U.S. Dismisses Mexico’s Plan to Ease Water Debt

Mexico offered to deliver 32 billion gallons of its huge water debt to the United States over the next four months, but the Bush administration dismissed the proposal as too little relief for drought-stricken Texas farmers, U.S. officials said Friday.

The offer was part of Mexican President Vicente Fox’s much-awaited plan for settling a conflict that is testing his friendship with President Bush and becoming a major point of friction between the neighboring countries.

A high-level Mexican delegation outlined the plan Thursday to U.S. officials in Washington. The dispute, aggravated by a decade-old drought afflicting thousands of farmers on both sides of the border, is so sensitive that neither side would speak publicly about the substance of the talks.

American officials said privately that the Mexican payback offer was less than one-third of what they had proposed. Both sides said they would restudy the issue and meet again soon.

Under a 1944 treaty, Mexico owes the United States more than 480 billion gallons, enough to supply the city of Los Angeles for more than two years. The treaty obliges Mexico to turn over 114 billion gallons a year where six Mexican tributaries flow into the Rio Grande. That water is measured and stored at two Texas reservoirs, which have been drained to about 15% of their capacity.

Mexico’s public position is that the country has no obligation to begin repaying the debt until late September, the start of a new five-year treaty period. Fox, who inherited the water debt from two predecessors, is under pressure from parched Mexican communities and some border governors to wait.

But he is also under diplomatic counter-pressure because farmers in Bush’s home state of Texas are facing crop failure in a state election year. Bush has telephoned Fox twice about the debt in the last month. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met his Mexican counterpart, Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda, in Barbados this week, the first thing Powell said was, “Water, water, water,” according to U.S. officials.

In Thursday’s talks, Washington demanded 32 billion gallons of immediate relief, an additional 82 billion gallons between now and Sept. 26, and repayment of the remaining water debt in phases over the next five years, U.S. officials said.

Instead, they said, the Mexicans offered 32 billion gallons by Sept. 26 and asked for $100 million in U.S. loans to build a water system that would reduce Mexico’s losses of irrigation and waste water through leakage and evaporation.

“It’s a tough issue,” one U.S. official said.