Colombia’s highest court ordered mineral exploration suspended in environmentally fragile lands belonging to the Emberá-Katio tribe and an Afro-Colombian community on grounds neither group had been properly consulted as required under the constitution. The Constitutional Court ruled last month that Denver-based Muriel Mining had failed to consult with genuine representatives of the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities bordering or overlapping its 16,000-hectare (40,000-acre) concession of copper, gold and molybdenum in the northwestern departments of Antioquía and Chocó. This, the court said, violated the communities’ right to “social and cultural autonomy and integrity and their ownership of ancestral territories.” The communities also were deprived of the right to decide their future in light of potential impacts on woodlands, air and water...
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A huge ice block that fell into Lake 513 in the Andes in central Peru, sending a wave of water over the dam and into a town down the valley, could be a sign of things to come, experts say. On April 13, about 1 million cubic meters (35.3 million cubic feet) of ice—the equivalent of 20 U.S. football fields three stories deep—broke off a glacier and fell into the lake, triggering “a small tsunami,” according to César Portocarrero, coordinator of the Peruvian National Water Authority’s Glaciology and Water Resources Unit in Huaraz. Anticipating such a problem, engineers had lowered the lake’s water level 18 years ago, leaving a 23-meter (75-foot) safety zone, but Portocarrero estimates that the wave from the...
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In the first nationwide inspection of Mexican zoos, environmental officials have closed one facility and taken more than 2,700 captive animals and dead specimens into custody, authorities say. After reviewing conditions at 49 of Mexico’s 101 zoos, inspectors from the federal Attorney General’s Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa) determined that 70% were in violation of animal protection laws. In the majority of cases, zoo officials had neglected to register or properly identify animals in captivity, says Joel González Moreno, Profepa’s director-general of inspections and wildlife monitoring. Moreno said the animals would remain under Profepa’s care until the zoos proved that they were obtained legally. Many zoo directors denounced the seizures as arbitrary. After a week-long inspection of the Mexico City zoo, Profepa officials...
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The agency overseeing environmental issues under the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has given Mexico until May 3 to respond to allegations that it violated its own conservation laws by failing to curb the illegal planting of genetically modified corn. The Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) requested the information after determining that a complaint, filed in January 2009 by Greenpeace Mexico and several campesino and human rights groups, provided sufficient documentation to merit a government response. The CEC, the trilateral environmental body created in conjunction with Nafta, will then determine whether the submission warrants further investigation. The case dates from 2007, when Greenpeace and the other groups alerted Mexican environmental officials that commercial farmers in the northern state of Chihuahua were threatening...
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