U.S.-Mexican Groundwater Problems: Bilateral Prospects and Implications

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Abstract
Obscured amid the headline issues of illegal aliens, drug smuggling, and the Mexican petroleum bonanza, yet another controversy is nascent in U.S.-Mexican relations the dispute over common groundwaters underlying the frontier zone. This dispute, with roots in the recent salinity accords of 1973, emerges as the latest phase in the long history of water resource controversies exacerbating problems between the two nations.Until recently, the history of U.S.-Mexican water relations had been one of preoccupation with the capture and distribution of shared surface waters. The present dispute thus marks a distinctive evolution in bilateral relations. Moreover, just as the groundwater issue is new, it also points to the complexity of the transboundary ecology and the special problems of interdependence. Only since World War II, for instance, have the full implications of the area's groundwater hydrology been appreciated with respect to such matters as quality, distribution, and movement.

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