Voceras de la Madre Tierra

Voceras de la Madre Tierra — "Spokeswomen of Mother Earth" — is a women-led grassroots environmental-defender collective based in Querétaro state, Mexico, organising in the defence of water, health, and territory across the Querétaro metropolitan area and its surrounding Otomí and rural communities. The group is the corpus's first Mexican local-group anchor and is the only documented Querétaro-based grassroots organisation actively pressing the state government for disclosure of how much water the region's hyperscale data centres consume. Voceras' data-centre work sits inside a broader water- and territorial-defence portfolio anchored on Querétaro's drought-stressed semi-desert hydrology and the 2022 State Water Law that the Supreme Court of Justice partially overturned in 2024 after Voceras' joint legal-and-political advocacy.

Founding and composition

Voceras de la Madre Tierra is publicly anchored by co-founder Teresa Roldán Soria, who has been engaged in environmental defence in Querétaro since 2016 — beginning with the defence of "los árboles, las áreas naturales protegidas" (trees and protected natural areas) and the former Metropolitan Park zone, and broadening into water- and territorial-defence work as Querétaro's data-centre industry expanded. The group is a small volunteer collective; alongside Roldán, four members have appeared together as public spokespeople in formal political settings: Teresa Roldán Soria, María del Carmen Siurob Carvajal, María de Jesús Ibarra Silva, and Elizabeth Durán participated in the joint July 2024 press conference with state deputy Laura Andrea Tovar Saavedra after the Supreme Court ruling on the state water law. The TRAMAS research network's case study on Querétaro names Voceras as exemplary of a broader pattern in which "those who tend to stand on the front line of defence are predominantly women" in the region's environmental struggles — a gendered frontline composition the group's own name foregrounds.

Querétaro data-centre water-disclosure campaign

Querétaro has become Mexico's primary hub for hyperscale data-centre construction, attracting over US$12 billion in capital since 2020 with 12 operational facilities and plans for up to 10 more, anchored by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the CloudHQ project announced in September 2025. The siting is structurally awkward: Querétaro is a semi-desert state already running on tight water budgets, where residents in towns surrounded by data-centre clusters such as Viborillas now receive water only three days a week and in extreme cases go without supply for a month. Against that backdrop, Voceras de la Madre Tierra has built a small but distinctive campaign along three lines.

• Public information requests and public forums on data-centre water allocation. Voceras has submitted public information requests and organised public forums to pressure the local government to disclose how much water is allocated to data centres; those requests have, to date, gone unanswered. The unanswered-requests pattern is itself the campaign's central political claim: that Querétaro's data-centre industry has been allowed to scale without the disclosure infrastructure ordinary industrial activity would face.
• Pressure on the environmental-reporting loopholes. Querétaro's data centres avoid issuing environmental-impact reports through a stack of legal exemptions — siting inside industrial parks (which carry their own park-level reporting); official classification as service providers rather than industries; and exemption from the state's 2021 CO₂ tax on the grounds that data centres are not "fixed direct emission sources." Voceras' allied lawyer Lorenia Trueba has argued publicly that every data centre should be required to issue an environmental-impact report on water and energy grounds, framing the existing loopholes as the disclosure failure the group's information requests are designed to surface. The Querétaro government's position, articulated by Sustainable Development Minister Marco del Prete, has been that "blaming data centers for water shortages oversimplifies the problem" — the framing Voceras' transparency demand is structured against.
• Aquifer-recharge framing. Roldán's standing public framing — "These data centres are in the middle of areas that were used for aquifer recharge, agriculture, or livestock farming, which is a source of income for many families. These centres have taken that income from them." — articulates the corpus's clearest hydrology-grounded grassroots case against hyperscale-AI siting: the campaign is not against compute as a category but against siting decisions that bypass the groundwater-recharge function of the land they consume.

State Water Law and the SCJN amparo

The 2022 Querétaro State Water Law — formally the Ley que Regula la Prestación de los Servicios de Agua Potable, Alcantarillado y Saneamiento del Estado de Querétaro — created the legal scaffold under which the state has authorised 40-year water-supply concessions to private companies, a structure the TRAMAS network's case study characterises as "veiled privatization." Voceras de la Madre Tierra has been one of the law's most active civil-society challengers, working along two parallel litigation tracks: supporting the Otomí indigenous community's Federal Court Amparo 907/2022 against the law on indigenous-constitutional-rights and international-treaty grounds, and in June 2024 winning the Supreme Court of Justice's ruling on amparo en revisión 984/2023, which partially overturned the law and prompted the group's joint July 2024 press conference with state deputy Andrea Tovar demanding "una verdadera ley para la gestión integral del agua, que garantice el derecho humano al vital líquido" — a genuine integrated water-management law guaranteeing the human right to water. The amparo line gives Voceras a formal legal track distinct from its public-information-request track, and is the principal mechanism through which the group has been able to force the state's water-policy machinery to respond.

Broader territorial-defence work

Voceras' data-centre and water-law work sits inside a broader territorial-defence portfolio across Querétaro. Roldán's own active-defence list since 2016 covers Peña Colorada, El Batán, Ejido el Zapote, El Salitre, El Tangano, Punto Olivo, El Cimatario, and the former Metropolitan Park zone, and the group's recent campaigns have targeted the Irlanda Apartments 16-tower residential development sited in an ecologically sensitive microcatchment area. The group is connected to two broader Mexican networks — the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Asamblea Nacional por el Agua y la Vida — through which its Querétaro-specific water-law and data-centre work is networked into the wider Mexican anti-water-privatisation movement.

Repression and risk

Voceras members and their community allies have faced sustained pressure for the group's water- and territorial-defence work. Roldán has been the subject of death threats and online harassment in connection with her data-centre advocacy; between late September and October 2025 she experienced a sustained pattern of armed-security-guard intimidation at her home, with a guard reportedly firing shots in the air on several occasions, blocking visitors, and forcing her daughter to drive slowly past on departure — incidents documented by Front Line Defenders. Voceras' allied community members in Escolásticas have been arbitrarily detained and reported tortured. The repression pattern is the principal operating risk under which Voceras' Querétaro work is being done and is consistent with the broader risk profile of women environmental defenders organising on hyperscale-AI water-extraction grounds in Latin America.

Place in the movement

Voceras de la Madre Tierra is the corpus's first Mexican local-group anchor, the corpus's first explicitly women-led grassroots organisation working on AI-infrastructure water exploitation, and the corpus's clearest documented case of a Latin American grassroots collective using a stack of public-information requests, public forums, and Supreme Court amparo litigation to pressure data-centre water-disclosure on legal grounds rather than physical-disruption tactics. The group sits in close structural parallel to MOSACAT — the Chilean Cerrillos-based community-of-residents collective fighting Google's second Chilean data centre — both grassroots Spanish-speaking groups in drought-stressed Global South capitals organising against hyperscale AI water extraction through legal and tribunal channels rather than purely confrontational ones. The corpus now anchors two such Latin American local-group cases at the commune / state level, complementing the existing regional digital-rights policy anchors Derechos Digitales (Santiago-based, pan-LatAm policy and litigation) and Coding Rights (Brazilian feminist tech research-and-advocacy). Voceras differs from those organisational anchors along three vectors: it is a small volunteer collective rather than a staffed organisation, it works at the state-and-municipal infrastructure-siting register rather than at the national or regional digital-rights register, and its gendered composition — women on the public front line of a water-defence struggle — gives it a structurally distinct claim to the Latin American AI-civil-society field's grassroots layer that the policy-and-litigation anchors above it do not occupy.