Greenpeace Goes After Mexican Officials Who Okayed Spanish Project
Greenpeace Goes After Mexican Officials Who Okayed Spanish Project
Two Environment Secretariat officials who allegedly approved Spanish developer Hansa Urbana’s huge Cabo Cortes tourism complex in Mexico’s Baja California Sur state are the subject of an administrative complaint filed by Greenpeace.
Mauricio Limon Aguirre, deputy secretary for environmental protection management, and Eduardo Enrique Gonzalez, director of environmental impact and risk management, were named in the complaint filed by the environmental group last week. The complaint was submitted to the secretariat’s internal affairs office, Greenpeace said in a statement.
The resort, which is being developed by Hansa Urbana unit Hansa Baja Investments, covers 3,800 hectares (9,382 acres), of which 2,500 hectares (6,172 acres) will be protected natural areas and 1,300 hectares (3,210 acres) will be developed, company officials said last month.
The project will be developed in five phases, with final build-out expected in 30 or 40 years. Cabo Cortes would cover an area similar to that of Cancun, Mexico’s main tourism destination.
Environmental groups began alleging in mid-2010 that Hansa’s project, which calls for a total investment of some $2 billion, would affect the 20,000-year-old Cabo Pulmo reef, one of the oldest in Mexico’s Pacific region and located just 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) from the tourism complex.
Cabo Pulmo is home to 226 of the 875 species of fish that live in northwest Mexico’s Gulf of California, government reports say. The Mexican government declared Cabo Pulmo a protected area in 1995 and it is now a national park sprawling over 7,111 hectares (17,558 acres), with about 99 percent of the park made up of protected marine areas.
The two environmental officials “engaged in actions contrary” to the General Law on Environmental Balance, the Natural Protected Areas Law and the Los Cabos Environmental Management Plan, Greenpeace said.
Development plans call for building about 8,000 condominium units, 15 hotels, a marina with 490 slips and two 18-hole golf courses at Cabo Cortes, developers said last month. The project will create about 19,000 jobs, including 8,000 direct jobs and 11,000 indirect positions.
The Environment Secretariat approved Cabo Cortes’s environmental impact statement in September 2008. The project was later temporarily halted when a resident filed a request for a review of the project. Environmental officials gave the go-ahead to the project for the second time in March, but they set certain conditions.
