As Monterrey’s Air Quality Worsens, Citizens Demand Urgent Government Action

A tall sierra rises around Monterrey, Mexico’s second-largest metropolitan area and Nuevo León’s state capital. Thick smog clings to the ground, obscuring the city’s once-imposing landscape.

“We can’t breathe anymore,” Ximena Peredo, a political scientist and activist who lives in the city, said in Spanish. “We can’t see our mountains.”

In 2024, Monterrey enjoyed good air quality for only 85 days, according to reports from the Integral Ecological Committee (CEI), a nonpartisan group working to raise awareness about the city’s pollution crisis. For the remaining 281 days, air pollution levels exceeded those established by Mexican law. 

“This is a severe problem,” said Peredo, who served as Nuevo León’s secretary of citizen participation until 2024. “It relates to a fundamental activity—breathing.”

The causes behind the pollution crisis are multiple. The decades-old Cadereyta oil refinery hasn’t been properly maintained. Gasoline supplied by state-owned gas stations produces more toxic pollutants than gasoline distributed to Mexico City and Guadalajara. On top of that, an underdeveloped public transportation system has led to higher automobile usage, further increasing emissions from fossil fuels.

The impact, in turn, has been deadly. A 2023 study by the Clean Air Institute found that chronic exposure to pollution claims over 2,500 lives in the state of Nuevo León annually.

“Even then, warnings are not issued when the air is very polluted,” said Vivianne Clariond, an environmental activist and former councilwoman for the city-municipality of San Pedro Garza García. “Of all days [in 2024] on which the criteria for issuing an environmental warning were met, only four were declared by the authorities,” said Clariond, one of the CEI’s founding members.

Just last month, Alfonso Martínez Muñoz, Nuevo León’s secretary of the environment, announced that such preemptive warnings would be eliminated moving forward. He stated that the conditions for issuing such preemptive warnings had not been met, a claim the CEI categorically rejected. 

Following this decision, Nuevo León’s authorities will declare contingency states—Mexico’s term for environmental emergencies—only once pollution levels have surpassed the levels established by national health standards.

“We can’t breathe anymore. We can’t see our mountains.”

— Ximena Peredo, a political scientist and activist

The CEI was highly critical on social media. “In the meantime, we citizens do not have measures to protect our health because without warnings there is no order to suspend polluting activities. There is no reaction from the population to the high risk to which we are exposed,” they wrote.

Clariond draws a comparison with Mexico City, where contingency states are accompanied by restrictions seeking to reduce pollution. “Not here. Here the industry continues as if nothing were happening,” she said.

“It is impossible to deny that we live in a polluted environment, that it is difficult to breathe,” said Nesib Inayeh, an environmental activist and former professional athlete. Earlier this year, Inayeh started organizing a digital campaign, feeling frustrated by the worsening environmental conditions in the city and a perceived lack of action.

Inayeh began by posting a video to social media, not knowing what would happen next. “I was just so angry. I grabbed my phone and posted a message saying, ‘If you’re fed up with what’s happening, reach out to me—we’ll figure it out together.’” He then created a WhatsApp group chat. “In just three days, the group was already at the app’s 1,024 people limit,” he said.

“It was impressive to see how people were so fed up they were just waiting to join the movement,” said Inayeh. “The pain and the feelings were undeniable.” Days later, on Feb. 11, the group was met with an unexpected opportunity: State Governor Samuel García announced that President Claudia Sheinbaum would be visiting Monterrey on Feb. 19.

“Within hours we were working to see how we were going to push for her to give us an answer,” Inayeh said. 

Members of the group started posting the hashtag #NLNoPuedeRespirarClaudia, which translates to “Nuevo León Can’t Breathe, Claudia.” Some activists hung banners throughout the city, condemning poor air quality conditions and demanding government action. Inayeh and others showed up at the site Sheinbaum was visiting. “We were left outside—it is a military base,” he explained.

Despite not meeting with the president, the group’s efforts appear to have had an impact. On Feb. 21, two days after her visit to Monterrey, Sheinbaum announced that a working group was collaborating with the National Autonomous University of Mexico to develop a pollution abatement program.

Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, first promised to address the crisis in late 2024. “We will address air pollution in Monterrey, Guadalajara and Mexico City in a comprehensive manner with the States,” she declared during her inauguration ceremony in October.

On March 3, Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s secretary of the environment and natural resources, declared the establishment of the Metropolitan Environmental Commission in Monterrey. “Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum came to Monterrey in November of last year, and instructed us to give priority to the issue of air pollution in Monterrey,” she said. “There has been much progress in the diagnosis, but we have yet to evaluate very precisely where the emissions come from.”

Some believe it is time for the emphasis to be on action and not further research. Shortly before the commission was established, Clariond expressed her frustration. “We are diagnosing something that is already over-diagnosed,” she said. “We already know what the solutions are. We already know what the problem is. Let’s study it again? Come on! It makes me feel desperate.”

Bárcena did present a series of environmental commitments in Monterrey, among them industry inspections and the implementation of vehicle regulations. Both García and members of the CEI were present, as were scientists from the Citizen Air Quality Observatory—a nonprofit organization working to improve air quality across Mexican cities.

“We believe it is very important to see if we can improve the quality of gasoline,” said Bárcena. “To this end, we are already in conversations with Pemex [Mexico’s state-owned oil and gas company] and [García] to see if we can achieve a quality of gasoline similar to that of the metropolitan area of Mexico City and Guadalajara,” she said. 

Critics are skeptical. “[The commission] will go nowhere,” said Ramón Alberto Garza, editor and commentator for the digital news platform Código Magenta.

Still, some remain hopeful. “The establishment of the Commission is a step in the right direction,” wrote Lorenzo de Rosenzweig in a column for the daily newspaper El Norte. “That is, as long as it is chaired by an expert, independent of the state government, and operated as a technical coordinating body, without biases,” wrote de Rosenzweig, who is an engineer and adviser for the Citizen Air Quality Observatory.

The urgency of the crisis has recently become more evident. On March 4, Nuevo León’s Secretariat of the Environment officially declared a contingency state—the first in 2025 as well as the first to be issued following the elimination of preemptive warnings. Strong wind gusts swept through the region, sparking a series of ongoing wildfires across the metropolitan area.

As the situation worsens, Selene M. Guajardo, a biologist and executive director of the Citizen Air Quality Observatory, looks forward. “We need citizens to know the health impacts related to breathing polluted air. But we also need all possible measures to solve the underlying problem. These solutions involve the federation, the state and municipalities—all sectors, industrial and transportation. Society in general,” she said.

Peredo, like many others, wonders what the future holds. “The communities that will manage to survive—those that manage to clean their air—will be the communities where citizens learn to organize themselves. Those that do not manage to organize will end up succumbing.”

A friend recently asked her if she thinks the situation will eventually get better. “If there were a program to respond to environmental emergencies, if there were restrictions on industry, if there were policies to reduce the use of automobiles, if there were neighborhood carpool organizations” and the problem still wasn’t solved, Peredo said, “then I would say this isn’t fixable.”

“But nothing is being done at the moment,” she concluded. “We are just getting started.”