THE FIGHT FOR A LIVING LAGOON

Mexico's Cuyutlán Wetland Stands Between Ancient Water and a Booming Port

Along Mexico's Pacific coast, a 35-kilometer lagoon stretches behind the dunes near the port city of Manzanillo. The Cuyutlán Lagoon is split into four interconnected basins, and together they form the largest coastal wetland in western Mexico. 

It holds international importance under the Ramsar Convention, the global treaty for protecting the world's most significant wetlands, and it is home to endangered sea turtles, thousands of migratory birds, and mangrove habitat that is becoming harder to find along this stretch of coast. Its waters have also sustained an artisanal salt trade, harvested for more than 500 years.

That water is now at the center of a battle over Mexico's future.

The government is pushing to expand the Port of Manzanillo — already Latin America's third-busiest container port — directly into the lagoon's second basin. The project, valued at roughly 65 billion pesos, or about $3.5 billion, would quadruple the port's capacity, largely through private investment.

A first expansion a decade ago, into a neighboring basin, cleared several hectares of mangrove forest, according to local activist Miriam Sanz, and left what she calls lasting environmental damage — a precedent that now fuels deep distrust of the new plan.

"The lagoon is a system of four interconnected basins," says Sanz, a member of Salvemos Cuyutlán, the grassroots coalition of salt harvesters, fishing cooperatives, beekeepers, farmers and independent scientists opposing the project.

Damage the second basin, she warns, and the harm will not stay contained.

"It's the basin that feeds the third and fourth. If they damage it — through deforestation, dredging, oil terminals and large ships — that flow moves into the other basins."

The lagoon's history runs deep, too. Archaeological digs around its shores have uncovered a 2,000-year-old funerary mound, evidence that people have relied on these waters since long before the Spanish arrived.

For María del Carmen Velasco, who leads the region's fishing and aquaculture cooperatives, the stakes are extremely high.

More than 500 fishing families work the lagoon directly, she says, and some 1,500 families across the region depend on it in one form or another. 

"The lagoon is everything to me. It's my identity," she says. "It's like taking away my way of life, my culture — everything."

The standoff over the lagoon drew national attention after President Claudia Sheinbaum visited Colima as part of a nationwide tour marking nearly two years in office. Protesters from several communities interrupted her remarks, demanding a meeting to explain their opposition to the port's expansion. 

Visibly irritated, Sheinbaum suggested they had been infiltrated by political opposition groups and left without meeting them — a moment critics, in the polarized climate of Mexican politics, quickly branded intolerant.

Two days later, at her daily news conference, Sheinbaum described the demonstrators as a small, politically motivated group. She also said the port's design had already been scaled back to reduce harm to the wetland and that dialogue with affected communities was ongoing. 

"There are negotiating tables in Manzanillo with fishermen and other residents to keep them informed," she said, adding that "the original project was changed, and there is now less environmental impact on the lagoon." 

She noted that the formal environmental impact review is still unfinished and that a public consultation will follow, "as always."

Salvemos Cuyutlán rejected that account point by point. 

In an open letter, it denied that any real negotiating table exists, insisted it has no ties to any political party, and demanded a public apology. 

Velasco disputes that any such dialogue has taken place at all, and for her, the project raises a simpler question about who truly stands to gain: "in the end, it's for big business owners," she says. "And where does that leave us?"

But the Sheinbaum administration seems determined to push the expansion, which would make the port number one in Latin America and improve Mexico's standing in North American trade. 

For Velasco, the calculation looks very different. "I ask the public to support us in saving the

Cuyutlán lagoon," she says, "because the Cuyutlán lagoon is life for all of us."