Latin America’s Thirsty Future Runs Through Avocados, Mines, And Memory
From Mexican monarch butterflies to Chilean deserts and Colombian mines, a new book follows water’s invisible trail across Latin America, exposing how luxury avocados, privatized rivers, and data centers are quietly rewriting the region’s map of power, profit, and survival.
Butterflies, Avocados, And A Murder In Michoacán
In Mexico’s mountains, where millions of monarch butterflies descend each autumn to paint the forests of Michoacán in trembling orange, a man known as “the guardian of the butterflies” vanished and was later found dead. His name was Homero Gómez González, and his unsolved murder in 2020 became the dark entry point for a remarkable chronicle about water, violence, and inequality in Latin America.
That story anchors Agua, the new book by Polish journalist Szymon Opryszek, published in Spanish by Itineraria and distributed in Spain and across Latin America after its original release in Polish in 2023. In an interview with EFE in Madrid, Opryszek explains that Homero’s struggle to protect the El Rosario sanctuary from illegal logging gave him a way to tell a global story from a small, human vantage point. “The story of Homer allowed me to write about global problems from a small perspective, at a micro scale,” he says.
Opryszek, born in 1987 and awarded by Amnesty International in 2021, had already written two books on Latin America, always through a human rights lens, when he noticed a pattern running quietly through his work. “I realized that in all those topics there was water, not in the foreground, but as a secondary actor,” he tells EFE. Agua is his attempt to push that actor to the center stage.
Homero’s fight to save the monarch butterflies from chainsaws is only the beginning. In the same region of Michoacán, another force has reshaped the landscape and the violence: avocados. The “green gold” boom has turned orchards into contested territory for organized crime, and the book pulls on that thread too, asking who gets water when the world demands perfect fruit on toast.
When Luxury Fruit Drinks Latin America Dry
To produce a single kilo of avocados, at least six hundred liters of water are needed, Opryszek notes in Agua. Demand in the West has exploded, and China has joined the craze with even greater intensity; in just one decade, Chinese consumption has multiplied by a factor of 1,000. “It is a symbol of luxury, a fashion among Instagram influencers,” he points out in his conversation with EFE, emphasizing the hidden water costs behind this trend.
He argues that the environmental damage linked to avocados reflects a broader issue of shared responsibility, reminding readers that the problems of green gold also apply to soy in Argentina or beef everywhere, encouraging collective awareness and action.
For him, the answer begins with responsibility on two levels. Individually, consumers in the Global North and in rising middle classes elsewhere need to understand that every “healthy” trend carries a hidden water price. Collectively, societies must push for more sustainable agricultural models, because “agriculture consumes more than 70 percent of the world’s fresh water,” he emphasizes.
“My book is a cry for moderation,” Opryszek summarizes. “It seems that our religion is growing, and we want more, stronger, faster. We have to change this idea. We cannot grow any more.”
A Thirsty Megacity And The Patriarchy Of Water
The pages of Agua move far beyond Michoacán. One of the places that haunts Opryszek most is Mexico City, a metropolis he describes as “hostage to its own thirst.” Tanker trucks, or cisternas, have become a symbol of inequality across the Global South, rolling into poor neighborhoods to sell water that is, on average, ten times more expensive than what arrives through urban pipe systems.
In the Mexican capital, the absurdities pile up. Around half of the city’s pipes leak, Opryszek reports, wasting massive amounts of treated water. At the same time, the town pumps untreated wastewater out toward the neighboring state of Hidalgo, sending what he calls the largest concentration of untreated sewage in Latin America into rivers and fields.
Behind these failures, the author sees not only technical mismanagement but structural injustice. He points out what he calls the “patriarchy of water”: in 80 percent of households worldwide without access to safe drinking water, women are responsible for fetching it. This gendered burden involves hours of walking, heavy loads, exposure to harassment and violence, and long-term health problems, making water scarcity a social justice issue that affects women most deeply.
The inequality is not just geographic or class-based; it is gendered, etched into the backs and routines of women who are forced to carry the cost of a thirsty world.
Chile’s Privatized Rivers, Colombia’s Toxic Mines, And Data Thirst
If Mexico offers a stark picture of scarcity and mismanagement, Chile pushes the story into outright absurdity. Since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the country has become, as Opryszek stresses, “the only country in the world that privatizes” water supply. Drinking water prices there are the highest in Latin America, and the logic of the market reaches all the way to rivers.
During his reporting, the journalist went through the motions of trying to “buy a river,” not because he wanted to own one, but to demonstrate how far the commodification of water has gone. In Agua, he follows the water footprint of copper mines and the emerging lithium boom in the Atacama Desert, where even so-called green energy carries a high hidden cost. “Even in the case of green energy, we must think about the consequences,” he warns.
The book also crosses into Colombia, where the global hunger for energy has revived old extractive patterns after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Spain and other European countries resumed importing coal from Colombian mines. Near the giant El Cerrejón complex, Opryszek documents dangerous levels of mercury and lead in local water sources, poisoning Indigenous communities who have seen their rivers transformed into polluted channels serving distant power plants.
His investigation does not stop at traditional industries. Opryszek walks readers through the silent explosion of data centers around the world—facilities with enormous cooling needs and almost no regulation. As social networks grow and artificial intelligence expands, these digital fortresses demand more and more water for refrigeration, often in places already struggling with drought.
Opryszek insists he is no fan of panic. He tells EFE he still believes that change is possible, “even if only on a micro scale.” Local communities, legal reforms, and personal choices can all push in the right direction. But his closing message is undeniably dark. “We have had twenty-one centuries to learn that water is essential, and we have done nothing,” he concludes.
Between murdered butterfly guardians, booming avocado orchards, privatized rivers, and thirsty servers humming in the desert, Agua forces readers to see Latin America’s water not as a backdrop, but as the main character in a story that will decide who gets to live well—and who is left counting empty buckets.
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