The 1,900-mile Rio Grande starts as a trickle in the Colorado Mountains and ends at the southernmost tip of Texas before it empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
The river is now dying.
That’s the argument made by journalist Jack Herrera in his Texas Monthly article, “The War for the Rio Grande.”
Herrera spent seven months traveling along the river with photographer Jordan Vonderhaar to document how communities along the border are coping with the ongoing decline.
Herrera, a Laredo native and former contributor of Texas Monthly, said the connection to the river is personal.
“That river has watered and fed generations of my family for hundreds of years,” he said. “This river is dying, this river is shrinking, and I might be the last in over 200 years of Herreras to see this river flow big and healthy through Laredo.”
The river has long pitted Mexico and the U.S. against each other, each pointing blame for what is owed under a decades-old international water treaty.
Herrera, a political enterprise reporter for the Washington Post, said the fight for the resource has already led to violence in Mexico.
“To say we’re in a water war is not a metaphor,” Herrera said. “This is guns and bullets and blood and guts. People are willing to fight for this water. We are at a time in our history where blood is being shed over these dwindling pools of water resources.”
