The Battle Over a Proposed Pipeline in Mexico’s Gulf of California

In Mexico’s Gulf of California, fishing villages and the Indigenous Comcáac community face potential fossil fuel development that could intensify industrial shipping through one of the world’s most biodiverse waters. In Puerto Libertad, a town approximately 125-miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border, the Texas-based company Mexico Pacific Limited LLC (MPL) is proposing a liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminal and cross-border pipelines that place both communities and marine life in its crosshairs. About 50 miles south of Puerto Libertad, the Indigenous Comcáac have resisted colonization for centuries; community leaders now warn the project could jeopardize relationships to the land and sea. 

In the small fishing village Puerto Libertad, many of the 2,750 residents contribute to sustainable fishing cooperatives and provide hook-and-line catch to some of Mexico’s most critically-acclaimed restaurants. If built, the project would bring a steady stream of LNG tankers through waters that sustain some of the highest concentrations of marine life on Earth, directly threatening fishermen’s livelihoods and the future of migratory whales and dolphins. While concerns about whale habitat disruption and marine ecosystem degradation have driven public attention, local resistance to the project is rooted in Indigenous self-determination and relationships to land and sea.

In 2018, MPL, a company with no prior record of operating project development, submitted an application to the U.S. Department of Energy to use existing cross-border pipelines to bring U.S. natural gas into Mexico. After requesting to expand the natural gas capacity, developers determined that the existing pipelines would be insufficient and proposed a new dedicated pipeline. This system is separated by name only—the Saguaro Connector Pipeline in Texas and the Sierra Madre Pipeline in Mexico—and would traverse from west Texas across northern Mexico for 800 kilometers to the proposed LNG export terminal in Puerto Libertad, otherwise referred to as the Saguaro Energy project. In Puerto Libertad, shipping tankers would climb up and down the coast to load the liquefied natural gas before heading to ports in Asia. 

For decades, the village has witnessed energy projects encroaching on its borders, including one of Mexico’s largest photovoltaic plants that helps to support the Puerto Libertad Power Station. As with the power station, which exports energy out of the fishing village to larger cities in Mexico and to the U.S. border, local residents do not expect to receive any energy benefits from hosting the Saguaro Energy project. Despite court victories from environmental groups that have stalled key components of the project, including a 2024 injunction that halted construction of the LNG export terminal and a 2026 ruling that temporarily blocked LNG tanker transit through the Gulf of California, the Saguaro Energy project persists.

The project has generated two distinct but overlapping forms of opposition. Comcáac leaders have raised concerns about Indigenous sovereignty, pointing to the lack of communication from MPL regarding decisions affecting their territory. At the same time, members of several Comcáac villages, local fishermen, and environmental advocates have mobilized around the risks the project poses to the Gulf of California’s marine ecosystem. Although the two motivations can work in concert, they are animated by different questions: one asks how the Gulf should be protected; the other asks who has the authority to decide its future.

Indigenous Sovereignty and Consent

In public debates about the project, concerns have centered on the Gulf’s marine ecosystem. But the fight over the Gulf is about more than conservation; it is also about Indigenous governance and self-determination. The Comcáac’s opposition is grounded not only in protecting the sea, but in territorial authority, kinship, and Indigenous self-determination. The communities south of Puerto Libertad that comprise the Comcáac territory—including El Desemboque and Punta Chueca—are where the Comcáac continue traditions that stretch back thousands of years. Valentina Torres, head of the Comcáac cultural center in Punta Chueca, describes the opposition to MPL within their broader cosmology of land and inhabitants as relatives. “We are gatherers and fishers, we eat from the ocean and the desert,” Torres explained, and warned that pollution from the project would destroy their home. For the Comcáac, protecting the Gulf is inseparable from defending their territory and relationships with more-than-human kin.

On a rocky cove of Tiburón Island, which sits east of the town of Punta Chueca, Torres recounted a story of an ancestor returning as a leatherback sea turtle to console their grieving sibling. These relational ties to more-than-human kin, alongside origin stories of the Comcáac relating to the giant Saguaro cactus, underscore their centuries-old territorial and spiritual connections to the Gulf of California. When asked if anyone in her community had been informed about the project, Torres said she did not have a lot of information. Although Torres noted internal divisions and differing positions among authorities and individuals, she stressed that most of the Comcáac community in Punta Chueca oppose the project. Several Comcáac youth, meanwhile, speculated that some elders may be less inclined to engage with the project given historical experiences of state violence and genocide against their ancestors.

Although President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration has pledged to strengthen Indigenous rights, Comcáac members in both Punta Chueca and El Desemboque shared that neither representatives from MPL nor the Mexican state have made attempts to engage with them. Even though the Inter-American Court, a binding judicial body over Mexico, ruled in 2007 that member states must ensure the effective participation of Indigenous and tribal peoples regarding any development, investment, exploration, or extraction plan within their territory, participation falls short of sovereignty and self-determination. Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC), a United Nations principle intended to protect Indigenous participation in decisions affecting their lands, is meant to ensure communities are informed and consulted before projects proceed. Yet critics argue that consultation alone does not guarantee Indigenous authority over those decisions. Energy researcher Alexander Dunlap argues that in practice, FPIC can operate as a procedural substitute for Indigenous autonomy, channeling territorial authority into consultation processes that leave underlying extractive decisions intact. For the Saguaro Energy project, consultation after years of permitting and project development risks legitimizing decisions that have already been made without the Comcáac.

Environmental Assessments and Legal Disputes

The Gulf of California is home to 39 percent of the world’s population of marine animal species, including the seven species of whales that come to the Gulf to breed. MPL’s proposed LNG export terminal would dramatically increase industrial activity in this breeding ground. Conservationists warn that increased LNG tanker traffic will heighten the risk of ship strikes on whales, while underwater noise pollution may disrupt the communication, migration, and reproduction of marine mammals. Additional concerns include the introduction of invasive species through ballast water discharge, contamination from industrial operations, and the lack of comprehensive assessments of the project’s cumulative environmental impacts.

Even though public campaigns successfully mobilized concern around whales, the risks extend far beyond marine mammals to the wider integrity of the Gulf and the many communities that depend on it.

In 2023, scientists at the Gulf of California’s Prescott College Kino Bay Center shared that they were contacted by MPL’s environmental compliance team who requested a general environmental assessment rather than the full Regional Environmental Impact Statement and Environmental Risk Study required under Mexican law. Even so, the local scientists said conducting the general study provided a detailed view of the biodiversity in the Gulf, and reinforced concerns that tanker traffic would severely affect the local ecosystems and fishing livelihoods. After the research team submitted their findings that underscored these risks, MPL laid off its environmental compliance team, leaving the researchers unpaid.

MPL cutting corners on environmental reviews is nothing new. On June 18, 2025, the company  requested the Department of Energy grant a seven-year extension of its LNG export authorization for the Saguaro Energy project to 2032, citing the Biden administration’s pause on export approvals as a main reason for delays. In response, several environmental organizations, including the Mexican Environmental Law Center (CEMDA), argued that MPL had failed to disclose ongoing legal challenges in Mexico and that unresolved litigation created significant uncertainty about the project’s future. In particular, the Mexican environmental agency, the Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Industrial y de Protección al Medio Ambiente del Sector Hidrocarburos (ASEA), approved MPL’s modifications to a 2006 permit that had been issued for a different project, allowing the company to avoid conducting a new environmental impact evaluation.

The Rights of Nature

Scientists and activists worry how increased tanker traffic may significantly impact sensitive marine breeding areas that include over 30 species of whales and dolphins, concerns that have prompted legal challenges to the Saguaro Energy project. The civil society organization Nuestro Derecho al Futuro AC (Nuestro Futuro AC) is suing Mexico’s federal government for authorizing the Saguaro Energy project without completing required environmental risk studies. Using whales as plaintiffs in front of the court, the organization demanded that the Mexican state designate the Gulf as a “critical habitat,” drawing from the Mexican Constitution and international law.

“[It is] this new paradigm of love, where nature is the center of everything,” said Elena Lopez, a lawyer at Nuestro Futuro AC. Camila Campillo, another lawyer on the same counsel, describes the case as a strategic climate litigation effort grounded in “rights of nature” arguments, aimed at challenging the project by framing whales as a legal proxy for ecosystem protection. Their lawsuit positions whales as an umbrella species and legal stand-in for the Gulf, and seeks to establish protection for the entire area.

This approach, novel to Mexico, is embedded within Latin America’s rights of nature tradition. The legal strategy moves past environmental regulation to shift the underlying legal paradigm so that ecosystems and all wildlife are recognized as bearing rights. Lopez and Campillo noted that President Sheinbaum’s administration recently led changes to the country’s amparo law, making it more challenging for environmental organizations to establish standing and obtain suspensions of potentially harmful projects. Despite increasing difficulties, in April 2026, Nuestro Futuro AC won a temporary victory that prohibits tankers longer than 300 meters and connected to the proposed Saguaro LNG export terminal from transiting the Gulf of California pending the court’s final ruling. 

Guardians of the Sea

Although they arrive at it from different traditions, local fishermen and the Comcáac share a commitment to protecting the Gulf. For local fisherman and boat captain Cosme Becerra, founder of the Kino Bay Turtle Conservation Group (Grupo Tortuguero de Bahía de Kino), his childhood was “being around the sea.” He began fishing with his step-father when he was about  seven, using a particular technique that created a half-moon between the net and the shore to trap the fish. Over the years, Becerra grew to be a boat assistant, and eventually a boat captain. Through fishing, Becerra built his home and now operates a local restaurant, ensuring a stable life for his family. 

Becerra explains how saving an injured turtle, and feeling deeply moved by its cries, transformed him from a “predator of the sea” into a turtle conservationist. His documentary El Llanto de las Tortugas (The Crying of the Sea) follows him as he becomes a marine guardian and the everyday life of coastal fishing communities. Now, his son Cosme “Cono” Becerra Jr., follows in his footsteps as a boat captain and diver.

Similarly, in El Desemboque, Mayra “Mila” Estrellas, a Comcáac turtle conservation leader, works within a cosmology in which sea turtles and fragile ecosystems are cared for as kin. “We are very proud because we are our own ethnic group,” said Estrellas, “and we are also doing conservation.” The ecological data they collect contributes to national reports and the Comcáac’s own record, where they can track the progress of endangered species and population size.

Although from distinct relationships to its waters and coasts, local fishermen and the Comcáac are linked through their commitment to the Gulf’s marine ecosystems. As they respond to ecological and infrastructural pressures, fishing communities incorporated species protection and care into everyday labor, contributing to Comcáac conservation practices grounded in territorial relations to sea and land since time immemorial. For the Comcáac, stewardship is inseparable from sovereignty; caring for the Gulf also means retaining the authority to determine its future. Their stewardship stands in sharp contrast to the fossil fuel developers and state leaders, far from the waters whose fate hangs in the balance.

Rachel Herring is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is a writer and researcher currently working on her PhD in Energy Sovereignty at Stanford University.

Arantza Caudillo-Álvarez is originally from Puebla, Mexico. She is completing her M.A. in Latin American Studies at Stanford University.