From the “Baker Briefing” podcast: A water crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border is growing. The 1944 Water Treaty has long guided how both nations share the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers, but climate change, drought, and growing demand are testing its limits.

Guest host Tony Payan speaks with Rosario Sanchez, a senior research scientist at the Texas Water Resources Institute, and Ivonne Cruz, a research scholar at the Baker Institute, about how to rethink water cooperation for an age of scarcity — and what it will take to build a more resilient future for both countries.

Featured guests:

• Ivonne Cruz, Ph.D., https://www.bakerinstitute.org/expert/ivonne-cruz
• Rosario Sanchez, Ph.D., https://twri.tamu.edu/rosario-sanchez/

Mentioned in this episode:

• Mexico Country Outlook 2026, Rice University’s Baker Institute, https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/mexico-country-outlook-2026

More about Tony Payan, Ph.D.: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/expert/tony-payan Follow Tony Payan on X (@PayanTony) and LinkedIn.

You can follow @BakerInstitute and @BakerInstMexico on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Learn more about our data-driven, nonpartisan policy research and analysis at bakerinstitute.org.

Political cartoons serve as a powerful visual commentary on major figures, events, and issues. Paco Calderón, a cartoonist who has documented much of Mexico's political and social landscape, joined "México Centered" to discuss his work and approach.

More about Tony Payan, Ph.D.: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/expert/tony-payan Follow Tony Payan on X (@PayanTony) and LinkedIn.

Follow @BakerInstMexico on X, LinkedIn, and Bluesky. Subscribe to “US-Mexico Update,” our monthly newsletter, at bakerinstitute.org/newsletters.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of cars are imported illegally into Mexico from the United States. These unregistered “chocolate cars” — a play on the word “chueco,” which means “crooked” in Spanish — not only crowd out the national light vehicle market, but often fail to meet pollution and safety standards and can be used in serious crimes.

The used car industry in the U.S. is partially responsible for allowing the vehicles to enter Mexico at extremely low prices. But the Mexican government also contributes to the influx by occasionally legalizing their circulation. A regularization program for used imported vehicles was recently extended to 2026 in the final days of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration.

Guillermo Rosales Zárate, executive director of the Mexican Association of Dealerships (AMDA) and Juan Vega Gómez, a senior researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), joined Tony Payan on “México Centered” to explore the chocolate car phenomenon and the black and gray markets that emerge along the U.S.-Mexico border in the absence of critical binational coordination.

This conversation was recorded on July 22, 2025.

Featured guests:

• Guillermo Rosales Zárate, https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermo-rosales-zárate-20258b19a/
• Juan Vega Gómez, https://www.juanvegagomez.com/

More about Tony Payan, Ph.D.: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/expert/tony-payan Follow Tony Payan on X (@PayanTony) and LinkedIn.

You can follow @BakerInstitute and @BakerInstMexico on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Learn more about our data-driven, nonpartisan policy research and analysis at bakerinstitute.org.