Please help us
This is Tajamar, México. It used to look like this.
The Mexican government authorized a new apartment complex covering over 140 acres of mangrove. In the morning of Saturday 16th, despite local opposition, machinery and land workers from a group of twenty two building enterprises entered Tajamar and started to tear trees apart and fill the swamp with dirt to prepare the land for such development. The mangrove destruction was authorized by the federal government, both through its FONATUR dependency and their local government. The local community fearlessly opposed to the destruction of their land, so the government sent a police squad and let the machinery in to start. The next morning, the damage was done; once green and full of life, the mangrove now looks like this:
Activists and the local community saw their land gone, they stood there powerless as they saw the bulldozers burry alive animals in their rush to get the job done.
This is specially important since Mexico, and ironically, Cancún (the municipality where Tajamar is located) will be host of the UN’s COP13, the most important conference about biodiversity and environment, which will take place December this year. The people of Mexico demands this conference to be taken away from the current government and to be celebrated somewhere else. We think the UN shouldn’t support this. I really can’t stress enough how unfair this is. They deliberately BURIED ALIVE crocodiles and other local species. This kind of mangrove saved México from hurricane Patricia last year. They recklessly just destroyed an entire ecosystem just to profit themselves. A fellow mexican has started a Change.org petition to bring the UN’s attention and try and do something. We’re desperate.
