Mexico City — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known by his acronym AMLO, will discuss the lack of water in the country’s northern Nuevo León state with Elon Musk during their discussion about the installation of a Tesla plant in the country, and propose options in central and southeastern Mexico for the electric vehicle manufacturer.
AMLO said during his morning press conference on Monday that the state of Nuevo León, governed by the opposition Movimiento Ciudadano party, is affected by droughts, and has high industrial and residential water consumption.
“The only thing we want to say to the directors of the company [Tesla] is that we also want orderly growth. There are already places in the country where there is not enough water, and we have to take care of water for domestic consumption, and one of the states that has problems due to a lack of water is Nuevo León,” the president told the press.
He also pointed out that companies trading with the US and which are installed in Mexico’s northern border states face “water-supply stress”.
AMLO said that one of the options for the Tesla plant is the state of Hidalgo, located north of Mexico City and close to the Felipe Angeles International Airport (AIFA), but also the country’s southeast, the region with the most poverty in Mexico, but with the greatest availability of water in the country.
“Seventy percent of the country’s water, it must be said, is in the southeast,” he said, and particularly toward the Gulf of Mexico.
The president recalled the case of the Constellation Brands brewery that planned to build a plant in Baja California, but finally negotiated with AMLO to install it in the state of the eastern, Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, in 2021.
“I am going to talk to the directors. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard is talking with Finance Minister Rogelio Ramírez de la O to order to see where we can guarantee we have water, electricity, and to not continue to overexploiting aquifers,” AMLO told the press.
