Guatemala this month announced the termination of a controversial contract for oil exploration in a coveted national park. In a move that environmentalists described as historic, Energy and Mines Minister Raúl Archila also said the government would not open the contract area or any other protected land to future exploration. Basic Resources International won a contract in 1992 to explore a nearly 475,000-acre (192,000-hectare) tract that includes the bulk of Laguna del Tigre National Park, a core area of the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Environmentalists and some government officials have maintained the contract was illegal because Guatemalan law expressly forbids resource extraction in national parks and core areas. However, legal challenges to the contract did not succeed. Once the project’s exploration phase ended in...
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Culminating his first 100 days in power, Mexican President Vicente Fox kicked off his National Forests and Water Crusade, a major environmental initiative aimed at getting Mexico’s public involved in conservation. Fox, vowing to treat protection of forest and water resources as a national security issue, touted the program in a March 7 curtain-raising held in Pátzcuaro, in the west-central state of Michoacán. He was accompanied by Victor Lichtinger, the new head of the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat). Early on, the new administration identified forest- and water-resource protection as a top priority. (See “Vicente Fox plays first environmental-policy card” and “Fox’s environmental chief wants the public involved”—EcoAméricas, December ‘00.) However, details of the effort remain unclear. Though the...
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A Brazilian judge’s decision to block construction of a $160-million navigational lock in the eastern Amazon has further clouded plans for a 620-mile (1,000-km) waterway aimed at spurring grain exports. The Feb. 18 ruling at least temporarily heads off construction of a lock at the Lajeado dam, a $700-million, 850-megawatt hydro station being built by a private consortium led by regional electricity-distribution companies. It follows a more sweeping, October 1999 court injunction against the Tocantins-Araguaia Waterway, which is supported by Brazil’s Transport Ministry. In that ruling—still in force—a federal judge prevented work on the waterway from starting on grounds that the project’s environmental-impact statement failed to gauge effects on river communities and 11 indigenous populations...
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Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency, Ibama, has decided to kill 15,000 wild buffalo because they’re destroying the Guapore Biological Reserve, a swampy floodplain in western Rondonia state and one of 23 areas in the country that Ibama has designated for ecological protection. Thirty years ago, a private ranch just outside the reserve imported African buffalo to study whether they could become a viable alternative to beef cattle, the main source of protein for the region’s residents. But shortly after the buffalo arrived, a number of them escaped into the reserve and reproduced prodigiously. Ibama can have the animals killed because under Brazilian law, imported species don’t enjoy the protection native species do. And the agency can cite serious destruction to the protected area. The wild animals...
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