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By Joe Edwards
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A deepening drinking-water crisis in Mexico presents a troubling question: Could a comparable failure happen in an American city?
Residents of Guadalajara, in the central-west state of Jalisco, have reported foul-smelling, discolored and sediment-filled water flowing from their taps, prompting protests demanding government action. Police used tear gas and water cannons during one demonstration, leaving dozens injured and nearly 40 people arrested, according to Reuters. President Claudia Sheinbaum subsequently criticized the police response.
The crisis unfolded across a metropolitan region of more than 5 million people. Experts who spoke to Newsweek said Guadalajara’s circumstances are not identical to those in the U.S., but pointed to aging infrastructure, struggling utilities and weakened public confidence as vulnerabilities that cross national borders.
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Guadalajara’s Water Crisis
Guadalajara’s drinking-water crisis did not emerge overnight. Héctor Morales Gil de la Torre, a faculty member at the University Center for Social Impact at ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, told Newsweek residents had reported turbid water in dozens of neighborhoods since 2023, with more than 1,000 formal complaints filed across roughly 475 neighborhoods between January 2025 and January 2026.
“In early October, contaminated water from the Las Pintas reservoir, where water from Lake Chapala mixes with wastewater, led the state government to acknowledge an unprecedented crisis and shut that source,” Morales said. “Since October 15, 627 neighborhoods have been on rotating supply, which authorities expect to last until March 2027.”
Morales said the deterioration reflected several interconnected problems, including polluted water sources, a treatment plant not designed for such contaminated water, a leaking and aging distribution network, “weak” disinfection and monitoring, and problems with the management and financing of water services.
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While Guadalajara’s crisis is particularly severe because several weaknesses converged at once, Morales said the individual problems are not unique to the city.
“Polluted sources near industrial corridors, mid-20th-century treatment and pipes, financially fragile utilities, and very thin monitoring (four or five sampling staff for some 5 million people). Many large cities, in Mexico and elsewhere, share these vulnerabilities; Guadalajara shows what happens when they arrive together,” he said.
A Warning for American Cities
Could it happen in the U.S.? Experts pointed to vulnerabilities in American water systems that could leave some cities exposed to comparable failures.
“It has already happened, and is happening, in many towns in the U.S.,” Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who was named one of Time’s most influential people in 2016 for his role in uncovering lead contamination during the Flint water crisis, told Newsweek.
“It is also exactly what happened in Flint. That was an acute health crisis and betrayal that led to deaths from Legionella and some elevations in blood lead.”
Edwards and his co-authors wrote in a recent paper that failures involving drinking water can erode public trust and, in turn, reduce support for the infrastructure upgrades needed to address the underlying problems.
“Systems that have lost population, or tax bases, are especially susceptible to these problems. But the lost trust, or the ‘epidemic of distrust’ described in the aftermath of Flint, endangers all systems,” Edwards said.
Jackson, Mississippi, was another U.S. city highlighted by experts as a relevant example.
Jackson’s largest water treatment plant failed on August 29, 2022, leaving roughly 160,000 people and essential facilities, including hospitals, schools and fire stations, without safe drinking water, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In some areas, water service stopped altogether, it noted.
Manny Teodoro, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed with Edwards that American cities are highly susceptible to failures in water quality and public confidence, noting that cases including Flint and Jackson attracted national attention while many others remained largely unnoticed.
He said confidence in public water systems had been declining for decades, alongside growth in the commercial drinking-water industry, including bottled and vending-machine water. That loss of confidence can occur even in communities where tap water is generally safe and reliable, he told Newsweek.
“The vectors of distrust are as much social as hydrological,” Teodoro said.
Although emerging contaminants such as microplastics warrant attention, Teodoro said the principal threats facing most Americans were more basic: broken water mains that cause pressure loss, water loss and microbial contamination; treatment plants that fail during storms; and shortages of skilled operators.
“Our regulatory and governance institutions are poorly suited to addressing these challenges,” he said.
Teodoro said older cities, places with stagnant or declining populations, low-income communities with large racial or ethnic minority populations, and especially small water systems could be particularly vulnerable.
“We neglect water systems at our peril; we have to invest in the utilities that run them. But critically, that doesn’t imply that the federal government should pour billions of dollars into water and sewer systems,” said Teodoro. “The U.S. water sector needs structural reform to achieve sustainability, not a federal bailout.”
The Limits of the Comparison
David Sedlak, director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley, offered a somewhat different perspective, emphasizing that water utilities in low- and middle-income countries generally operate under different circumstances from those in wealthier nations.
“The situation in low- and middle-income countries is usually quite different from that encountered in wealthy countries,” he said.
Sedlak said water utilities in middle-income countries often struggle to collect revenue and keep pace with the needs of their communities. Some U.S. cities experience comparable pressures, he added, particularly those where a considerable portion of the population is poor. Sedlak also cited Flint as another example of a city that struggled to keep its water system operating, although he said the crisis there involved additional challenges.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Cannon and Emma Lee-Sang
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