Honduras: Feminist Caravan Occupies Garifuna Territory with Art and Memory

Por

24 May, 2022

^{Translated by Aline Scátola}

Women with at least 16 independent feminist organizations from different parts of Honduras joined the “Viva OFRANEH!” Caravan and occupied the Garifuna territory between May 19^th and 22^nd—more specifically, the Triunfo de la Cruz community, in the state of Atlántida, a disputed territory where the African-Indigenous population faces the threat of displacement.

The women occupied the Garifuna territory to “not only know, but comprehend that solidarity is about being together, knowing the names and the stories that make us stronger,” they wrote in a statement.

“This is a very powerful act, a camp in a territory marked by many conflicts driven by corporate interests. The very presence of women is an act of resistance,” says Melissa Cardoza, one of the members of the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Honduras who took part in the activities.

The actions carried out by the women included a tour of the territory, activities for children, and activities in memory of four Garifuna men who have been forcibly disappeared—all activities were marked by art, music, and drums. “The spirituality of the Garifuna people is probably one of the most important hearts of the struggle,” Cardoza says.

The goal of the caravan was to fight the logic in which state and companies empty territories. “The patriarchal, militaristic, capitalist, and racist oppression system aims to displace people from their lands, take over them, and make people earn miserable wages, making them work in the services industry, turning them into human beings with no life projects beyond trying to secure a precarious livelihood; this is how they rob them of their time and appetite for life,” Miranda argues.

The Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña—OFRANEH) has struggled for more than four decades in defense of land and territory, “because it is exactly, materially, and concretely the place where community life is established, where there is a pursuit of common good and happiness, the aspiration for being in a world where people are appreciated, the arena inhabited by the great spirits that protect the people,” stated the Feminist Caravan.

The community-strengthening processes of the Garifuna people therefore grow in health care community centers, in sexual dissidence collectives, in reclaiming coconut oil and ancestral food that fill the Garifuna land, and also in the resistance against extractivist companies that want to grab their territory.

“In face of the forced emptying of territories, we call Indigenous people back to this ancestral space. We call us to listen and be together, to support the struggle for life where our navel strings are planted,” the women stated. It is not a coincidence that OFRANEH has so many enemies and detractors, who use all the tools they can against organizing processes: killing, arresting, exiling, and disappearing long-standing leaders who are vital to their communities.

“We, the diverse feminists and fighters who organize with the National Network of Women Defenders, not only feel acknowledged in the struggles, but we also feel part of the aspirations and victories of the organizations. This is why today we are calling for this week at the rebellious territory of the Garifuna people, to be present, to speak with each other, to be able to learn with each other, to feel the sea breeze, and feel life ruling our days and our dreams,” they stated.

A Great Memorial

On July 18^th, 2020, four young Garifuna men were brutally taken from their homes and have been missing to this day. Since then, the community has continuously demanded official explanations, but silence remains.

The women left a big memorial for the missing in the center of the community: a mural with the faces of the four kidnapped young men: Snaider Centeno, former president of the Triunfo de la Cruz Association, Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, Suami Aparicio Mejía García, and Gerardo Mizael Róchez Cálix.

Local residents report that, at the dawn of July 18^th, three trucks stormed into the community, each with a group of armed men. One by one, the four young men were taken from their homes. The operation lasted about forty minutes.

Inter-American Court

The human rights violations perpetrated against the Garifuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz were taken to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in the case Garífuna Triunfo de la Cruz Community and its Members v. Honduras. The regional court held the state of Honduras internationally accountable for the violation of several rights of the Garifuna community, including the right to collective land. It also addressed the impact of tourism projects or residential projects built without the community’s consent, as it happened with the population of Triunfo de la Cruz and other communities in Bahía de Tela.

While Honduras was found guilty by the IACHR in this case, the administration of the former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was recently extradited to the United States, did very little—virtually nothing—to comply with the series of reparations established by the regional court.

Solidarity

The caravan received support from women and organizations from several parts of the world, including the Mesoamerican Initiative for Women Human Rights Defenders. “The Garifuna people and the communities organized within the OFRANEH are one of the hearts of our hope. Not only because they have been facing the most destroying, violent, destructive power, the oppressive power of bad government, of extractivist companies, and their thugs and organized crime groups (…), but also because they have made true and given life to this other world that we need and dream of, bringing back Indigenous crops, community radios, traditional community health care centers, with their struggle for food sovereignty, the experience of the Faya liberated territory, with their worldview rooted in the earth, connected with their ancestors, spirituality, and art,” the initiative stated.

Sembrando Vida: Counterinsurgency, Neoliberalism, and Clientelism

Por

Aldo Santiago

15 May, 2022

John Kerry y AMLO dialogan sobre Sembrando Vida — Special Envoy on Climate Changes for the United States, John Kerry, accompanies the President of Mexico in a tour of parcels of Sembrando Vida in Palenque, Chiapas, October 2021.

^{English translation by Schools for Chiapas.} ^{Cover photo: Special Envoy on Climate Changes for the United States, John Kerry, accompanies the President of Mexico in a tour of parcels of Sembrando Vida in Palenque, Chiapas, October 2021.}

While Andrés Manuel López Obrador tours the various countries of Central America to promote the extension of governmental assistance programs such as Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro (Youth Constructing the Future) and Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life), the latter is implicated in undermining community organization in indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico, according to a report published by the Center of Studies for Change in the Mexican Countryside (Ceccam).

“The indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico have an extensive tradition of collective management of territory, supported by social ownership of the land with the assembly acting as the highest authority. The Sembrando Vida program is intentionally undermining these structures that allow the communities a certain level of autonomy,” Ana de Ita writes in the publication elaborated by Ceccam, Community and Autonomy in the face of Sembrando Vida.

“In addition to this denunciation, there are other consequences of the program: that of causing deforestation in order to enter into the program, the opacity in the management of the government budget, as well as the creation of parallel organizations to that of the communities for decision-making, which is used to buy wills.

*^{Deforestation in the Yucatan Peninsula as a result of Sembrando Vida.}*

Among these problems, identified by campesino and indigenous communities of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatan, they underscore that the most damaging effect of the program is the destruction of the community fabric and of the organizing structures of decision-making.”

Ceccam’s publication also brings together the perspectives of agroecologists, researchers and civil organizations that accompany community members in various regions of the country. Because of this, one of the publication ‘s research projects is to be able to identify the uses that Sembrando Vida can have in the the regions where the intent is to impose megaprojects like the Mayan Train, the Transithmic Corredor, “and other where it is urgent that the communities are not an obstacle.”

It is difficult for the participants in the Sembrando Vida program to participate in “social resistance movements, for example, in the face of the government’s megaprojects, or the extractive interest of companies, when they fear that they will lose the benefits of the program,” Ana de Ita reports in her text entitled “Sowing Envy,” included in the publication.

For Ita, this explains the coincidence in the new lines of the “Mayan Train” with the locations of Sembrando Vida, as well as the express instructions to include the municipalities of the Interoceanic Corridor in Oaxaca.

Neoliberalism and the reorganization of the countryside

The director of Ceccam indicates that the implementation of the program weakens community organization due to the fact that it follows the neoliberal logic “that leaves the realm of rights and places itself in the realm of handouts, granted to whomever the government decides.” This wayd, the resources are given to individual producers, who spend the money on personal consumption rather than strengthening community organization.

“In regions in which the program is operating, an increase in luxury spending has been noted, such as beer in a can, since in the rural communities there are not many alternatives for consumption of other goods; health, education, culture, nutrition, etcetera, and what is most readily available is junk food,” Ita denounces.

Another common problem is that young people and women don’t have land, and in many cases they don’t have the 2.5 hectares required, personally, in order to enter the program. According to the program, in these cases, individuals can access the required acreage by establishing a share-cropping contract with the agrarian nucleus until at least 2024.

To Ita, this means that the program encourages collective social property to be parceled and individualized. “In lands of common use that the ejido cedes for a period of time to campesinos that don’t have it, they will plant fruit and timber trees that will just be producing when the program ends, so it will be very difficult to return this land to the common use of the agrarian nucleus,” the director of Ceccam maintains.

Sembrando Vida proposes the coordination of the program through so-called Campesino Learning Communities (CAC), which in fact form a parallel organization to the community or ejidal assembly, which is the main authority in the territories. “Contrary to the strategy of better organized communities which strengthen the power of their assemblies, the CAC do not report to, nor are they held accountable by the agrarian assemblies,” Ana de Ita reports.

Deforest, in order to re-forest?

The goal of Sembrando Vida is the reforestation of a million hectares, and for this, between 600 million to a billion trees are needed, according to federal government figures.

It does not have this number of trees, however, and since the announcement of the program, forestry experts warned of the absence of capacity for production of such a quantity of plants in Mexico. According to the data from the Secretary of Welfare, in 2019 only 14% of the goal of 575 million trees were planted and survived.

Among the complaints that Ceccam compiled, campesinos reported that they are obligated to plant trees that don’t belong in the region, which is why they frequently die and, despite this, “they demand that they replant them, instead of planting trees that are adapted to their own climatic conditions. For example, in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca, they are demanding that they plant cedars that need a lot of water which is scarce in the region, which is why many plants have died,” Ita maintains.

This is in addition to the evidence that has emerged in states such as Puebla, Campeche and Chiapas, where farmers, organizations and the press have documented the deforestation of land for the purpose of registering it with Sembrando Vida.

“But this problem can’t be demonstrated, because the government hasn’t made public the location data of each of the 430 thousand parcels,” clarifies the Ceccam researcher.

Audits

The budget assigned to Sembrando Vida in 2022 reaches 29 billion 231 million pesos, an amount close to the total which corresponds to the Secretary of Agriculture (32 billion 750 million). Notwithstanding its resources, the program is only destined for 430 thousand campesinos of the 5.5 million agricultural producers and around 2.5 million agricultural day laborers that exist in the country, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

In this context, the program has been evaluated by entities like the Federal Superior Audit Office (ASF), which detected shortcomings in its design, content and implementation. According to its Individual Report of the Results of the Superior Audit of the 2019 Public Account, “the objective of achieving that agrarian subjects in rural locales with income below the line of welfare, have enough resources to make the land productive,” is at risk.

Without participation of the communities

For the researcher, the execution Sembrando Vida, like other federal programs, has avoided the social participation in the design of its public policies in accusing the campesino organizations of being corrupt.

For Ana de Ita, it is necessary to remember that during the current federal administration, the recognition of indigenous rights has not received any impetus, and “and the guardians of the forests and the jungles are threatened and persecuted for their labor of caring for them.” According to data by Global Witness, in 2020, 30 environmental defenders were murdered in the country, placing Mexico at the second-most violent in the world.

In this context, the Ceccam member writes, “to not take into account the agrarian authorities, the forms of organization in the countryside, the systems of community charges, the forms of collective work, the ways of making decisions —and in not addressing the campesino agrarian nuclei as collective owners of the land, but instead as individuals, choosing some and not others —the end of this term [AMLO’s 4T] will not see a single difference, neither in the reduction of poverty, nor in reforestation and care of the forest.”

In Honduras, Chortí Maya cemetery is swallowed up by Aura Minerals

Por

Renata Bessi

12 April, 2022

^{Foto de portada: Renata Bessi}

The Chortí Mayan community of Azacualpa, in the state of Copán, northeastern Honduras, sits on a hill that is part of a huge gold vein mined by Minerales de Occidente S.A de C.V. (Minosa), a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Aura Minerals.

Minosa began the on the lower part of the hill, near Azacualpa. “Every day at the foot of the hill they blow up dynamite,” Yesica Rodríguez, a resident of the community, told Avispa Midia. “The sound is incredible.”

The strip mine is expanding daily towards the top of the hill, destroying everything in its path. Now, the mining company is targeting the community’s traditional cemetery, which contains some 338 million ounces of gold, according to a report by the Center for Democracy Studies.

Minosa has spared no effort to dig up the remains of the community’s ancestors. Immediately in response to residents’ resistance and protest, police occupied the cemetery and surrounding area to guard the company’s equipment while it removed the bodies.

On February 20^th, Minosa employees came at dawn, protected by the armed forces and the National Police. It was later, when the soldiers and officials had left, that the family members who opposed the exhumations were allowed to enter and “obviously our souls ached seeing the disaster they had left. The ground was dug up everywhere,” said Rodríguez, who is part of the Committee of Those Affected by Minosa.

The company reported that it had exhumed all bodies from the cemetery. “According to them, they took out all the corpses, but we’re certain that it wasn’t all of them, only the ones in mausoleums. They wrecked the cemetery, dug up graves, all to make it look like they’d exhumed all the bodies. We believe that there are still remains of our relatives churned up in the land the excavated,” said Rodríguez.

Furthermore, she said, the community was not told where their families’ remains were taken. The new cemetery is on the same hill—however, according to Rodríguez, the graves are unmarked. “No one knows which bodies are which, we don’t know where they are, we can’t go visit them, and what’s more, the new cemetery will be moved again because it’s in the mining zone.”

What happens now, she said, is that the company will “clean the terrain,” to remove the earth already excavated in order to use dynamite. On February 22nd, Minosa “went so far as to enter the cemetery at four in the morning to begin removing the land.”

The conflict has been evident to the community since 2012, when the company’s plans to remove Azacualpa cemetery were made public. “It is unjust for outsiders to come in and destroy our territory, our culture, the land where our ancestors rest,” said Rodríguez.

Generations of Destruction

Just above the cemetery sits the community of Azacualpa, part of the area allotted to Minosa. “Destroying the part below will leave us hanging over a chasm. It’s logical that they want to destroy our village as well (...) but we won’t let them.”

Azacualpa wouldn’t be the first community in the area to disappear. The villages of San Andrés, Platanares, and San Miguel were relocated in the 1990s. In San Andrés, a church with colonial artifacts from the 18th century—which was even designated a cultural and historical heritage site—was abandoned in the mining area.

Land that had been full of life, animals, water, and pine forests is now dry, orange, covered in dust, and guarded by Minosa security. Huge craters and leach pads dot the slopes of the hill, along with an immense amount of machinery. The sound of the wind in the pine leaves has been replaced by the noise of bulldozers and dump trucks carrying tons of brush.

In 2016, when the battle over the cemetery was reaching its peak, the Avispa Midia team was in Azacualpa to document.

María Rodríguez Villanueva, now 52 years old, was a child when communities were being relocated. She said that her parents, along with many other families, came to live in Azacualpa because “there was nowhere left to build houses on the land the company had assigned them, Nueva San Andrés.” Furthermore, the company did not pay what it had promised for the houses’ construction.

When they uprooted San Andrés, her sister was president of the community trust. She remembers that some of the community were in agreement with the move, but not others. “Those who did not want to leave resisted. The last ones left faced off against company bulldozers that came to destroy the whole village. I remember one young man who didn’t want to leave—they fractured his spine with their machine. In the end they removed him because he was injured. He recovered and went to the United States.”

When Minosa first arrived in the 1980s, her father warned of the risks. “My dad said: ‘there’s a company coming and they’re going to be destructive, they’ll destroy the land and what’s on it.’ But we never thought it would go this far. If we’d realized at the time, we never would have let it begin.”

“I also remember that we would pass through here carrying firewood,” she said, pointing at the company’s operational area, where everything is arid. “Everything was forested, beautiful—there was even water here.”

Unlike Villanueva, Yesica Rodríguez isn’t lucky enough to remember an Azacualpa without the mining company. Rodríguez is 21. “I grew up in this battle with Minosa.” She recalls witnessing the conflict since she was a child. “I remember that people would hold demonstrations and the police would come, throw tear gas, beat people.”

She remembers, too, that children were told in school that the community could not exist without the mine. “There was one instructor who taught us that the company was everything to our survival. Now I see clearly that that’s not the case, it doesn’t help us, it destroys us, violates our rights, and humiliates us. If our ancestors could live off the land, I believe we can too,” said Rodriguez.

Cemetery in the courts

In 2015, the community of Azacualpa determined through an open town hall meeting that the cemetery is a cultural heritage site and therefore neither the exhumations nor the graveyard’s destruction would be permitted. “Despite this, the mining company, together with the municipality of La Unión and the Ministry of Health, began exhumation processes in the cemetery,” the Studies for Dignity Law Firm, which provides legal advice to the community, explained in a statement.

Legal remedies were pursued. The Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) issued an injunction that protected the cemetery from destruction and mandated its repair.

Defying the Supreme Court’s decision, an October 2021 resolution by judge Rafael Rivera Tábora of the Court of Santa Rosa de Copán ordered the exhumation, transfer, and reburial of human remains from the Chortí Maya cemetery to be carried out “urgently.”

In November 2021, a nullification hearing was held against Judge Rivera’s ruling. “Despite ample demonstration that his authorization violated the CSJ’s decision, which ordered the protection of the cemetery, the judge declared the nullification request, the objective of which was the preservation and protection of the community cemetery, to be without merit,” the Studies for Dignity Law Firm explained on social media.

So, they forcibly exhumed remains against the wishes of family members of the deceased.

In his resolution, the judge also ignored the community’s Chortí Mayan identity and the cemetery’s heritage and historical value for the residents of Azacualpa.

Taking into account both the judicial proceedings and the contempt for the order of protection by the CSJ, the Studies for Dignity Law Firm filed a complaint of judicial malfeasance against Judge Rafael Rivera Tábora before the Special Prosecutor for Transparency and the Fight Against Public Corruption.

According to statements made by the firm's lawyers in local media, none of the local judicial authorities recognized the Chortí Mayan identity of Azacualpa’s residents, although the identity was recognized initially by the CSJ in its order of protection.

Green Mining

During Avispa Midia’s visit to Azacualpa, we interviewed José Armando Acosta Contreras, who worked for Minosa for some 20 years. Contreras was fired after being accused of acting against the company by defending his community cemetery, and later his blood was found to be contaminated with heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and lead, leading to ongoing health problems.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Minosa maintains that its business is “focused on sustainable development.” For Contreras, there is no such thing as an environmentally responsible mining company. “Sustainable development,” for those who understand mining from the inside, is a joke. “Otherwise they wouldn't harm the forests, or kill the animals. There used to be many animals in these hills, birds of all kinds, squirrels, deer, even coyotes. Also, the five springs we used to have no longer exist. Little by little, the company has destroyed all of this,” he told Avispa Midia.

There is no shortage of complaints of pollution. According to a report by the Center for Democracy Studies, there were cyanide and heavy metal spills in the Lara River in 2003, 2009, and 2017. “Several other studies have shown that the discharge of wastewater by the mining company into the waters of the Lara River presents a serious danger in the short and medium term to the health of local residents” and those in the surrounding municipalities, the report confirms.

The Azacualpa Environmental Committee stated that it believes there has been even more discharge than acknowledge, and that Minosa personnel clean up and collect the evidence. The situation is worrisome as no one controls the discharge and its effects, nor does the company face penalties.

La Encrucijada’s Dilemma: The Greenwashing of Oil Palm

Por

Santiago Navarro F. y Aldo Santiago

4 April, 2022

by Santiago Navarro F. and Aldo Santiago for Avispa Midia and CONNECTAS

Oil palm cultivation is expanding aggressively across protected areas such as La Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve. In this region of Mexico’s Pacific coast, at least 17,300 illegally-cultivated acres (7,000 hectares) of the exotic plant have been identified, which the government and businesses are trying to legalize through reductions to the size of the reserve and a sustainability certification.

Read the full report here

Mexico’s military knew Ayotzinapa 43 were kidnapped, then covered it up

Por

Ñaní Pinto

3 April, 2022

^{Translated by NACLA}

^{Cover photo: Parents of the 43 missing students from the Normal School of Ayotzinapa, protested in front of the Attorney General's Office (FGR)}

Following a new report, families of the 43 students criticized the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for failing to follow through on promises to finally solve the case.

As the 43 families, we’re angry, really angry, because unfortunately [this government] looked us in the face for three years,” said Mario González, father of César Manuel González Hernández, one of the 43 students disappeared from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College in Iguala, Guerrero in 2014.

The response from the families of the disappeared students came after the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) charged with investigating the case released its third report on March 28. The report confirms that the Mexican military participated in the students’ disappearance and that authorities worked to distort the facts in presenting the “historical truth.”

That’s what the government of former president Enrique Peña Nieto called its official version of events, in which it argued that the students were detained by police in Iguala, handed over to members of an organized crime group, and then killed and incinerated in a trash dump in Cocula.

The GIEI’s investigations have cast doubt on the narrative since 2015. The independent experts got involved in the case after complaints of irregularities in the official version of events.

The group’s most recent report also includes a video that shows marines entered, interfered with, and manipulated the Cocula trash dump to construct the “historical truth.”

The GIEI also reported that the military designed a counterinsurgency strategy with which it infiltrated the Ayotzinapa teacher’s college to spy on students’ activities. The military was surveilling the students in real time as they were attacked by police and criminals in Iguala in the night between September 26 and 27, 2014.

After the latest revelations, the parents of the disappeared students called for investigations into both the Mexican military and former president Peña Nieto to clarify their participation in the case.

Broken Promises

In a press conference on March 29, the mothers and fathers of the disappeared students also demanded a meeting with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with whom they say they have not been in contact since September 2021.

*^{Parents of the 43 disappeared students meet with experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Guerrero, Mexico, September 29, 2015. (Daniel Cima / CIDH)}*

María Elena Guerrero, mother of one of the 43, Giovanni Galíndez, said the families didn’t think that after three years with a government that describes itself as the “Fourth Transformation,” there would still be no information about the students’ whereabouts.

For her part, Cristina Bautista, mother of the disappeared student Benjamín Ascencio, stressed that the GIEI report should prompt an investigation into the military “because that is where there are obstacles and we cannot find the truth.”

Emiliano Navarrete, father of the student José Ángel Navarrete González, said that in Mexico, the poor don’t get justice, and that the investigation into the disappearance of the 43 students is proof of that fact. He noted that, since the previous government was in power, there has been sufficient reason to suspect the military’s involvement in the crime.

Navarrete also criticized the current administration’s actions, arguing that because state institutions don’t listen to the president, barriers to accessing information and furthering investigations remain.

“[The president] should focus a little less on the mañaneras and a little more on the commitments he has with the people,” Navarrete said, referring to López Obrador’s daily press briefings, which sometimes last as long as three hours. “It is upsetting to see that federal government institutions keep withholding information. If they hid this from us, what else have they hidden? He who lies once lies twice and three times. And the government only uses power for itself, and it does not give justice to the people.”

For Mario González, actions like the creation of the Truth and Justice Commission for the Ayotizinapa case, created when López Obrador came to power, show that state institutions have been toying with the families for the past three years. Just two days after López Obrador took office at the end of 2018, federal authorities committed to releasing all information related to the case “knowing we wouldn’t find anything,” said González.

“How are we not going to be angry if, after three years, information comes out that should have been released at the time?” González continued. “How are we not going to be angry if we don’t know anything about [what happened to] our children?”

Toward Justice?

In the press conference, Vidulfo Rosales, legal representative of the families of the disappeared students, stated that one thing is clear from the latest GIEI report: the manipulation of the Cocula trash dump reveals that there was an effort to befoul the investigation and cover up the truth.

According to Rosales, this effort complicated the exploration of other lines of investigation over the course of at least five years. At the same time, he argued that there is no difference between the previous and current federal government with respect to the Ayotzinapa case because, in the more than three years since the creation of the Truth and Justice Commission, the heads of the Navy and National Defense have refused to collaborate with the investigations.

“It’s one thing to deliver [information] to the GIEI and another to take concrete steps toward establishing responsibility,” Rosales said. Despite the publication of the expert report, the evidence it reveals has not concretely entered into the investigation, so the prosecutor’s office will have challenges leveraging the GIEI’s report into legal channels.

According to the GIEI, the military also conducted investigations that have not been shared to help shed light on the facts. The experts warned that relevant information remains in the hands of the military and security forces that “has been omitted in the documents delivered to both the GIEI and the special prosecutor, as well as in the declarations of military officials, including: information about a military patrol at the Palace of Justice in Iguala; omission of reports from toll booth three on the highway, where soldiers were deployed; and that the students [were detained in the Palace of Justice] that night.”

United States Promises Millions of Dollars of Investments to the Southeast of Mexico

Por

Sare Frabes

7 March, 2022

Versión en español ➜

The government of the United States, the Mexican Agency of International Development Cooperation, the conservation organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and USAid or the United States Agency for International Development signed a letter of intent to “promote conservation and economic development in the south/southeastern region of Mexico.

The objective is “to support the efforts” of the southeastern Mexican states, and to this end, an initial investment of 30 million dollars is anticipated. The letter has the intention of adopting lines of coordination to implement policies, plans and strategies together and “to achieve a sustainable southeast.”

The announcement was made Thursday, the 24th during the Third Encounter of Governors of the Mexican South Southeast in Quintana Roo, where the governors, secretaries of the economy, and of the environment from Yucatán, Tabasco, Campeche, Veracruz, Chiapas and Oaxaca participated.

In a press conference, the ambassador of the United States, Kenneth Lee Salazar said that there is an “tremendous” interest in the region for the unique opportunity in the Maya jungle and the southeast of Mexico.

Mixed in with conservation discourse , the invited States addressed updates on the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, as well as strategies for the attraction of new investments in the Mexican southeast and public -private partnerships for conservation and development.

You might be interested in — Global Trade Bridge Will Devastate Indigenous Peoples and Biodiversity

The Ambassador of the United States added the importance of environmental conservation in the economic development of the region, in which infrastructure projects like the one in the Isthmus “will trigger more commerce in our countries and improve the movement of merchandise coming from Latin America and Europe,” in his words.

Security

In addition to “conservation” and “development” in the Mexican south-southeast, security was also a theme of the conversations between the United States and Mexico. This agreement took place a few days after the Mexican Secretary of the Navy announced, on February 3rd, that for the first time it will allow the United States to carry out military exercises on Mexican territory as part of the “Tradewinds 2022¹.” The event will be held from the 7th to the 21st of March.

The Ambassador from the United States said that in October of 2021, a new era in the relationship between the United States and Mexico on the issue of security had begun. He recalled a reunion of the Cabinet members of his country with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Since that time we began a new period against violence in the two countries. The difference from what had happened with previous governments, is that now we do it together, we are working very well as partners,” Kenneth Lee Salazar said in a press conference.

The governors agreed to hold a follow up meeting to present the comprehensive projects. They announced that the proposals set forth in the letter of intent would receive follow-up in subsequent meetings.

Translated by Schools for Chiapas

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