19/09/2023 | Cancun, Quintana Roo.-The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, informed -during Tuesday’s morning conference- that a group of landowners who had deeded around 300 hectares in Puerto Morelos, decided to donate the land to turn it into a Natural Protected Area.
“There, very close to Cancun in Playa Morelos (Puerto Morelos), some businessmen have just donated 300 hectares of mangroves in Puerto Morelos to become protected areas, about 300 hectares, deeded, they were theirs, it was a trust and they decided to donate them to be declared natural protected areas”, he shared.
This donation, he celebrated, is very important because tourists come to enjoy the Caribbean sea, but also nature, all the vast mangrove areas, the jungle, the fauna, the archeological sites.
If we do not take care of that, he compared, if we continue to have a site like Calica, which is a bank to extract material and take it to the United States, material that is obtained from one of the most important tourist areas in the world, it is as if Mexico went to Florida and exploited a bank of construction material and brought it here, he said.
He assured that with this type of actions Mexico is contributing a lot to face the problem of climate change, because it is being done in two ways, on the one hand, it has the most important reforestation program in the world, Sembrando Vida, which does not exist in any other country, cultivating fruit and timber trees in more than one million hectares.
“This is a very important thing, this contributes to improve the environment and the other thing we are doing is declaring protected areas, extensions that Fonatur had for the construction of hotels; they have already been decreed as protected zones or areas in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Baja California Sur, around 16 thousand hectares”, he added.
He said that the idea is to protect these areas and also to allow the general population to enjoy them, so that they can go to the beaches, because the tendency was their privatization and reserves will continue to be decreed, as was done in Lake Texcoco.
In Calakmul, he pointed out, the reserve will be expanded and it will be the second most important in Latin America, after the Amazon, to reach 1,500,000 hectares.
Regarding the Calica issue, he informed that they have not yet received an answer regarding the offer made by the government to recover the land and convert it into a protected area, because he believes that they are waiting for the end of their mandate, thinking that they are going to return to do what they did before.
“These gentlemen from Calica should know the background of how when Salinas de Gortari, they blame Mrs. Julia Carabias (Secretary of Natural Resources and Fisheries in the government of Ernesto Zedillo), but no, she had to do with it, but the original permit was given when Salinas was in power, what Zedillo did was to extend or renew it, but that was since Salinas, and they did not have the original concession, it was given to another company and that company sold the land to them, but we are making them a good offer, we are buying everything from them, the appraisal has been done and they still do not respond. We are talking about jungle, mangroves, about 2,400 hectares”, he said.
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