Video still from El Universal Puebla.

La Jornada de Oriente reports:

“At 1:20 a.m. on Tuesday [February 15], agents of the National Guard and the State Police evicted members of the Council of United Peoples of the Volcanes Region who had taken – in the municipality of Juan C. Bonilla – the Bonafont water bottling plant – which is owned by the French consortium Danone – since March 22, 2021.

Preliminarily, some members of the popular organization that had under their protection the plant, which was called Casa de los Pueblos [House of the People], reported that there were no injuries during the eviction and apparently, there were no detainees.

Eleven months ago, residents of Juan C. Bonilla and 30 other communities in the region, taking advantage of the fact that March 22 is World Water Day, took over the Bonafont plant as part of a growing unrest against the bottler they accuse of having caused the wells of that municipality to run out.

Over the last year, this conflict became emblematic in Latin America for having managed to get the protest against Bonafont to the headquarters – in France – of the Danone Group and collectives from Europe, the United States and Canada, in solidarity in the struggle for the defense of water in the municipality of Juan C. Bonilla.

It was learned that Bonafont had exerted strong pressure on the governments of the state of Puebla and the federal government to proceed with the eviction of its Juan C. Bonilla plant, which led this company to extract water from other wells clandestinely.”

The full article is at Guardia Nacional y Policía Estatal desalojan planta de Bonafont en Juan C. Bonilla.

Shado (See Hear Act Do) reports: “Since 8th August [2021, the plant] has been occupied by local Indigenous communities and renamed Altepelmecalli: the House of the People.”

That article explains: “20 Nahua Indigenous communities from the volcanic region in Puebla, Mexico, came together in response to the depletion of water in their wells, rivers and streams, united in defense of water and life. Together they formed Pueblos Unidos (the United Peoples) to resist the colonization and depletion of their waters by Bonafont.”

PBI at La Casa de los Pueblos

Just last month, on January 15-16, PBI-Mexico accompanied the organizations and communities that gathered at the occupied bottled water plant to participate in the National Meeting of Struggles against Gas Pipelines and Death Projects.

And on December 15, 2021, PBI-Mexico also participated in an International Mission at the occupied plant on the physical and emotional integrity of communities in Puebla that defend land and water.

We continue to follow this situation.

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