Mexico appears to have backpedaled on its commitment to require that industries disclose the types and amounts of pollution they produce. A bill drafted by Mexico’s environment ministry (Semarnat) to create a Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) was sent to Congress last month as part of a reform package. (See “Toxic-reporting legislation on way in Mexico”—EcoAméricas, Aug. ’01.) But the proposal that reached Congress falls short of the promise Environment Secretary Víctor Lichtinger made in June at a meeting of the tri-national Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). Lichtinger told the CEC he would push through legislation to create a public register in which industries must periodically report how much pollution they emit site by site, substance by substance. This would have...
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Ibama, Brazil’s environmental-enforcement agency, has begun investigating the illegal cutting of 7,165 cubic meters of mahogany it confiscated last month—the largest such seizure in the country’s history. After making the seizure in the eastern Amazon state of Pará, the agency suspended all logging, transport and export of mahogany. “We only will allow resumed commercial mahogany activities when we feel it’s safe for the species and the rainforest,” says José Leland Juvencio Barroso, who heads Ibama’s inspection division. Ibama now is seeking witnesses to the cutting, which is punishable by up to $15 million in fines and a year in jail. In doing so, it is targeting a longstanding Amazon problem. “Illegal cutting of mahogany has been one of the main factors responsible for...
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Adriana Hoffmann has resigned as executive director of Chile’s National Environment Commission (Conama), indicating she received insufficient support from the center-left government. “Today, I note a lack of commitment by the government to environmental issues,” she said in an Oct. 16 press statement. She said the government of President Ricardo Lagos, who appointed her to head Conama in March 2000 at the outset of his six-year term, did not give her the latitude she needed. A botanist who founded and led the Defenders of the Chilean Forest group before joining Conama, Hoffmann long has championed native-forest protection. Her appointment drew immediate fire from business. (See “Hoffmann starts fast, jangling some nerves”—EcoAméricas, April 2000.) According to some local media reports, Álvaro García...
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In its latest show of support for the country’s landmark Galápagos-protection law, Ecuador’s highest court last month decided to permit authorities here to auction off a Costa Rican shark-fishing vessel that was seized within the Galápagos marine reserve. The vessel, María Canela II, was seized March 22 just north of the archipelago carrying 1,044 shark fins, 78 shark carcasses and 10 live sharks. It was well within the reserve, a 40-mile (64-km) protection zone established in 1998 under the Special Law of the Galápagos. Commercial fishing is prohibited in the reserve, where Galápagos National Park has enforcement authority. In the case of the María Canela II, the park imposed a maximum $4,000 fine and confiscated the vessel as a first step...
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In a surprise move, Mexican President Vicente Fox this month ordered that anti-logging activists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera be released from jail. The action came amid growing pressure on the Fox administration to free the two men, who were arrested on drug and weapons charges in May 1999 after they had organized opposition to timber cutting in Guerrero state. Lawyers for Montiel and Cabrera filed a complaint Oct. 26 with the Organization of American States (OAS), having lost appeals in the Mexican courts. The complaint, filed with the OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), is the first international rights case against Fox’s one-year-old administration. The activists’ cause, already championed by international environmental and human-rights groups, gained further attention...
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