Two indigenous Tarahumara anti-logging campaigners have been freed from prison following an international campaign on their behalf by human-rights and environmental groups. Isidro Baldenegro and Hermenegildo Rivas were arrested on weapons and drug charges in March 2003 by Chihuahua State Judicial Police. The men’s supporters called the arrests a frame-up aimed at stopping Baldenegro and Rivas from campaigning against logging in the Sierra Tarahumara, their northern Mexico homeland. (See “Freedom sought for anti-logging activists”—EcoAméricas, June ’04.) Baldenegro and Rivas were released on June 23 after Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha withdrew the charges filed against the pair. They had spent 15 months behind bars. In a statement, the attorney general’s office did not admit irregularities in the...
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The environmental side-accord created in conjunction with the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has provided an important forum for Canada, Mexico and the United States to deal with continent-wide green issues, a review panel says. In its report, the panel also concludes Mexico has gotten significant capacity-building help under the side-accord, named the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC). Billed as an independent appraisal of the side-accord’s first decade, the review was prepared by a six-member committee appointed by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), the tri-national agency charged with implementation of the environmental side-agreement. Each of the Nafta nations represented on the CEC’s three-member governing council appointed two members of the panel. Mexico’s...
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Protesters from throughout Honduras converged on the capital of Tegucigalpa last month to demand that the government address what they are calling widespread environmental degradation. As last year, Catholic priest Andrés Tamayo led some 3,000 peasants on a seven-day march from the forested province of Olancho to protest runaway logging and the government graft that they say fuels it. But this year, Tamayo’s contingent was met in the capital by marchers from other parts of the country who came to protest not only destructive logging, but also environmental damage from shrimp farming and mining. Organizers say the broad participation marks the first step toward a nationwide, grassroots environmental movement in Honduras. “The people were in a state of coma, but they are waking up...
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The Swedish movie “Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers,” a condemnation of consumerism, won the grand prize and the press award last month at the Brazilian community of Goiás’ 6th Annual International Environmental Film Festival (Fica). Crowds estimated in the thousands filled Goiás, a town of 17,000, for the festival. The namesake of the state for which it served as capital until 1937, Goiás, a Unesco World Heritage Site, still retains much of its colonial architecture. Local residents mobilized to support the event and the environmentalist ideals it promotes, with T-shirt-clad volunteer brigades patrolling the streets to clear them of litter. “At the first festival, hardly anyone from the community came,” says Rodrigo Borges Santana, a Goiás City Council member and president of the...
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