mexican and American farmers working at least 2 million acres of land in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Farmers say water
scarcity has cost them at least $2.5 billion in the last five years. They are planting fewer acres and switching from more lucrative fruits and vegetables to plants such as
cotton and sorghum, which require less water. Industrial pollutants are also killing crops.

Water Dispute Officials in Washington and Mexico City are currently sparring over a water dispute in the valley. Mexico has withheld more than 450 billion gallons in
the past seven years that it was supposed to give to the United States through controlled releases from a series of dams and reservoirs under a 1944 treaty splitting
up the waters of the Rio Grande. Mexico argues that a drought has made it impossible to deliver the water, but the Americans contend that Mexico is simply
withholding it to provide for its own fast-growing industry.

"I can't make my farm work without water; nobody can," said Jack Harbison Jr., 51, standing near a farmhouse built by his grandfather in 1927 in tiny Elsa, Tex., not
far from McAllen. Profits from his family farm have been cut almost in half in the last five years, and neighbors have gone out of business. The farmers say the U.S.
government has not pressed Mexico aggressively enough on the water issue.

"People here are upset. Your work all your life and you lose everything you had; it's not good," Harbison said. The U.S. government "is always telling us, 'manana,
manana.' Well, tomorrow's here and we've got to do something now."

Twenty miles due south across the Rio Grande, farmer Javier Hinojosa of Rio Bravo, Mexico, looks out at his 220-acre farm in the parched flatlands. His fields used
to yield him an annual crop of corn and vegetables worth about $240,000. But this year it was worth less than $40,000.

His Rancho Santa Maria is a dusty, crumbling mess. A house where busy farmhands once bunked down is abandoned; its roof has fallen in. His aging tractors are
rusting in the yard because Hinojosa cannot afford to maintain them. Yet only a few miles away sit gleaming new maquiladoras owned by Panasonic and Sony and
other big international corporations.

Compounding the farmers' problem, the region has suffered a drought for the last six years, and the Mexican government has diverted water to Monterrey, a
showcase high-tech city 140 miles to the southwest. Farmers here say that 80 percent of the water they once used for irrigation now goes to Monterrey instead.

Many farmers have abandoned their land, and their sons and daughters have gone off to work in maquiladora factories. While those jobs pay well, they say it is unfair
that their way of life has been sacrificed to industrial development.

"Even if my son is a little better off working in his maquiladora, he is doing something he doesn't like," said Juan Manuel Flores de Leon, a Mexican farmer in Rio
Bravo, who recently gave up his 25-acre farm near the border for lack of water.

"It has all changed because of water," he said. "Without water, you're dead."

                                                   © 2000 The Washington Post