Agua Prieta pipeline

[2] The Yaqui Valley is fed by numerous tributaries which drain the eastern highlands as they flow from the escarpment of the Sierra Madre Occidental to the Gulf of California.

[4][5] The first portion of the pipeline that is currently undergoing construction is 505 km with 36 inches in diameter, and will transport natural gas from Sásabe to Guaymas, Sonora.

While project managers hail this pipeline as the bringer of clean and low-cost energy, Loma de Bácum (the Yaqui holdout community) remain skeptical.

Mexico, along with other Latin American countries, are signatories to the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention, which guards their rights and makes an informed consultation obligatory in the case of projects that affect their territories.

[2] According to scholar Stephen V. Lutes, "the Yaqui are notoriously sensitive about the issue of autonomy, even today, and have shown a will to resist the encroachments of alien colonists and authority.

[1] In December 2016, Yaqui activist and lawyer María Anabela Carlón Flores and her husband, Isabel Lugo Molina, were kidnapped at gunpoint by unknown masked men before eventually being released.

[5][13] Carlón Flores accuses the State Public Security Police (Policía Estatal de Seguridad Pública) of being complicit in the kidnapping.