The manager of a protected area in southern Mexico was shot to death this month after he had alerted authorities about the illegal extraction of sand and rock from a river. The body of José Luis Álvarez, 64, was discovered on June 10 on the side of a highway in Palenque municipality in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Next to his body authorities found threatening messages directed at his family and colleagues, according to the forest reserve he oversaw in the state of Tabasco—the Saraguatos Wildlife Management Unit (UMA Saraguatos), a division of Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat). The 345-hectare (853-acre) UMA Saraguatos, which includes a preserve for mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra), extends from the community of Chablé to the town of Emiliano Zapata. It is home not only to hundreds of mantled howler monkeys, but also to species including green iguanas (Iguana iguana...
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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador appointed academic Víctor Manuel Toledo as Mexico’s top environmental official following the surprise departure of his original appointee, Josefa González-Blanco. González-Blanco, whom López Obrador named in December to lead the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), resigned on May 25. The day before, a passenger on a delayed flight to Baja California complained that the plane had been halted on the runway in Mexico City for 38 minutes to wait for the secretary. The man, identified as Jorge Rioja, said on Twitter that the captain of the Aeromexico flight to the northern city of Mexicali had announced on the loudspeaker that the delay was due to “a presidential order.” Rioja followed his tweet with a photo he took of González-Blanco after she had boarded the airplane. Media outlets then reported on the delay, saying airline sources confirmed that González...
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The separation of two large icebergs from the eastern portion of Grey Glacier in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, one on Feb. 20 and the other on March 7, has spurred ongoing discussion of the effects of climate change on the country’s Patagonian region. “They are the biggest detachments in that area since one that occurred at the end of November 2017,” says Ricardo Jaña, a glaciologist with the Chilean Antarctic Institute. “The three events [together] have been the biggest recorded in 20 years, when icebergs detached from the western portion.” The detachments are considered abnormal on account of the large, 16.3-hectare (40-acre) collective size of the two icebergs released from the glacier into Lake Grey. They have drawn public attention to issues of glaciology that have been the subject of on-the-ground monitoring in the region since 2011, says Inti González, a glaciologist with the...
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The Chilean government has formally received two huge Patagonian parks from a private donor—a total of 400,000 hectares (988,000 acres) that are now national parks, one called Pumalín and the other Patagonia. The donations, completed in May, came from a foundation operated by the late Douglas Tompkins and his wife Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, former U.S. clothing executives who became conservationists. The parks significantly expand Chile’s publicly owned protected areas and encompass a dramatic array of landforms ranging from coastal fiords and temperate rainforests to Andean mountains and glaciers. The transfer of the tracts, which have operated as private parks for years, comes at a tricky time, however. That’s because the new parks effectively expand Chile’s public protected lands in a year in which the government parks authority, the National System of Protected Wild Areas of the State (Snaspe), has seen its budget cut by 13%. The transfer of Pumalín...
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