Colorado River dispute
water rights dispute between the United States and Mexico
The Colorado River dispute is a long-running dispute between the United States and Mexico over water rights to the Colorado River.
Background
In 1884, the International Boundary and Water Commission was founded between Mexico and the United States as an entity to, among other things, oversee the flow of water from the United States to Mexico. The IBaWC negotiated the 1944 United States-Mexico Treaty for Utilization of Water of the Rio Grande, Colorado, and Tijuana rivers and allotted to Mexico a guaranteed annual quantity of water from these sources. However the treaty did not define the quality of the water. This became a problem with rapid development in the southern United States in the late 1950s, when the United States began diverting significant amounts of water from the Colorado River for the newly developed areas. Mexico protested and entered into negotiations with the United States. In 1974 an international agreement resulted in interpreting the 1944 treaty as guaranteeing Mexico the same quality of water as that being used in the United States.
Legislation
1922- The Colorado River Compact was signed by the seven states part of the Colorado River Basin. Its goal was to allocate the water in two parts, an Upper Division and Lower Division. The Compact was amended in 2007 to preserve the water in the event of shortages.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Colorado River dispute” as water rights dispute between the United States and Mexico. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as water rights dispute between the United States and Mexico. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5149009. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1884, 1944, 1974 and 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colorado River dispute” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.