BACANUCHI, Sonora — The makeshift town hall was packed by the time Mayor Vidal Vázquez arrived. The residents of this small town of a few hundred people, which shares the name with the nearby river where millions of gallons of toxic solution were dumped, had been waiting for him.
A few sat in plastic chairs; most stood against the wall or sat on boxes of bottled water. Those outside strained to get a look through the windows.
Nearly two months after the Aug. 6 and 7 copper mine spill, which was followed by heavy rains brought by Hurricane Odile that further contaminated the land, residents are frustrated and feel as though they’ve been forgotten.
“This is the town that’s worse off, and no one is doing anything about it,” said a man in a blue baseball cap. “How is it possible that in nearly two months they are digging wells in other places but not here?”
Vázquez explained what the federal, state and local governments are doing.
“Remember, when you told me there was a spill, I got on my horse; it took me two hours,” he said, “but I went to check it out and reported it to the authorities.”
Vázquez was referring to a second spill, after rains from Odile caused the dams to overflow.
He also told them about a new committee that all the mayors, the government and the mine’s owners, Grupo Mexico, are part of.
They will oversee the $150 million trust Grupo Mexico established to begin covering damages.
Farmers will get about $700 per acre of land up to approximately 25 acres.
They will also get about $1,000 for up to 41 head of cattle and $27 for each additional head, up to 300.
None of this sat well with the community, many of them ejidatarios who work the communal land, nor with the Cananea attorney they hired to represent them.
They wanted to know if it was going to be an amount given to them annually or a one-time payment only. Vidal didn’t know.
“This is not fair,” some said, shaking their heads.
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The spill at the Buenavista Copper Mine has directly affected almost 25,000 people in 36 communities. Bacanuchi, the town closest to the spill, is probably one of the hardest to reach.
From the head of the county of Arizpe, it is a nearly five-hour drive. Not because of its distance from the main town, but because there’s only one working road that takes visitors through the city of Cananea.
The last two hours or so are driven on a dirt road only accessible after mine employees question drivers and passengers and radio in before opening metal mesh doors.
After heavy rains, as the ones seen in September, the road becomes impassible. Residents said they couldn’t leave or come into the town for about five days.
The tanker trucks carrying thousands of liters of water for the town’s communal water tanks couldn’t make it either.
While communities further down the river may get running water twice a day, residents here are lucky if they get it once a day, maybe for half an hour.
They were not asking for drinking water, the residents told Vázquez, they had plenty of five-gallon water jugs in a room next to where the meeting was held.
They worry about what’s going to happen next.
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The impact of the spill is felt throughout the town.
People don’t have to own land or cattle to be impacted.
Agustin Medina works for an area rancher, while his wife, Natalia Leyba, supplements their income selling homemade tortillas and bread.
Their backyard is covered with peach and quince trees, as well as corn, beans, squash and green beans they haven’t been able to water since the wells were closed. If it doesn’t rain soon, they might lose all of it.
And if people don’t have money to spend, they won’t have money to buy her goods .
The local governments and Grupo Mexico have created jobs for area residents so they can earn some money and to give them something to do.
Leyba is among about a dozen residents who work cleaning the streets of Bacanuchi for $11 a day. Others were hired to clean up the river or distribute water.
She gets up every morning at about 4 a.m., the crowing roosters seem to call out to each other, their song coming and going in waves as Leyba starts her day with the Milky Way still in the sky.
She makes flour tortillas daily for bean burritos to sell and for her children’s breakfast.
A little before 6:30 a.m., she grabs her baseball cap and a long-sleeve shirt and heads out until the late afternoon while her husband goes off to the ranch and her children to school.
“Not everyone gets to shower every day,” Medina said. There’s not enough water for the 10 of them.
There are no large grocery stores, restaurants or even a gas station in town. The main street is a dirt road, muddy and rutted.
On Monday, Medina was debating whether to even go to work.
His truck was low on gas and he was afraid of running out when it comes time for his daughter-in-law to give birth. The nearest hospital is in Cananea.
There’s no cellphone signal either, unless you climb a hill. There’s some Internet connection in the schools, where teens go at night to check Facebook, but it can be spotty.
Still, they’ve never had it as hard as now, Medina said. “Who knows if this will get fixed.”
Residents said analysts have come to take samples, but they’ve never returned to say exactly what’s in their water and soil. Being the community closest to the spill, it is possible that the contamination is worse there.
“This is a community that is at a great disadvantage,” said Alicia Miramon, a Tucson resident. “Not only do politicians rarely come, but when they do, they don’t really explain to people in basic terms what’s going on.”
Miramon was in Bacanuchi last weekend celebrating her father’s 66th birthday. Both of her parents are originally from Bacanuchi and decided to move back when they retired after decades of living in Tucson.
“They practically can’t do anything with their land and they don’t know how long it will last. Through other means we’ve heard it can be as much as 10 years,” she said. “People are desperate.”
