Entering or leaving Guadalajara has become an ordeal. Construction is everywhere, and traffic jams on the city’s main roads can exceed 35 minutes. Accidents are frequent, and social protests are mounting, bringing the capital of Jalisco to a boiling point weeks before it hosts four World Cup matches. The sewage crisis, which has been affecting hundreds of thousands of residents for months, is the latest to compound other persistent problems in the city and its metropolitan area, home to five million people. Rising public transportation fares, complaints about the city’s “beautification” efforts, and a surge in measles cases in the state have increased the pressure on authorities who are seeing multiple challenges unfold less than 100 days before the start of the world’s biggest sporting event.

Water was the trigger. The disruptions in hundreds of neighborhoods, which received water of varying colors and foul odors, sparked a protest unlike anything seen before, not even after the massive security operation the city experienced during the federal forces’ hunt for the world’s most wanted drug trafficker, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho.”

The fear and terror of the roadblocks during the operation at the end of February have been overshadowed by complaints about poor water quality. On March 23, the governor of Jalisco, Pablo Lemus, removed Antonio Juárez and replaced him with his close collaborator Ismael Jáuregui as the new director of the Inter-Municipal System for Drinking Water and Sewer Services (SIAPA), the agency that has borne the brunt of criticism amid the crisis.

This week, Jáuregui donned a hard hat and vest with official logos and accompanied dozens of workers to clean the Las Huertas facility in Tlaquepaque, about 10 miles from downtown Guadalajara. There, he gave a lengthy assessment of the agency’s current state: bankrupt finances, low revenue collection, and nearly 300,000 accounts consuming water without paying. In his opinion, the infrastructure needs an investment of at least 80 billion pesos ($4.5 billion) to reach optimal conditions.

“But that’s impossible; we have to prioritize what’s most important. This administration’s objective is the replacement system [for the Chapala-Guadalajara aqueduct], the modernization of the Miravalle water treatment plant, improving distribution, and focusing on consolidating the flow coming through the Zapotillo reservoir, perhaps by increasing its volume,” Jáuregui summarized.

More than 60% of the water that reaches homes in the Guadalajara metropolitan area comes from Lake Chapala, Mexico’s largest lake, via two routes: an aqueduct that transports the water to the Miravalle water treatment plant and an open-air system that suffers volume losses along the way. The idea of ​​replacing this second route with a more modern canal is not new. At various times, the proposal has been met with public opposition, with residents complaining about the lack of studies and proper planning with sufficient technical assessments. The remaining water that does not come from Chapala is supplied through deep wells and the El Salto-La Red-Calderón aqueduct, part of the El Zapotillo distribution system.

On a tour of Las Pintas and Arroyo Seco, two tributaries that carry water to the treatment plants supplying the area, the amount of trash and debris floating in the water is noticeable. A wastewater discharge in Arroyo Seco, on the border between the municipalities of Tlajomulco and Tlaquepaque, stands out due to its volume and because it is actively flowing in plain sight. However, Járuegui assures that there is no danger to the population.

“The turbidity and odor will be greatly reduced with the cleaning of the tanks and the replacement of some components within the plants. We will see this in the coming days,” said the new director of the system. The official insists that the Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risks (CoprisJal) has already carried out its validations and reviews of the flow rates entering and leaving the treatment plants. “We are within the limits established by the regulations,” he said.

Dirty water in a city under construction

The Degollado Theater, in downtown Guadalajara, is surrounded by construction projects paid for with public funds. “All year long, we’ve had construction everywhere, much of it not functional. This plaza didn’t need fixing. The Plaza de la República at the intersection of Avenida México and Avenida Américas didn’t need fixing. The Minerva monument didn’t need fixing. An overpass at the intersection of Avenida Patria and Avenida Universidad didn’t need fixing,” says Juan Pablo Macías Salazar, a citizen activist, regarding the city’s economic waste in preparation for the World Cup.

The international business graduate still remembers when Enrique Alfaro, the governor who left office in December 2024, assured everyone that thanks to projects undertaken by his administration, the supply of drinking water was guaranteed for at least 50 years in Jalisco. Macías, whose father worked at SIAPA for many years and is very familiar with the system, questions that assertion: “There have been a series of omissions and poor decisions administration after administration, at least in the last 25 or 30 years. Several people and myself have demonstrated with figures that supply is not guaranteed for 50 years, and that while the Zapotillo dam project was completed, there is no certainty that it can provide the two cubic meters per second that Alfaro claimed. There is no hydrological study to support that.”

This activist now fears that the current water crisis will lead authorities to privatize the system. “We’ve already seen the experience of Cancún, Aguascalientes, and Puebla, where water was privatized, and it turned out very badly. Water cannot be privatized because it is a universal human right, and it cannot be treated as a commodity,” he says.

Sergio Garibi, one of the spokespeople for the residents of Colonia Americana, one of the affected neighborhoods, asserts that the situation remains unchanged despite the changes at SIAPA and the statements made by authorities. “They aren’t publishing scientific data. Since we don’t really know what the problems or pollutants are, and without a clear diagnosis, it’s very difficult to know whether the proposed projects should be undertaken; besides, they will all take years. What are we going to do for the next three years?” he asks.

The municipalities of El Salto and Juanacatlán also play a significant role in the water crisis. El Salto, located just over 20 miles from Guadalajara and with 230,000 inhabitants, has a vast industrial area and is considered one of the more than 50 environmental disaster zones that abound in Mexico.

Sofía Enciso, a member of the organization Un Salto de Vida (A Leap of Life), and several of her colleagues separate cotton seeds on a table. They cultivated these seeds near the Santiago River in El Salto. In this corner of the world, surrounded by goats, native trees, and a greenhouse, they conduct research, community work, and try to mitigate the harmful effects that this community has endured for decades. Near the river, a little over a mile away, a monumental stone wall, its markings revealing its age, contains the water that falls from different directions. Were it not for the strong odor and the color of its murky contents, it would pass for a dreamlike landscape.

Enrique Enciso, another member of the organization, used to bathe there more than 40 years ago and has witnessed the transformation of the area. Today, the river receives toxic waste from over 300 companies in the industrial corridor, as well as sewage from the Guadalajara metropolitan area.

For 20 years, Un Salto de Vida has been working through protests, meetings, and awareness campaigns to stop projects that harm the health of local residents. In 2022, they succeeded in closing a landfill, a site that received approximately 5,500 tons of waste daily. Currently, they maintain a project cultivating native tree species on a 4,000-square-meter plot in neighboring Juanacatlán. Enrique Enciso considers this his legacy for when his grandchildren ask him what he did in the face of the environmental catastrophe that surrounds him.

The price hike, public space and measles

But in Guadalajara, it’s not all about water. The protests last week also rejected the increase in public transportation fares. “No to the fare hike!” shouted dozens of people at a demonstration in Parque Revolución, better known as Parque Rojo. The price increase, which went into effect on April 1, raised the fare from 9.50 to 11 pesos. The government had proposed an increase to 14 pesos, but backtracked after a public outcry. There have been months of disputes and adjustments, but the public still believes the increase is unfair.

A couple of miles away, on Chapultepec Avenue, lined with trendy bars and restaurants, the World Cup playoff matches are being shown on giant screens. At the end of the avenue stands one of Guadalajara’s most emblematic monuments, the former roundabout of the Niños Héroes (Child Heroes), which activist groups have renamed the Glorieta de las y los Desaparecidos (Roundabout of the Disappeared). “They died for their country,” can still be read among the figures of several men, now splattered with lilac paint and graffiti. Newly laid tiles have been placed by the activist groups, who for a year have feared that their missing persons posters will be removed in a deliberate attempt by the authorities to give the city a clean and orderly appearance.

Jaime Aguilar, from the Guerreros Buscadores (Searching Warriors) collective in Jalisco, says that just a few hours ago, dirty water arrived at his house, something that hadn’t happened before in his neighborhood, and that the overall situation regarding disappearances in the state remains the same. “Things are still the same, disappearances continue to rise, and [forced] recruitment [by cartels] is the same,” he says. He emphasizes how the figures from Claudia Sheinbaum’s government, regarding its reinterpretation of the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons, presented on March 27, were received. “It was a slap in the face for us collectives,” he says.

In downtown Guadalajara, the landscape is also dominated by photographs of missing persons. They’re plastered all over the Government Palace, on the sidewalks of main streets, and on walls and buildings. Public space, in the lead-up to the World Cup, remains a battleground. Collectives like Aguilar’s continue to post these photographs, despite the local Congress’s attempt to ban them from unauthorized public spaces.

Furthermore, another problem looms over Jalisco. The wave of violence during the operation to capture El Mencho, coupled with social protests against contaminated water and the increase in public transportation fares, has hampered the local government’s efforts to curb the measles outbreak. Since the beginning of this year, Jalisco has led the country in reported cases. The latest bulletin from the Ministry of Health, dated April 3, indicates that 5,039 cases have been confirmed in the state so far in 2026, a figure rapidly approaching the total number of cases Mexico recorded in all of 2025 (6,460).

Vaccination stations have been set up in hospitals, but the apparent calm of the Easter holiday period means that, even though several dozen people visited each day, the fear of catching measles is far down on their list of concerns.

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Cantabria·La Cultura·Lead

Just a few weeks ago they were electricians in Miami. Or department managers at a multinational corporation. They were still fishing, just like they had for the last 30 years. They drove trucks. They owned an air conditioning company. They were collecting retirement benefits after a lifetime of work. And now? Now they look for a gap between the arcades, hang wet clothes to dry in a sink, open and close the doors of an Oxxo convenience store hoping for a few coins, celebrate the blankets that a kind neighbor gave them so they don’t have to sleep directly on the hard concrete floor, treasure worn papers, documents in the wrong language, and rely on promised money to buy a cell phone so they can call their families, who remained thousands of miles away, on the other side of the border.

They are in Tapachula, a city that for years functioned as an open-air prison for thousands of migrants who carried the weight of their travels and who now no longer arrive, frightened away by Donald Trump’s policies. That anti-immigrant strategy is the same one that has now reached them — Cubans with lives built in the United States. ICE, the U.S. immigration agency, tore them from their homes and dumped them here, in a poor city in Mexico’s poorest state. Many dream of returning; they plead, they wait. Others, with wrinkled eyes, complain: “I cry at night, I cry in the morning. Look around you, we’re all old, what are we going to do here?” asks Lázaro Ballesteros, who spent 47 of his 53 years in Miami.

Mexico accepts deported foreigners from the United States as a “safe third country.” Under the Biden administration, an agreement was reached to receive 30,000 per month (Nicaraguans, Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans who had crossed the border illegally). Now, under Trump, there is no quota, at least not publicly. However, Federal Judge William G. Young stated in a ruling that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) informed him that, based on an “unwritten agreement,” it deported 6,000 Cubans to Mexico in the last year. According to Tapachula authorities, most of these deportees in 2026 have arrived in Tapachula and Villahermosa. This newspaper has asked the National Institute of Migration (INM) about these figures, as well as why these two locations were chosen as receiving destinations, but has not received a response.

The decision to send them to Tapachula caught by surprise local authorities already seasoned in dealing with people in transit and migrant caravans. “It’s a completely new situation for which no one was prepared. We’re worried,” acknowledges Denisse Lugardo, director of International Relations and Cross-Border Development. She admits they are still awaiting instructions from the state or federal government. No one notified them that the Cubans, who have been arriving by the dozens in INM trucks from the northern border for the past couple of months, were being sent there — a three-day road trip.

Now, with the help of activist Luis Villagrán, these Cubans are fighting for legal protection to obtain a humanitarian visa, which would allow them to reside and move freely within Mexico, given their stateless status. The city council is aware of the initiative and supports it: “It’s one of the primary conditions of vulnerability; in that case, it’s absolutely essential that COMAR (the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) or the INM grant them the visa.” For the U.S. government, “their deportation to Cuba has been considered impractical, inadvisable, or impossible.” “They told me at the Arizona detention center: ‘Cuba won’t accept you,’” says 63-year-old Jesús Gutiérrez. Niorje Rodríguez even attempted the journey to the island from Tapachula: he went to the immigration office and asked to be deported to his country: “Instead, they sent me to Guatemala. From there I came back, crossing the river, and here I am, sick, sleeping on the street.”

Cuba, which is mired in its worst crisis in decades, evokes mixed feelings in these men. Most left as children, some fleeing the Castro regime, others simply out of poverty. Many no longer know anyone in the country, but some plead to be sent back to see their ailing mother one last time or embrace a brother after 40 years. If neither the United States nor Cuba is an option, many seek at least to reach Cancún, where a network of Cubans is being established; or to some other country where they can work and support themselves. “Here, I can’t find a job I can do at my age. Sometimes, when I’m desperate, I unload 100-pound sacks from trucks, but I’m in a lot of pain the next day,” says Eduardo Soto, 62. Others, like William Herrero, 54, got hold of a thermos and make coffee in the morning to distribute throughout the day, charging 10 pesos (less than a dollar). Lázaro Ballesteros, who describes himself as a “professional tile maker,” bought fishing gear: “There aren’t any fish here. Nothing moves here. What there is here is poverty.”

Arsenio Chirino, 76

He limps through the central park carrying an empty water bottle and the food left behind by another man: “So it doesn’t get stolen,” he explains. He poses sadly for photos, after remembering Mateo, the six-year-old grandson he cared for in recent years and whom he hasn’t seen in seven months. Arsenio Chirino is 76 years old, has had heart surgery, and suffers from high blood pressure. He tires easily in this tropical heat, eats little and poorly, sleeps on the ground, and begs, by any means necessary, for someone to send him back: “I’m old now, I don’t want to die here.”

He remembers the day he arrived in the United States, on May 5, 1980, better than the day he was deported to Mexico. ICE detained him, like almost everyone else, while he was signing the revocation of his deportation order. He was imprisoned when he was already an old man, accused of drug possession, a crime he insists he didn’t commit. Be that as it may, he paid for it for seven years. In September he was sent to Villahermosa, the other destination for deportees from third countries. But five months later — he doesn’t know why — the INM transferred him to Tapachula, along with a young man and a man in a wheelchair. In the state capital of Tabasco, he thinks he was somewhat better off because he found a shelter nearby; here in Tapachula they are far from the city center, and in that isolation “he’s filled with thoughts and sadness,” which is why he prefers the streets. His last request is frank: he doesn’t want to die, after a lifetime working as an electrician in the U.S., in a place where he doesn’t know a soul.

Rolando Tito Vega, 50

“What are you doing in Mexico?” the lawyer asked Rolando Tito Vega when he called her two months ago for help. He’s still asking himself the same question. It was January 9 and he was working in his office as a department manager when ICE showed up. They were supposedly looking for him because of a 25-year-old sanction for which he hadn’t even served time and for which he had already received a pardon. It didn’t matter. In 11 days, he was already on the Arizona-Mexico border: “They offered me a federal prison to wait for my case to be resolved, but I’m not going to jail for something I didn’t do. So they took me to Mexico.” He says a judge has acknowledged the error, but now the U.S. government is demanding a $9,400 fine (“as if I had left the country voluntarily”) to return. It’s money he still doesn’t have. He has five children in Miami, where he has lived since 1995. They now run the air conditioning business he started and help him survive in Tapachula.

Juan Carlos Rodríguez and Jesús Gutiérrez, 44 and 63

Last Wednesday, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, a chef by trade, didn’t feel like cooking anything. So he went down to buy some tamales at the entrance of the hotel in downtown Tapachula where he lives with Jesús Gutiérrez. He paid for them, went back upstairs, and said that immigration officials had asked for his documents; he’d bring them down quickly and be right back for lunch. Minutes passed, and nothing happened. When Gutiérrez, worried, went down to the street, he found Juan Carlos already inside one of the INM’s vans. Without any explanation, the federal agency had conducted a raid and taken Juan Carlos from the first floor, three Haitian women with their children from the second, and another young Cuban man from the third. They were released, without further ado, a few days later.

The Siglo XXI center is the third immigration detention center that Juan Carlos, 44, has been in during the last six months. He was arrested on September 12 in the streets of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, on his way to work at a Puerto Rican restaurant where he was one of the chefs. He was flown directly to Alligator Alcatraz and held for 86 days. There, he was told he would be sent to Mexico, but he refused to sign the deportation papers. He spent another two months in an Arizona jail until February 9, when they were taken to Mexico. “Many of my companions didn’t want to get on the trucks to come here. They were beaten, subdued, and then forced on,” he recounts. It was in Tapachula where he met Jesús, and they rented an apartment together in the hotel for 12,000 pesos a month (about $650), with the money their families send them. “All my life paying taxes, income tax, licenses…,” says Gutiérrez: “Only to end up here.”

William Herrera, 54

William Herrera says his family crossed the 200 miles from Villa Clara, Cuba, to Key West, Florida, on March 11, 1994: “When Fidel said anyone who wanted to could leave.” He was 22 years old at the time and did the same work he did back home: fishing. A year after arriving in the U.S., a wood-shredding machine took off the fingers of his right hand, but he continued working “on the boats” and “preparing fish” for 30 years. Because of a felony he committed in his youth, he spent years traveling to Miami to sign the revocation of his deportation order. He was never arrested again for anything. In October 2025, he was detained at the courthouse and transferred, like most of the others, to the infamous Alligator Alcatraz, the migrant detention center built by Trump that has accumulated dozens of complaints of human rights abuses. “It’s terrible in there,” Herrera says. “It’s a cage,” Eduardo Soto adds: “You’re with 32 other people inside a cell all day, you only get out to eat three times a day and to shower on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Nothing else.”

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