Bottles of the beer, Modelo, a brand of Constellation Brands Inc., sit on a supermarket shelf in Los Angeles, California, April 1, 2015. 
 
 MEXICO CITY Alcoholic beverage maker Constellation Brands Inc (STZ.N) said on Tuesday it is in the process of investing more than $2 billion in its Mexican operation. 
 
 The money will be spent on expanding the company's bottling and brewery plant in the northern border state of Coahuila, Robert Sands, Constellation's chief executive officer, said at an event in Mexico City. 
 
 He gave no timeframe for the investment. Constellation has an agreement to sell beers by Grupo Modelo, a Mexican brewer owned by Anheuser Busch InBev (ABI.BR), in the United States. 
 
 Modelo's beers include Corona and Modelo Especial. 
 
 "Constellation Brands is investing because we believe that premium Mexican beer will keep growing and will keep leading this segment of the U.S. beer market for years to come," said Sands. 
 
 Constellation said last year it was expanding capacity at its brewery in Mexico to increase its share of the U.S. market. 
 
 (Reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez; Editing by Jonathan Oatis) ||||| A Constellation brewery in Mexico is a fully automated plant, including laser-guided vehicles that move pallets around the factory floor, replacing the need for forklifts--and their human operators. Photo: Julia Robinson for The Wall Street Journal 
 
 NAVA, Mexico—Here at the Nava Brewery just over the border from Texas and south of thirsty beer country, robotic cranes hoist bottles of Corona Extra into cases a robot stacks onto pallets for pickup by driverless vehicles. 
 
 This is as state-of-the-art as it gets in the North American beer industry, and the plant’s about to get much bigger. Outside, 3,000 construction workers are scrambling to more than double the plant’s size so that Constellation Brands Inc., the New York-based owner, can pour even more beer into the U.S.... ||||| Municipality near the US border says brewery that makes Corona, Modelo and other beers is using so much water from wells that region is becoming bone dry 
 
 A brewery satisfying Americans’ thirst for Mexican beers such as Corona is sucking so much water from wells in an arid region near the US border that it has left one municipality bone dry, according to a local mayor. 
 
 
 
 “WE HAVE NO WATER FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION,” Mayor Leoncio Martínez Sánchez of the municipality of Zaragoza, wrote in single-sentence letter to Coahuila state governor Rubén Moreira. 
 
 Zaragoza is currently suffering through water shortages so severe “there’s barely a drop of water when you open the tap”, Martínez told the Guardian. 
 
 A nearby brewery run by the US firm Constellation Brands currently draws water from wells drilled to a depth of 500 metres, and Martínez said that plans to increase production at the plant would “aggravate” the current situation, especially as the federal government ramps up plans for fracking in northern Mexico. 
 
 “We’re worried because we’re already being impacted by this extraction of 1,200 litres of water per second” by the brewery, he said. “It’s contradictory that while Constellation Brands has industrial amounts of water to make beer, the municipality of Zaragoza doesn’t have 100 litres [per second of water] of water to give people to drink or use in their homes.” 
 
 
 
 The brewery – which sits in the municipality of Nava, 45 kilometres south of the US border at Eagle Pass, Texas – makes Corona and other brands of beer such as Modelo for export to the United States. Constellation Brands, which bought the plant in 2013, subsequently announced a $2.27bn investment to expand the facility and a glass factory, saying it would churn out 20m bottles of beer per day by the end of 2017. 
 
 
 
 Martínez says the deep wells supplying the brewery are located approximately 20 kilometres from the municipal seat and have caused water supply problems in Zaragoza since being drilled a decade ago. 
 
 “[The government] gave them this land and these wells on a silver platter,” he said. 
 
 Constellation Brands said in 2014 that the Nava brewery would implement water-conservation practices and recycle 30% of the water it uses. The expanded brewery would also create 2,500 jobs, the company said. 
 
 
 
 The Nava brewery owned by Constellation Brands. Photograph: Constellation Brands 
 
 “These are erroneous comments,” brewery spokesman César Isidro Muñoz said of the mayor’s letter. “Even if the brewery did not exist, Zaragoza would still water problems.” 
 
 He added the brewery was built in an area with an abundance of water and that the local aquifer is recharged at a rate that is greater than the amount withdrawn to make beer. 
 
 Don't call it mezcal: Mexico may force artisanal producers to use a new name Read more 
 
 Mexico has become one of the world’s biggest beer exporters over the past two decades – and the United States now imports more beer from Mexico than all other countries combined. 
 
 
 
 The Coahuila state government has disputed suggestions of a water crisis in the region, saying the shortages only impact two neighbourhoods, local media reported. It added that water delivery was a municipal responsibility. 
 
 
 
 Water crises are common in the region, said Raúl Pacheco-Vega, public administration professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics 
 
 “Northern Mexico is extraordinarily dry and it has extreme climatic conditions. It doesn’t have a lot of rain, therefore, there is a lot of water scarcity,” he said. “Even though Mexico has a constitutional mandate to have water for everyone, we’re still privatizing it, we’re still giving concessions to private entities on the premise of bringing jobs.” 
 

– Americans love Mexican beer. The US imports more beer from its neighbor to the south than all other importers put together, and Corona is the country's fifth best-selling beer, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2015. But the mayor of the municipality of Zaragoza just south of the US border says a brewery there—which produces Corona among other beers and was bought by US firm Constellation Brands in 2013—is sucking so much water from the region's already dry wells that it has left the area bone dry. "WE HAVE NO WATER FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION," he writes in a single-sentence letter to the Coahuila state governor, and tells the Guardian there's "barely a drop of water when you open the tap." The beer produced by the brewery is exported to the US, and Constellation Brands in June 2015 announced a $2 billion investment to expand the facility, Reuters reported. Its aim: to produce and fill 20 million bottles of beer a day by 2017. In comments to the Guardian, a rep for the brewery dismissed the mayor's comments, saying the local aquifer is replenished at rate greater than that at which the brewery removes beer from it. He also asserted that Zaragoza would have water problems even without the presence of the brewery. Indeed, a public administration professor notes arid conditions are typical of the region, though he blames business interests for making the problem worse. "We’re still giving concessions to private entities on the premise of bringing jobs." Constellation Brands had previously said the expanded brewery would mean another 2,500 jobs.