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<br />from salt balance? Why did its government then ask that remaining drainage flows be bypassed
<br />without cQmpensation? Former U.S. Commissioner of the mwc Joseph Friedkin recalls: "By
<br />the time the Presidents met in June, 1972, it was clear that there was no longer an opportunity
<br />to reach $J1 agreement with Mexico on the salt balance principle. Mexico was unWilling to .
<br />accept any Wellton-Mohawk drainage waters as treaty deliveries. "11 From this perspective,
<br />Mexico's ,wasting of the balance of the Wellton-Mohawk drainage must be seen as an effort to
<br />preserve its claim to water of Imperial Dam quality.
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<br />But Bureau of Reclamation employees in the Lower Colorado Region remember hearing another
<br />message Via mwc that summer; Mexican Commissioner David Herrera Jordan indieated that
<br />the appro~ch used in Minute No. 241 would be acceptable to his government as the basis of a
<br />permanen( solution. 12 Was Mexico, then, bypassing drain waters for internal politicalreasoQs,
<br />to prove its toughness to Mexicali Valley interests? Were Echeverria and his advisors really
<br />amenable to more moderate terms?
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<br />These questions were never to be answered conclusively. The events of the summer of
<br />1972-the: Echeverria visit, the joint communique, the prospect of a Presidential.
<br />initiative---,served to focus the attention of powerful individuals and interests on the salinity
<br />problem. In the process, both the international issues and the nature of an acceptable solution .
<br />were redefined.
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<br />The joint cpmmunique introduced the terms "permanent" and "definitive." As the President's
<br />Special Ret>resentative, Herbert G. Brownell, Jr., and his Task Force deliberated, these terms
<br />came to b~ applied to the actual measures used to reduce salinity, rather than to a legal or
<br />diplomatic ;settlement. The narrow assignment placed on them-that of the ultimate technical
<br />fix-left, in the end, only one politically feasible solution.
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<br />Deliberations of the Brownell Task Force
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<br />Brownell, a lawyer who had served as Attorney General under President Eisenhowet,was.
<br />appointed qn August 16, 1972, and sworn in on September 7.. After a brief disagreement
<br />between OMB-which wanted him to be headquartered in the Executive Office of the
<br />President-and the State Department; Brownell and his staff were settled in offices in the
<br />Mexican Affairs section of State. The President also appointed an interagency Task Force to
<br />assist Brownell, composed of representatives of eight agencies: the Department of State
<br />(including tile U. S. Section of the IBWC), the Department of the Interior, the Dc!partrnent of the
<br />Army (Civi). Works), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and four entities in the
<br />Executive Office of the President-the Domestic Council, OMB, the Council on Environmental
<br />Quality (CE!Q), and the Office of Science and Technology (OST). (A list of Task Force
<br />members is included in Appendix A.)
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<br />The Task Fbrce, in turn, created a staff-level Working Group, chaired by Samuel D.Eaton,
<br />Brownell's ~xecutive Assistant. The Working Group included representatives from the Task
<br />Force agencies and dc!partments, and two agencies of the Department of Agriculture: the
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