Mexico City Citizens Ask President Sheinbaum to Expropriate Water Well Granted to Televisa

ByKarla Mora

This article by Karla Mora originally appeared in the November 30, 2025 edition of El Sol de México.

Residents of the Assembly Against Mega Constructions in Tlalpan and Coyoacán will request on December 1st that President Claudia Sheinbaum expropriate the well located in the Santa Úrsula Coapa neighbourhood, whose concession is held by Televisa and which they claim will be overexploited due to the World Cup.

Currently, the water is donated entirely to the towns of Santa Úrsula and Pedregal Úrsula Coapa. They claim that the concession authorizes the company to withdraw the donation whenever it wants, which puts the supply at risk.

In front of the Coca-Cola advertisement under the Azteca Stadium bridge, which the urban artist Vlocke painted twice as a sign of protest, the neighbours maintained that works that are part of the World Cup will not have the ecological benefits the CDMX government boasts of.

Residents of Coyoacán and the artist Vlocke met under the bridge next to the stadium to paint, for the third time, a mural with messages referring to the dispossession they accuse the local government and the companies Coca Cola and Televisa of carrying out, which are involved in organizing the World Cup that will take place in Mexico City in 2026.

Before they could intervene in the advertising, four people, allegedly on orders from the soft drink company, covered the billboard with a tarp to prevent the protesters from painting it.

In response, the attendees painted the phrases “When the World Cup is over, dispossession remains,” “If water doesn’t arrive, neither will the World Cup,” and “Water for life, not for profit” on the tarp. Heavy machinery was present in the area for the removal of debris as a form of protest, and residents also placed defiant messages on it.

Natalia Lara, spokesperson for the assembly, stated that the concession allows for the extraction of 450 million liters of water annually. She noted that, in a working group meeting held on November 28, 2025, the Mexico City Water Management Secretariat claimed to have no knowledge of the concession , despite its registration in the Public Registry of Water Rights.

“Currently, Televisa has a collaboration agreement with Mexico City, which expires on May 3, 2026. Under this agreement, the company donates its water concession to the Mexico City public water network. For the residents, this bureaucratic water contribution shouldn’t exist, and the authorities should opt for the expropriation of that extraction well ,” she stated.

Regarding the World Cup transportation projects, specifically the trolleybus route from University City to Huipulco, she said that poor planning will cause residents of the area to lose access to their homes because the streets are too narrow. FIFA mandates green transportation, but the trolleybuses will have no effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions because there is no energy transition program in place.

Regarding the Tlalpan bike lane, the activist pointed out that it causes quite a few problems for public transport users.

“People who have to take buses to go up to their villages in the upper part of Ajusco in Tlalpan or to get to the Xochimilco and Tláhuac area, practically have to throw themselves onto Calzada de Tlalpan, hoping not to be run over by cars,” she said.

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