WSP10281

• File Number: 8278.300
• Description: Title I - Mexican Treaty
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 9/1/1991
• Author: Anne DeMarsay CRBSCF
• Title: The Brownell Task Force and the Mexican Salinity Problem - A Narrative Chronology of Events
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Publication

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from salt balance? Why did its government then ask that remaining drainage flows be bypassed
without compensation? Former U.S. Commissioner of the IBWC Joseph Friedkin recalls: "By
the time the Presidents met in June, 1972, it was clear that there was no longer an opportunity
to reach an agreement with Mexico on the salt balance principle. Mexico was unwilling to
accept any Wellton-Mohawk drainage waters as treaty deliveries. "11 From this perspective,
Mexico's wasting of the balance of the Wellton-Mohawk drainage must be seen as an effort to
preserve its claim to water of Imperial Dam quality.

But Bureau of Reclamation employees in the Lower Colorado Region remember hearing another
message via IBWC that summer; Mexican Commissioner David Herrera Jordan indicated that
the approach used in Minute No. 241 would be acceptable to his government as the basis of a
permanent solution. 12 Was Mexico, then, bypassing drain waters for internal political reasons,
to prove its toughness to Mexicali Valley interests? Were Echeverria and his advisors really
amenable to more moderate terms?

These questions were never to be answered conclusively. The events of the summer of
1972-the Echeverria visit, the joint communique, the prospect of a Presidential
initiative-served to focus the attention of powerful individuals and interests on the salinity
problem. In the process, both the international issues and the nature of an acceptable solution
were redefined.

The joint communique introduced the terms "permanent" and "defmitive." As the President's
Special Representative, Herbert G. Brownell, Jr., and his Task Force deliberated, these terms
came to be applied to the actual measures used to reduce salinity, rather than to a legal or
diplomatic settlement. The narrow assignment placed on them-that of the ultimate technical
fix-left, in the end, only one politically feasible solution.

Deliberations of the Brownell Task Force

Brownell, a lawyer who had served as Attorney General under President Eisenhower, was
appointed on August 16, 1972, and sworn in on September 7. After a brief disagreement
between OMB-which wanted him to be headquartered in the Executive Office of the
President-and the State Department, Brownell and his staff were settled in offices in the
Mexican Affairs section of State. The President also appointed an interagency Task Force to
assist Brownell, composed of representatives of eight agencies: the Department of State
(including the U.S. Section of the IBWC), the Department of the Interior, the Department of the
Army (Civil Works), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) , and four entities in the
Executive Office of the President-the Domestic Council, OMB, the Council on Environmental
Quality (CEQ) , and the Office of Science and Technology (OST). (A list of Task Force
members is included in Appendix A.)

The Task Force, in turn, created a staff-level Working Group, chaired by Samuel D. Eaton,
Brownell's Executive Assistant. The Working Group included representatives from the Task
Force agencies and departments, and two agencies of the Department of Agriculture: the

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