By Estefanía Camacho
“And just for a second, while picturing her loved ones back home in New York, she forgot where she was and opened her mouth.”
There is a scene in Sex and the City: The Movie in which one of the characters, Charlotte, avoids drinking tap water or eating certain foods in Mexico at all costs because of the stereotype that every foreigner who visits the country, inevitably gets sick. It is a thing, and it’s colloquially called Montezuma’s revenge, although it is usually mild and short-lived.
What these fears often overlook is that simply leaving your routine and the familiar circle of your own microbiome can make your body more sensitive. New foods, different bacteria, changes in climate, stress, travel itself: all of these can affect digestion.
On the other hand, the idea that a few drops of shower water will immediately send someone running to the bathroom is wildly exaggerated. It is true that people in Mexico generally do not drink tap water, not because of a stereotype, but because water coming through municipal systems is often not considered safe for consumption in much of the country, there are some exceptions but there are as well information gaps.
You would likely have to drink an actual glass of untreated tap water to experience discomfort and, again, it would rarely be serious.
Most Mexicans who have family roots in rural areas or the countryside have at least one older relative who talks about drinking directly from a stream coming down the mountain, from a well, a nearby river, a reservoir, or even melted snow in higher elevations. For many families, this was not some distant past. In some places, it still isn’t.
The Four Reasons That Built Mexico’s Bottled Water Industry
Cities followed a different story.
After the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the idea spread that the city’s pipes could no longer safely carry drinking water. In many ways, this was true. Decades of neglected infrastructure collapsed alongside buildings, and parts of the system remained damaged for years. Yet the reconstruction of reliable drinking water systems never fully arrived.
Mexico’s National Water Commission (Conagua) describes the earthquake as an accelerator of the bottled water industry:
“After the earthquake there was no water in many people’s homes. There were people in the streets. There was no water pressure. The biggest problem at the time was that there was no drinking water. In some homes there was a bad smell — the smell of contamination. The pipes had broken and the water was contaminated, so people couldn’t drink water from the tap.”
The earthquake became the first of four major factors cited by researchers that created the conditions for the bottled water boom. Today, Mexico is one of the world’s largest consumers of bottled water, reaching approximately 286 liters per person each year.
The remaining factors came later. The cholera epidemic between 1991 and 1999 further cemented public distrust in municipal water supplies. Economic crises during the same period made infrastructure investments more difficult, while aggressive marketing by bottled water companies transformed bottled water from an emergency solution into an everyday necessity.
Before this shift, many Mexican households routinely drank tap water, boiled it, or treated it with chlorine before consumption. Now, Conagua shares statistics on how many contaminants are present in the surface water, by analyzing in 2022 1,723 sites, of which 42.5% were classified in green and 39% in red. Hence the perception that drinking tap water may not be safe, since habitants have no way of making this analysis in their homes.
However, according to the National Survey of Government Quality and Impact, only 20.9% of households nationwide consider the water delivered to their homes through the public network to be drinkable as of 2023. The situation varies by state, ranging from 49.1% in Tlaxcala to 1.9% in Tabasco, according to the 2025 investigation The impact of bottled water on household expenditures in Mexico: is it a public policy problem? published in the Official Journal of the World Water Council.
Politics and Private Enterprise: A Partnership Without Consequences
I remember that sometime after the early 2000s, Bonafont became one of the loudest promoters of the idea that everyone should drink two litres of water a day to stay healthy, while this was not yet a truly spread and well-known idea in Mexican households. Conveniently, the company sold bottles in exactly the sizes needed to make sure you met that goal.
Once bottled water and refillable jugs became normalized in Mexican households, also as a part of a certain high-level kind of life, it was only a matter of time before soft drink companies entered the business. Coca-Cola, whose presence in Mexican family life is almost impossible to overstate, expanded aggressively into the water market.
Mexico loves Coca-Cola so much that one of its former executives, Vicente Fox Quesada, became president of the country in 2000. But the other side of the story is often left untold: Coca-Cola may love Mexico back, but it arguably needs Mexico even more.
Revenues for Coca-Cola FEMSA, the company’s Mexican subsidiary, tripled during Fox’s administration. Between 2002 and 2003 alone, FEMSA reported extraordinary growth, doubling revenues from approximately $2 billion to $4 billion, while its bottled water business expanded dramatically.
Nor was Coca-Cola alone. Bonafont, owned by Danone and once a relatively unknown brand, became the country’s leading bottled water company.
In Mexico there is a saying: a nadie se le niega un vaso de agua — no one should ever be denied a glass of water. The phrase works both ways: we offer it, and we ask for it. Yet institutionally, drinking a glass of water from the public system often feels almost forbidden.
Bottled water also represents a significant expense for many families. Lower-income households generally spend a larger proportion of their income on water, including both piped supplies and bottled alternatives.
And, as always, inequality runs through the entire system.
It is estimated that households without daily access to piped water spend a total of 503 million USD on bottled water. These households consume bottled water out of necessity. Households with daily access to piped water spend up to 902 million USD on bottled water, which they consume for pleasure or due to mistrust of the quality of piped water.
Researchers at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM Azcapotzalco) argue that water insecurity becomes even more unequal when examined by income levels. “When designing public policies regarding household water consumption,” they write, “it is imperative to consider not only accessibility and frequency of use, but also affordability.”
The Sinkhole That Exposed Water Stress in Puebla
The prioritization of private interests over public needs, together with decades of resource extraction and limited oversight, became visible in the town of Santa María Zacatepec, Puebla.
In 2021, residents occupied a Bonafont bottling plant in protest, arguing that the company had been extracting groundwater for more than two decades while local wells gradually dried up.
That same year, a massive sinkhole nearly 50 feet wide suddenly opened nearby. Although the exact causes remain debated, many residents connected the event to the long-term extraction of groundwater. Coincidentally or not, only weeks after the occupation forced the plant to suspend operations, local residents reported that water levels in wells and streams had begun to recover. Investigations also uncovered irregularities involving municipal permits and concessions that Bonafont claimed to possess.
The peaceful occupation, which included cultural events, artistic activities, and community gatherings, was eventually dismantled by the National Guard and state police. Bonafont later resumed operations.
“The More Polluted the Water, the More People Will Buy”
I cannot help but think of The Lorax, where a businessman becomes wealthy by selling encapsulated air after destroying the environment around him.
The comparison may seem exaggerated, yet there is something strangely familiar about it. In some regions, bottling companies extract groundwater from local aquifers, sell it back to nearby communities at a markup, and position themselves as the solution to a problem that increasingly appears impossible to solve without them. What would people drink otherwise?
But perhaps the more important question is not directed at the companies themselves. Where were the political actors who allowed private companies to gain access to public resources instead of prioritizing infrastructure, investment, and public policies capable of guaranteeing access to safe drinking water?
After all, access to water is not simply a market opportunity. It is a human right, one that is also recognized in the Mexican Constitution.
Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.
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