Amid the punishing rains to hit Central America in recent months, attention has appropriately focused on the lives and property lost in floods, mudslides and other water-related disasters. Another consequence, the pollution of coastlines with flood-borne trash, has had considerable impact, too, with Guatemala’s Motagua River providing a striking example. Heavy rains in September raised the level of the Motagua, which empties into the Caribbean at the Honduran border. The heavy flow sent a torrent of trash into the sea, with some 600 tons fouling the shores of Honduras’s Omoa Bay and sparking a dispute between Honduras and Guatemala. Rains from back-to-back hurricanes Eta and Iota this month have swelled the Motagua yet again. The downpours caused the river to overflow its banks and flood several Guatemalan towns, prompting evacuations and resulting in the flood-borne delivery of still more floating trash downstream. The September flows...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
The Mexican government is studying the feasibility of a project to build a small nuclear power plant on the Baja California peninsula, further indication that the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador seeks to fortify the country’s electricity grid with non-renewable energy sources. “I am convinced of the value of nuclear energy,” Rocío Nahle, Mexico’s energy secretary, told senators in an Oct. 26 presentation. “It’s time for Mexico to begin to talk more about nuclear energy, which has been somewhat forbidden and is a very beneficial energy source.” Nahle has promoted investment in national hydrocarbon development and oil refinery upgrades since assuming her post in 2018, a strategy that has created serious headwinds for clean-energy projects. In her presentation to senators last month, she said the state electricity company, CFE, is weighing a project to build a “micro” nuclear power plant in Baja California. Nahle did not...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Adrián Peña became the first head of Uruguay’s newly created Environment Ministry on Aug. 28. Less than a month later, he weighed in on a controversial project, announcing that the construction of a new sanitary landfill in the southern department of Canelones would be suspended pending a review of alternative approaches. Residents near the rural project site in the municipality of Soca, a number of them smallholder dairy and vegetable farmers, have strongly opposed the project since it was announced in February of 2019, arguing it would foul local water sources. But the disposal project won technical approval on Feb. 21 of this year from the left-leaning administration of then-President Tabaré Vázquez, whose term ended nine days later. It also has had the enthusiastic support of Yamandú Orsi, chief executive of the Canelones’ departmental government, which also has approved the project. Orsi was running for reelection when the...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Paraguayan officials have temporarily shut down one of three meat processing plants operated in the country by Frigorífico Concepción, the nation’s second-leading beef exporter, over the discharge into the Paraguay River of waste that they say received “no treatment whatsoever.” Video distributed Nov. 19 on social media by fish farmers in the area—the central Paraguayan town of Concepción—showed red liquid gushing into the river from an aboveground pipe projecting from one of the plant’s exterior walls. The Environment and Sustainable Development Ministry (Mades) sent inspectors to the site and later issued a resolution citing “activities that depart from conditions established in environmental regulations.” The company, for its part, issued a statement attributing the problem to “a failure of one of the underground wastewater-treatment lines.” It said that plant personnel located the source of the problem and stopped the release of untreated waste. “We reject the unfounded...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
