Plans for a fourth cruise ship dock on the island of Cozumel, Quintana Roo, have been criticized by residents and environmental groups for the damage they claim it will do to coral reefs.
Before the pandemic Cozumel was ranked as the world’s busiest port of call for cruise ships, but has not welcomed a single passenger since last June.
The US $25-million project is backed by the president.
Residents complain that the plan is antithetical to a coral reef restoration project on the sea floor.
The environmental group Global Coral Reef Alliance agrees. “The new proposal to build the fourth cruise ship dock on Cozumel will destroy the most important project to regenerate coral [on the island],” it said in a statement.
Activists say that volunteer divers have worked for years to transplant small chunks of living coral anchored to seabed structures to grow new reefs. They say that thousands of corals have been transplanted so far, repairing damage from human activity and hurricanes.
A Change.org petition has gained over 40,000 signatures.
The company behind the project tells a different story. Its building proposal says the location for the new dock was chosen “in order not to affect coral reefs … This was backed up by field work on the sea floor, which found no presence of coral reef structures.”
It says the cruise industry, which normally brings in US $480 million a year, is expected to grow.
Tens of thousands of tourist jobs were lost in Quintana Roo in the pandemic, in a sector which accounts for 87% of the state’s economic activity.
Thanks to friendships with a Hollywood producer and the director of the Mazatlán Aquarium, the writer’s fantasy about creating a reality TV show in Mexico about saving innocent bystanders from crocodiles on their streets was not immediately relegated to “that idea we had over a few too many drinks last night.”
In Part 1 of The Crocodile Chronicles, Bodie Kellogg successfully met with the then-mayor of Mazatlán about an adapted dream: using the outskirts of his city as a shooting location for the TV series The Gator Boys. He also convinced Discovery Channel officials that they wanted to know more. The next step was to head to an estuary supposedly full of crocodiles and home to the elusive, monstrously large “Godzilla” croc …
After arriving at the estuary which boasted 800-plus crocodiles throughout the four-square-kilometer area we were standing at the edge of, we set out on our voyage of discovery.
Our group was myself, my photographer friend Alwin and two of the shrimp farmers who utilized the estuary for their harvests. We were looking for a place on dry land where crocodiles could be approached and feasibly be captured without the loss of life or limb.
Our two guides led us along a narrow trail. When we got close to a possible croc location, they would hold up a hand. At that point, we would all pick our way through the tangled jungle as silently as possible until we could see a small beach with one or more crocs sunning themselves on the sand. However, even with the well-practiced stealth of our guides, we could get no closer than 30 or 40 meters before there was a flash of tail and a splash as the crocs hit the water.
After two hours of sneaking through a jungle of vegetation, most of it with thorns and some of it with snakes, we called a halt. As I stood in the shade examining the bloody scratches on my arms and legs as well as my shredded T-shirt, I felt seriously disappointed.
Our guides, sensing my defeat, quickly assured me that there was a really big croc that they could actually call and it would come. This buoyed my spirits that maybe not all was lost.
Even with experienced guides, it was impossible to get closer than 30 or 40 meters to the crocs.
When we all arrived back at the guides’ covered patio, I brought out the ice chest filled with cold Pacíficos and told them to help themselves. Over the years, I have learned that cold beer is an excellent emollient for lively conversations with working-class Mexicans.
After a couple of beers, they began to tell us about the large crocodile that would come when called. They explained that the V8 engine on their causeway ran both a large pump and a generator that powered several long strings of lights, which ran the full length of the causeway.
These lights were used to attract shrimp at night, so they could be easily netted without the need for a boat. The sound of the engine is what would bring in the big croc.
I was told that they started feeding it a bucket of shrimp scraps several years ago, and now it comes and expects to be fed. If it arrives and does not get something immediately, they said it would let out a roar that was terrifying.
With this news, I thought, we were back in business. I had found Godzilla.
One of the men had a cell phone picture, a view straight down at the surly beast with its head partway out of a three-foot culvert. The widest part of the croc’s head had about three inches of clearance at either side of it.
Perhaps a croc took a bite of this warning sign at some point?
Later calculations put this guy at 1,000 to 1,200 pounds and over 16 feet in length. One of the largest apex predators in North America and we were planning to send in a couple of good ‘ol boys from Florida to capture it? This was just getting better each day.
By this time, the people at The Discovery Channel had green-lit the project. We had less than four weeks to put together the rest of the required pieces.
I went to Acuario Mazatlán and told Jorge the game was on, but we were having a difficult time finding catchable crocodiles in the wild. He gave me a phone number for a crocodile farm outside of Culiacán, a few hours away by car.
We promptly named the croc farm Crocs-R-Us. I and The Captured Tourist Woman (TCTW) set off the following morning for Crocs-R-Us.
Having never rented or purchased a crocodile, we had no idea what to expect. We didn’t even know how to transport the damn things.
The facility occupied about 20 acres, with two large ponds and a lot of trees for shade. The very distinctive odor of croc crap was strong.
The crocodile farm outside Culiacán.
We met with the owner, promptly explained our mission and were pleasantly surprised when he said he knew of the TV series and would love to help us any way he could. The fenced enclosure contained several hundred crocodiles, ranging from three to 10 feet in length. We arranged for five of his largest snappers to be collected in a week or so. How that was going to happen was still a bit fuzzy.
When we told the producer of our success with five large crocs and the discovery of the monster, he promised a reptile handler would be sent ahead to Mazatlán to help with the logistics of the rapidly unfolding situation.
My next item on the list was to find suitable locations to stage the “catches.”
Since pictures of alligators on Florida’s golf courses have been going around the internet for years, my first location was the very exclusive golf resort of Estrella Del Mar, a half hour south of Mazatlán. When I approached the manager, I was hoping he would see the positive publicity angle and not the negative aspect of having a 10-foot, carnivorous reptile roaming the fairways of his pristine club.
Actually, he told me that crocodiles are sometimes seen on the back nine, which is adjacent to a major river. He introduced me to the head of maintenance, who could take me around the course to scout out a good spot.
This was going better than I expected, and I was hoping my luck would hold. I was starting to think that the possibility of being on TV was the elixir that promulgated the eager responses to my query for help.
Crocs heading for the water.
I spent a couple of days scouting both sides of the Río Presidio and the handful of villages that lay in the broad valley 10 miles south of Mazatlán. I found a number of suitable locations with sufficient interest from local villagers, all of whom wanted their five minutes of fame.
So far so good, but I still wanted a location with hysterical people, preferably gringos. After all, we would be making “reality” TV.
My next trip was north of town, to a condominium complex, far enough out to keep the mayor happy. It had a swimming pool in the central courtyard. After discussions, the condo owners thought it would be fun to see a croc in the pool and promised to be hysterical.
Ah, but then somebody brought up the possibility of croc crap; this could be a deal killer.
How will we transport five large crocs 140 miles? Can I get a croc in my VW? Where will we house them? How will we deal with the croc crap? Will we still have all our body parts when this is over? Watch for the next chapter of The Crocodile Chronicles.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half-wild dog. He can be reached at buscardero@yahoo.com.
German engineering and technology company Bosch will invest between US $90 and $100 million in 2021 to modernize 12 production lines.
Automotive plants in San Luis Potosí and Aguascalientes and two research and development centers will benefit from technological upgrades.
Last year Bosch invested $87 million in Mexico despite the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw its domestic sales earn $2.7 billion, a 20% fall on 2019.
The pandemic caused a two-month closure, rupturing the entire supply chain, according to Gonzalo Simental, vice president of finance at Bosch. Sales to third parties in Mexico fell by 23% last year.
Despite the fall in sales, Bosch president René Schlegel said the company’s investment strategy will continue. “You can see the way we invest, there’s constant investment in technology, buildings, production of goods, development and people … I think that stability is good news for Mexico,” he said.
He added that Bosch has expanded its workforce through the pandemic with 17,200 staff at the end of 2020: a 5% increase on 2019.
Eduardo Pérez, vice president of taxes and foreign trade, spoke of the importance of Bosch’s Mexican infrastructure. “In the automotive sector there are big plans to continue on the same path. San Luis Potosí is the second most important plant that we have … Aguascalientes, particularly for brake systems that are important for the industry, has been growing steadily year after year. That part of the Bajío, where these two plants are located, is a central point in the automotive sector and will continue to grow in 2021,” he said.
He added that in 2021 Bosch will launch thermo-technology products, and its power tools business will launch a wide range of cordless products.
Bosch entered Mexico in 1966 with a manufacturing plant in Toluca, state of México. It now has a corporate development center, headquarters and 12 manufacturing plants in the country.
Mexico’s real Covid-19 death toll is almost triple the federal government’s official total, according to a new analysis by a United States health research center.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine published an analysis on Thursday that shows that 617,127 people have died from Covid in Mexico.
The figure is 183% higher than Mexico’s official death toll, which rose to 218,007 on Wednesday.
The research center noted that many Covid-19 deaths go unreported because countries only report deaths that occur in hospitals or among patients with a confirmed infection.
Large numbers of Mexicans have died at home without being tested for Covid-19, and Mexico’s testing rate remains very low at about 51,000 tests per million people, according to German statistics portal Statista.
The IHME also said that weak health reporting systems and low access to health care magnifies the challenge of accurately counting all Covid-19 deaths.
According to its analysis, which was based on excess death rates in countries around the world, Mexico has recorded the third highest number of Covid-19 deaths after the United States and India. The IHME estimates that the United States has actually had more than 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, about 56% higher than its official death toll, and that more than 654,000 people have succumbed to the disease in India, an increase of about 184%.
Globally, Covid-19 has caused approximately 6.9 million deaths, the IHME said, a figure more than double what official numbers show. According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the global death toll is currently about 3.25 million and Mexico ranks fourth for fatalities behind the United States, Brazil and India.
“As terrible as the Covid-19 pandemic appears, this analysis shows that the actual toll is significantly worse,” said Dr. Chris Murray, IHME’s director.
“Understanding the true number of Covid-19 deaths not only helps us appreciate the magnitude of this global crisis, but also provides valuable information to policymakers developing response and recovery plans,” he said.
“Many countries have devoted exceptional effort to measuring the pandemic’s toll, but our analysis shows how difficult it is to accurately track a new and rapidly spreading infectious disease. We hope that today’s report will encourage governments to identify and address gaps in their Covid-19 mortality reporting, so that they can more accurately direct pandemic resources.”
A rendering of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport.
The head of Airports Council International (ACI), the sole global trade representative of the world’s airports, has heaped praise on the construction of the new Mexico City airport, describing the progress made to date as “incredible.”
In an interview with the aviation news website A21, ACI director general Luis Felipe de Oliveira also said that the new airport could one day completely replace Mexico City’s existing airport, the AICM, due to its potential for expansion.
Both he and Rafael Echevarne, ACI’s Latin America chief, said that there are challenges to overcome before the airport can begin operations, such as ensuring that airspace is managed to operate concurrently with the existing Mexico City and Toluca airports and making it easily accessible for passengers.
However, after visiting the site of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), currently under construction at the Santa Lucía Air Force base, they were both impressed with the progress made by the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) in building the facility, which is slated to open in March 2022.
“We’ve been big critics of the process because we never imagined that they were going to deliver what they’re doing,” de Oliveira said, apparently referring to the government’s decision to scrap its predecessor’s Mexico City airport project and start from scratch at a different site.
“We’ve seen business models in Latin America in which they promise a lot but deliver very little. But here, what they’ve done in two years is incredible. The construction is simple and modular but it flows and it’s well thought out. Sedena has learned a lot about airports in a very short time,” he said.
De Oliveira said that the AIFA won’t initially have the capacity to replace the AICM but could in the future because it clearly has the potential to expand.
“They’ve created an airport that is a kind of mirror, and it can be replicated on the other side [of the Air Force site], which would double the infrastructure” and create the kind of international hub airport Mexico needs, he said.
Initially at least, the AIFA is slated to operate in conjunction with the AICM and the Toluca airport as part of a three-pronged plan to meet rising demand — at least before the coronavirus pandemic — for airline services in the Valley of México metropolitan area.
Some aviation experts have questioned the viability of operating the AIFA and the AICM simultaneously due to their close proximity to each other. But Echevarne said the limited airspace issue can be overcome.
“We know that there are critics of the reconfiguration, but airspace shouldn’t be an obstacle. There are ways to organize all that; there is technology, and there are places in the world that are more complicated. With the will, it can be solved,” he said.
Echevarne and de Oliveira noted that the AIFA is quite far from Mexico City — about 50 kilometers north of the capital’s downtown — and therefore quick transportation connections will be essential. To that end, the federal government is building a new highway to the Santa Lucía airport and also plans to extend an existing suburban railway line to the site.
Although AMLO ran on a leftist platform that emphasized aiding the poor and vulnerable, programs intended for them have disappeared, Zambrano says.
The leader of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s former party has accused the president of recreating the old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime he fought for decades to replace.
Speaking at an event in Morelia, Michoacán, to mark the 32nd anniversary of the foundation of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), Jesús Zambrano declared that the raison d’etre of his party — which AMLO, as the president is commonly known, represented at the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections — remains the same: “to put an end to anti-democratic, populist, centralizing and dictatorial practices.”
Zambrano, a former federal deputy, said the foundation of the PRD in 1989 — AMLO, also a former PRI member, was one of the founders — was the result of a fight for democracy and a response to the old political regime of the PRI, which implemented a quasi dictatorship for much of the 20th century before being voted out of office in 2000.
The PRI didn’t respect minority groups and controlled sham elections from the Ministry of the Interior, he said, explaining that it was in that context that the PRD came into being.
“And now, in the middle of 2021, 32 years after our birth, López Obrador and [the ruling party] Morena have returned to rebuild that old regime, accentuating its worst practices,” the PRD national president said.
President López Obrador and Democratic Revolution Party leader Jesús Zambrano in happier times, when they were close colleagues.
At the 2018 elections, Morena fooled millions of people, leading them to believe that it was a leftist party, Zambrano said. But now many of them have realized that the ruling party is not leftist at all but rather an enemy of democratic practices, the division of powers and social justice, he said.
(The Congress, in which Morena leads a majority in both houses, recently approved a law backed by the president to extend the term of the Supreme Court’s chief justice, an AMLO ally, even though it appears to be in clear violation of the constitution.)
“It’s enough to see how Morena abolished [public] trusts that benefited millions of people and helped the development of the country; they cut the budgets of both institutions and social programs,” Zambrano said.
The party leader also criticized López Obrador and Morena for perpetuating the militarization of public security, giving the military control of the nation’s ports and centralizing the purchase of medications, which he claimed has caused widespread shortages of drugs, including those used to treat children with cancer.
Zambrano also charged that Morena, under the guise of austerity and the push to eliminate corruption, has modified the structure of public administration, making it less effective and a shell of its former self. Institutions, government programs, shelters for women who are victims of violence and state-run childcare centers have all disappeared, he said, claiming also that AMLO is attempting to destroy bodies that have played a crucial role in democratizing Mexico, such as the National Electoral Institute.
“López Obrador assumes himself to be the bearer of morals that he doesn’t have,” Zambrano added.
“… This government has been unable to resolve problems. On the contrary, it has made them worse; it’s only focused on causing division and trying to win elections. … The president behaves … like the boss of a gang, not a head of state,” Zambrano said.
Despite Zambrano’s claim that many citizens who supported Morena in 2018 are now aware that the party is not what they thought it would be, the ruling party nevertheless has a commanding lead in the polls ahead of the June 6 elections, at which the entire lower house of Congress will be renewed.
Some political observers believe that López Obrador will become even more authoritarian in the second half of his six-year term — especially if Morena, as expected, wins convincingly in the midterm elections — and even seek to change the constitution so that he can remain in power beyond 2024.
The president himself has repeatedly ruled out that possibility, and even signed a written undertaking in March 2019 that he would not seek reelection. He reiterated last month that when his term as president ends, he will retire to his ranch in Palenque, Chiapas, where he intends to write a book.
The vehicle in which the two shooting victims were traveling near Caborca, Sonora.
The National Guard opened fire on two agents of the Sonora Attorney General’s Office Wednesday, killing one and wounding the other in what appears to have been a case of mistaken identity.
The incident occurred yesterday afternoon on a dirt road near the Ejido San Isidro, about 30 kilometers from the city of Caborca. The victims were José Ramón Reyes, 37, and his sister Verónica Reyes.
Early reports indicate that the two were riding in an SUV when they were attacked by guardsmen, who evidently believed the vehicle was that of a local criminal leader. At least seven shots were fired at the front windshield with high powered firearms.
José Reyes died at the scene while his sister was admitted to hospital with a bullet wound in the arm.
Several civil society organizations were quick to release a statement calling into question the value of deploying the National Guard in the state, claiming that the only result has been to generate more violence.
Police guard the scene where the dead bodies of landowners and activists Jesús Robledo Cruz and María Jesús Gómez Vega were found.
A couple opposed to a mining company’s operations in Sonora was murdered last week and 13 other anti-mining activists were threatened, triggering a call for government protection from an organization that defends the rights of people affected by mining.
The Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (Rema) said in a statement that community landowner José de Jesús Robledo Cruz and his wife María de Jesús Gómez Vega, opponents of the firm Penmont, a subsidiary of Grupo Peñoles, were murdered on April 29 in the municipality of Puerto Peñasco.
The organization said it had no doubt that the murders were committed by people in cahoots with Penmont, owned by billionaire businessmen Alberto Baillères, and Rafael Pavlovich Durazo, uncle of Sonora Governor Claudia Pavlovich. Rema claims that Pavlovich Durazo illegally seized more than 1,800 hectares of land from community landowners.
Penmont has a mine in Caborca, which landowners say encroaches on their land, an ejido known as El Bajío.
Rema said the bodies of Robledo and Gómez were dumped with a sign that made threats against 13 other ejidatarios, or community landowners. Those landowners are clearly at “high risk,” the group said.
The landowners at El Bajío say that Penmont illegally encroached on their land and have polluted it as well.
The murders occurred within the context of their demand for Penmont to comply with “multiple legal rulings” to pay rents to the ejidatarios “for the illegal occupation of their lands,” return illegally extracted gold to them and pay compensation for environmental damage, Rema said.
It noted that it was not the first time Robledo and Gómez were targeted. They were abducted and tortured in 2017 by hooded and armed men wearing army attire. It also said that landowners have been harassed and suffered acts of violence since 2002, when Penmont first entered El Bajío.
The organization said it took legal action against Penmont and was granted several rulings in its favor but “none of them have been executed.”
“On the contrary, since the first moment of complaint, acts of violence such as … intimidation, arbitrary detentions, homicides, abductions, forced disappearances, the use of public force, dispossession and forced displacement increased,” Rema said.
Robledo, as president of El Bajío, led the landowners’ defense of their ejido against the mining company’s encroachment, the organization said, putting him in direct opposition to “powerful people who are guarantors … in this country for murder and dispossession: Alberto Baillères, a powerful mining businessman and Rafael Pavlovich Durazo, a criminal protected by his niece, the current governor of the state.”
Penmont issued a press release denying any connection to the couple’s deaths.
“Penmont categorically rejects the assertion or insinuation of any kind of link with the criminal acts of this weekend,” the company said in a statement. “It rejects violence in any form and trusts the justice system with the resolution of problems.”
Billionaire Alberto Baillères is one of the owners of Penmont Mining.
Rema demanded that the federal government “assume its historical responsibility” and protect citizens as well as supervise the actions of the Sonora Attorney General’s Office, which it claimed is complicit with the violence perpetrated against El Bajío landowners.
It also demanded the implementation of protection measures for the 13 landowners who were threatened as well as for other El Bajío ejidatorios and their families.
For a country in which the president says every morning that corruption and impunity are no longer permitted, the murders and other acts of violence against community landowners opposed to mining are “shameful,” Rema said.
“The death of each defender of land is a wound that the political class will not be able to heal, hide or clean,” it said.
Matola's Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center is credited with having helped spark a greater environmental awareness in the nation.
The year is 1983. Surrounded by a small menagerie of injured rare wild animals, Sharon Matola has a decision to make.
The animals in her charge are unable to take care of themselves in the wild, and they are in the middle of the Mexico-Belize tropical forest with no real access to help or provisions.
After stints as a Mexican circus performer, jungle-trained member of the air force and a wildlife documentary filmmaker, Matola “was at a crossroads,” she was to tell the Washington Post later of that moment.
“I either had to shoot the animals or take care of them because they couldn’t take care of themselves in the wild.”
There and then she made the decision that was to shape the rest of her life until her sad and untimely death of a sudden heart attack on March 21 at the age of 66.
Sharon Matola in her younger days at the Belize Zoo, which she founded.
These days, Matola’s life has rightly become legend, but this was not something she could know as she was constructing rudimentary shelters for a veritable ark of animals on a shoestring budget in the early 1980s.
But, whatever the obstacles, onward Matola drove, displaying the signature never-say-die attitude that was to mark her next 40 years caring for animals and advocating aggressively for the protection of the Mexico–Belize jungle — the largest contiguous tropical forest in the Americas outside of the Amazon.
Back then, at the very beginning, it started with nothing more than a pitched sign announcing the arrival of the “Belize Zoo,” later evolving into the Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center.
Initially charging a nominal entry fee and relying on local restaurants to send bored patrons her way, Belize Zoo struggled in its early years, raising chickens to supplement costs. Four decades after its inception, however, the sanctuary is one of Belize’s biggest tourist attractions: before the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on tourism across the globe, the zoo hosted 75,000 visitors a year.
Crucially, half of these visitors were Belizean. The center is, in great part, credited with having awoken an environmental consciousness in the nation.
Markedly different than your average controversial zoo, at Belize Zoo, animals were rehabilitated and remained in their natural habitats rather than locked up in small pens. Today, there are now more than 45 species at the zoo, including the emblematic tapir, coatimundis, and white-lipped peccaries — all keystone species in Mexico’s southern jungle.
A jaguar lounging at the Belize Zoo. Some have called Matola the Jane Goodall of jaguars for her efforts to save them from extinction. From Belize Zoo Twitter
Her greatest work, however, was in her activism, which straddled Mexico and Belize and which awoke in her the greatest passions when defending the wildlife of the Maya Forest Corridor. She famously never suffered fools gladly and would happily take offending businessmen and politicians to task in very public settings.
One of her biggest fights in the early days was to spearhead a grueling five-year campaign against the construction of the Chalilo Dam on the Macal River.
A landmark movement, it was the first environmental case to appear before the Court of Appeal of Belize, where Matola argued that building the dam would destroy animal habitats in the heart of the Maya forest corridor running through part of Belize, northern Guatemala, and southern Mexico.
The ecosystem is scientifically recognized as one of the world’s most important ecological systems and is home to rare species such as the scarlet macaw, a bird for which Matola was internationally recognized as a leading researcher.
Much to Matola’s disappointment, the attempt to reverse the building permission was unsuccessful, and the dam was constructed in 2005. Moreover, and likely to her even greater chagrin, she was right about the negative impact of the dam on the Selva Maya, where the pressures of modernization are already being felt by declining wildlife levels.
However, while Matola’s attempt to combat the building of the dam may not have had the success she had hoped for, and won her more than a few enemies, her legacy nonetheless remains vitally important to the southern jungle and the people of Belize — a people she was to call her own when she took nationality in 1990.
Matola, who loved to play guitar, plays at an event in 2019 at which the US ambassador to Belize honored her as their woman of the year.
Matola’s resourcefulness and ability to make do with the bare minimum extended into all facets of her life: the rough-hewn wooden hut in which she lived at the zoo contained only the essentials for survival, and she shared her bathing pool with a crocodile.
Likewise, at a conference in Miami in 1984, Matola — having no money for expenses but an abundance of determination — put an out of order sign on a toilet door and operated from there, walking around with a photo album to speak to anyone who would listen.
Though Matola’s legacy, and the impact of her loss, will be most felt in her home in Belize, it will also be felt across the natural spaces of southern Mexico and Central America. The Selva Maya ecological corridor, to which Matola dedicated years and years of her life protecting, is under a greater threat than ever before: increasing global temperatures, deforestation and the encroachment of huge development projects such as the Maya Train are threatening huge swathes of land that will be irrecoverable once lost.
Where nature is concerned, there are no borders. The great, unique body of life which is our home exists as a single, interconnected entity, and it needs its defenders now more than ever. Last month, with the untimely death of Sharon Matola, nature took a hit.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
Residents of Homún, Yucatan, have been protesting the operations of Producción Alimentaria Porcícola, an industrial hog farm, almost since it opened.
A group of conservation organizations, scientists, doctors and public health experts have filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court (SCJN) to support a case against a 49,000-head hog farm in Yucatán.
Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, filed a friend of the court brief on Wednesday on behalf of itself, the Center for Biological Diversity, Coastal Carolina Riverwatch, Greenpeace México, Waterkeeper Alliance and 13 experts.
The groups asked the SCJN to uphold a 2018 Yucatán court decision which, on environmental grounds, suspended operations at the farm, located about 50 kilometers southeast of Mérida near the Mayan town of Homún.
The court will hear the case later this year.
The environmental groups said in a statement that their brief supports constitutional claims raised by Maya children who oppose the pig farm’s approval and operation.
Citing arguments to be presented in the lawsuit, they said the decision to allow the massive facility in “an ecologically sensitive area” near Homún “violates the Mayan children’s rights to a healthy environment and to autonomy as indigenous people.”
The groups said their amicus curiae brief details “substantial scientific evidence about the grave and irreversible harm to human health and the environment associated with industrial hog operations.”
The harm includes “contamination of water, including naturally occurring freshwater wells known as cenotes; emission of noxious air pollution; the spread of dangerous pathogens and contribution to climate change,” they said.
Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that pollution from industrial pig farms “has already disproportionately degraded huge swaths of indigenous land and water in the Yucatán Peninsula.”
Adding another “mega-operation” will “overwhelm this fragile ecosystem with farm animal excrement and noxious gases,” she said.
Dr. Jill Johnson, an assistant professor of preventative medicine at the University of Southern California who joined the brief, noted that “numerous scientific studies provide evidence that industrial hog operations release contaminants into neighboring communities, where they affect the health and quality of life of neighbors.”
The farm was closed in 2018 by court order. If it were to reopen, the conservation groups say it would generate over 272 million kilograms of urine and feces annually.
She said that such operations have been associated with increases in asthma symptoms, blood pressure and stress and anxiety among residents living nearby.
Offensive odors would also likely affect people living near the Homún pig farm if the SCJN allows it to resume operations.
According to the conservation groups, the farm is expected to generate over 272 million kilograms of urine and feces annually, an amount, they said, more than that generated by the human population of Tijuana, a city of more than 2 million people.
The pig waste “will be stored in uncovered pits and then disposed of on nearby fields, a practice employed by many industrial animal operations in the United States,” the groups said.
Dr. Ana Maria Rule, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering and director of the exposure assessment lab at Johns Hopkins University who also joined the amicus brief, said that hurricanes could cause the waste pits to overflow.
“The Yucatán Peninsula is frequently impacted by hurricanes, which will likely cause this facility’s waste pits to overflow,” she said. “It has happened in the United States several times in recent years …”
Kelly Hunter Foster, senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance, said that extensive scientific research has shown that industrial-scale pig farms that use waste pits and land disposal of urine and excrement can contaminate groundwater, pollute surface waters and emit hazardous gases into the air.
The environmental organizations noted that “the Ring of Cenotes Geohydrological Reserve, located in Homún on a site of global and ecological importance, is especially vulnerable to pollution” from the farm, owned by the company Producción Alimentaria Porcícola, or PAPO.
Guillermo Zúñiga Martinez, an attorney with Earthjustice, said the SCJN has an obligation to not allow the farm to resume operations until it installs advanced waste treatment technology.
“Mexican and international law require authorities to apply the precautionary principle, and the message of the precautionary principle is clear: we must stop unacceptable risks before harm occurs,” he said.
“… Authorities shouldn’t wait for children to get sick before acknowledging what everyone knows to be true: advanced waste-treatment technology is necessary to protect people and the environment, and this facility must adopt functional advanced technology before operations resume.”
The Producción Alimentaria Porcícola farm site.
The environmental organizations’ statement noted that the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace México last month submitted a separate request to Mexican authorities “urging that they respect the sovereign right of indigenous communities under Mexican law and basic human rights, including self-determination and consultation, on the permitting and operation of industrial hog operations in the states of Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo.”
The two groups asked that the federal government accept a complaint from 21 Mayan communities that requests a moratorium on all approvals of new industrial hog operations, as well as the expansion of existing operations, until the rights of the Mayan people and ongoing damage to air and water quality, biodiversity and human health are respected and resolved.
In an environmental impact statement submitted to environmental authorities in Yucatán, PAPO acknowledged that its farm could cause some moderate impacts to the environment. However, the company said that it had a range of tools at its disposal to mitigate those impacts. PAPO said that urine and feces will be sent to “a treatment system with a biodigester, aeration pond and a chlorination tank.”
Once the waste has been treated, it will pose no contamination risk, company representative Ricardo Díaz Montes said in 2018.
The farm’s establishment in Homún has divided residents: many oppose it on environmental grounds, but others support it because of the jobs it will generate. The company has said that a fully operational farm would support 75 full-time jobs.
