Risk analysis of the 1944 Treaty between the United States and Mexico for the Rio Grande/Bravo Basin

The treaty of 1944 between United States (U.S.) and Mexico defines the water allocation of both countries for the Colorado, Tijuana and Rio Grande/Bravo rivers. This paper focuses its attention in the treaty obligations of water delivery from Mexico to the US in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin. For this basin, the treaty specifies a primary division of six tributaries originating in Mexico as one-third to the U.S. and two-thirds to Mexico. The third shall not be less than 431.721 million m3/year as an average over cycles of 5 consecutive years. Two international dams, Amistad and Falcon, are used to store and manage the water for both countries and each country has its own storage account in each reservoir. The treaty cycles can expire in less than five years if the account of U.S. storage in both dams is filled with water. Before the signature of the treaty, an analysis of the six tributaries outflow was done in order to evaluate the treaty obligations. This analysis showed that Mexico will not comply very frequently with the volume of water specified for every treaty cycle; however the deficits were supposed to be small and the system expected to recover fast fillin