Rehabilitating El Agua de la Revolución

The chapter tells the paradoxical story of the short-term envirotechnical success of the federal government’s grand rehabilitation plan for the Laguna’s economy in the 1960s and 1970s. Even while técnicos enthusiastically implemented the plan via land concentration, the concrete lining of canals, and the building of a second smaller dam on the Nazas, they also accurately predicted the negative medium- and long-term social and ecological consequences these measures would have. Most notably, they anticipated accelerated aquifer contamination and depletion that could endanger public health. Possessing an unbridled faith that deploying yet more invasive technology to solve the problems caused by previous technological deployments, they effectively ignored their own prognostication of its adverse consequences.