Ecatepec
Mexico's most populous municipality receives the capital's sewage through a reversed canal, absorbs its overflow population, and gets none of its infrastructure budget.
Ecatepec receives Mexico City's sewage but not its infrastructure budget. The Gran Canal — built in 1910 to drain the capital's basin — has lost 87% of its discharge capacity over the past three decades, dropping from 90 cubic metres per second to roughly 12. Land subsidence reversed the canal's gradient. Water that was designed to flow away from Mexico City now flows toward Ecatepec, flooding homes with contaminated wastewater during every rainy season.
This is Mexico's most populous municipality — 1.6 million people living in the overflow zone of a megacity that treats them as jurisdictionally invisible. Ecatepec is technically in the State of Mexico, not Mexico City, which means federal and city funds designated for the capital do not reach it despite being functionally part of the metropolitan area. The municipality absorbs population that Mexico City's housing market cannot accommodate, without receiving corresponding investment in water, sanitation, or security.
The Gran Canal was built to drain Mexico City. Land subsidence reversed the flow. Ecatepec now receives the capital's sewage through infrastructure designed to carry it away.
The security deficit is lethal. Over 600 women were murdered in Ecatepec between 2012 and 2016, surpassing Ciudad Juárez as Mexico's femicide capital. Surveys show 92% of residents report feeling unsafe where they live. Eighty percent of the municipality's water infrastructure does not function. The pattern is consistent: Ecatepec absorbs the costs that Mexico City externalises — excess population, contaminated water, inadequate policing — without capturing any of the economic activity that generates the capital's tax revenue.
Ecatepec functions as a downstream organ in a failing circulatory system — receiving waste products that the body's core generates but processing them without the metabolic resources (infrastructure investment, security funding, functional drainage) that the core retains. The Gran Canal is a reversed artery: instead of carrying waste away from the core, subsidence has turned it into a conduit that delivers contamination to the periphery. The organ cannot refuse what flows downhill, and the body's governance structure has no mechanism to redirect resources upstream.