Absence of a general water law and national extraction fee
- Water for industry
- Industrial water, wells and discharges
- Audited
No. Art. 127 of the 1985 Constitution declares that 'all waters are public-domain assets, inalienable and imprescriptible' and orders that 'a specific law shall govern this matter'; that law has never been issued. As a result there is no general water law and no national extraction fee: the legal vacuum is the rule of the game, and the right to drill on one's own land rests on the Civil Code. The only national rule with teeth today is the one on wastewater discharges (Governmental Agreement 236-2006). Bill 6816 (Aug 2026) sets out to fill the vacuum, but has no timetable for a committee opinion. The phrase 'a 40-year debt' that circulates in other material does not appear in No-Ficción (which says only that 'the Constitution ordered this matter to be regulated decades ago') and was withdrawn as a quotation in the audit.
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
Figures
- Constitution in force mandating the specific water law
- 1985
Sources
Related records
- Right to drill a well and ownership of the water (Civil Code)
- Industrial self-supply and the 2,000 wells of Guatemala's valley
- Procedure to drill an industrial well in the metropolitan area
- Cost and regulation of the municipal well-drilling license
- MARN environmental license costs and categories
- Well-drilling restrictions in the Lake Atitlán basin (AMSCLAE)
This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.