A Brazilian appeals court last month absolved Bernardo Paz, founder of the Inhotim Institute, an acclaimed environment-themed art and botanical garden complex in the east-central state of Minas Gerais, of money laundering, just over two years after he was convicted of the crime. On Feb. 11, a three-judge federal appeals panel in Brasília unanimously overturned a Nov. 2017 ruling by a lower-court judge, citing insufficient evidence of guilt. Prosecutors had charged Paz, a businessman, with diverting US$98.5 million in employee social-security withholdings in 2007 and 2008 from a mining group he controls. He was accused of sending the funds into an offshore account set up to receive donations from his businesses for the benefit of the Inhotim Institute, then using them to pay bills and debt incurred by his mining group. Paz, who denied the accusation, was sentenced to nine years and three months...
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Construction of a beachside Caribbean hotel has been put on hold pending Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina’s order that the project’s future be weighed by a special commission on account of its location in a protected area. The Spanish company Globalia had begun building a complex of cabanas in early January at a site in the southeastern portion of the Dominican Republic with permission from the country’s Environment Ministry. Days before the president’s Jan. 28 order that the project be reviewed, Globalia and Dominican Tourism Minister, Francisco García, had made a presentation on the planned resort at a tourism conference in Madrid. Since it won Environment Ministry approval last year, the hotel project has drawn flak from Dominican environmental organizations affiliated with a national network of green groups called the Coalition for the Defense of Protected Areas. They contend there were irregularities in the permitting process. Globalia bought the 25...
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An estimated 26 jaguar populations in the Americas cross national borders, and this number will likely increase as continuing habitat destruction forces the cats to range more widely to feed and reproduce. That’s why the jaguar (Panthera onca) last month was designated for protection under the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), a United Nations treaty to safeguard animals that need their conservation status to accompany them from one country to another. The decision came at the 13th Conference of the Parties to the CMS, held in Gandhinagar, India, based on a proposal made by the governments of Costa Rica, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Conservationists hope the jaguar’s listing will encourage Latin American governments to create cross-border corridors of protected habitat for the animal, which is found as far north as the U.S.-Mexican border region and as far south as the South American meeting point of the...
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Of Uruguay’s 48 native amphibian species and 70 reptile species, approximately 25% and 13%, respectively, are under threat of extinction, according to a report compiled by the Uruguayan government and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The species totals and conservation statuses appear in the Red Book of Amphibians and Reptiles of Uruguay, issued in December 2019 by the IUCN and Uruguay’s National Environmental Directorate (Dinama). The percentages of amphibians and reptiles under threat compare to reported worldwide figures of 41% and 13%, respectively, participants in the study say. Featuring interpretation of Red Book data released in 2015, the report’s principal contribution is to recommend steps needed to ensure conservation of the threatened amphibians and reptiles, says co-editor Santiago Carreira, a biologist at Uruguay’s University of the Republic. In doing so, he adds, the report gives authorities tools to tailor those steps appropriately. “Public authorities have...
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