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 .
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.
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. While Guadalajara’s crisis is particularly severe because several weaknesses converged at once, Morales said the individual problems are not unique to the city.
Many large cities, in Mexico and elsewhere, share these vulnerabilities; Guadalajara shows what happens when they arrive together,” he said. Could it happen in the U.S.? Experts pointed to vulnerabilities in American water systems that could leave some cities exposed to comparable failures.
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. 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.
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