Social and Environmental Conflicts in Mexico and Central America
Mexico’s social and environmental conflicts between communities and big industries such as tourism, urban development and farming are being mapped by the collective Geocomunes. In addition, the organization is also covering data visualizations of Central America. This has proved helpful as it’s shedding more light on energy projects and other developments taking place in the region.
The first project Geocomunes worked on was a map of the highway infrastructure built in Mexico between 2006 and 2012, during former president Felipe Calderon’s administration. Adrian Flores, a member of Geocomunes, told Nightingale that the project team was concerned about the highways in Mexico and some fellow geographers had the same worries about the transport infrastructure in the country, so they began to gather and systematize the information. They worked through it based on the Environmental Impact Assessment.
That first effort, Flores continued, had the context of the environmental conflicts in Mexico, that began when the national transport network expanded. They gave the map a territorial perspective and a geopolitical vision, linking the most productive zones with the transport and the consumption regions.
After that, they mapped Central America. In 2018, with support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, they published the version for that region of the continent, focused on the expansion of electrical systems, through the SIEPAC, the Spanish acronym for the electric interconnection system for Central America.
That maps covers Guatemala and El Salvador up to Costa Rica and Panama, showing energy projects like hydroelectric, biomass, geothermic, solar and wind plants.
Geocomunes accompanies the maps like the one above with analysis of the region. It says that, instead of being something that helps people, the privatization of the electrical systems in Central America is taking control away from the public services as they build their market presence.
“Far from being an integration process for the people and useful in a public area, the electrical projects have expanded in spite of the communities, many of which are opposed to the installation of the energy project for many motives, like forced displacement, the impact on the local environment and, above all, because they impose them,” reads their document on Central America.
Their objective is to build cartographies that can be used as a tool to defend the common good. For that, Geocomunes uses public information on diverse media to make this unique and open map.
The maps right now are available only in Spanish, although they are easy to access and use, and with a translation tool from Google they can be explored by English speakers. Unfortunately, the documents and graphics are also in Spanish only.
Yannick Deniau, also a member of the Geocomunes collective, said that the layers from the map are obtained through transparency requests made to the federal, state, and municipal governments in Mexico. For example, the Environmental Impact Assessments shows the coordinates of a highway or a dam, and they build the layers with it.
“We try to add more information, like with the mining concessions we tried to find out who are the big consortiums that are hiding behind the names of their brands,” Deniau told Nightingale.
“The most important thing is to have a starting point for the information, so the communities and civil society can be informed and be able to defend themselves and their territories,” Deniau said. “It allows full-picture thinking about what’s going on.”
Their most recent project is the Yucatan Peninsula. It was done with the Mexican Civil Council for Sustainable Forestry (CCMSS, by its Spanish acronym).
The region mapped has places such as Cancun, Tulum, the Maya Riviera, Chichen Itza, Merida, and Holbox. Cancun’s airport receives an annual visit of 3 million tourists. It includes three states: Yucatan, Quintana Roo, and Campeche. The primary motivation to map the peninsula is in response to the Maya Train, the project from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that seeks to build a train across the Maya Jungle and the communities that surround it, including the states of Tabasco and Chiapas.
The map below shows the layers where the Maya Train is projected to cross in the Yucatan peninsula, although the government hasn’t defined the project yet. There are no official documents nor accredited feasibility studies that define the route in question.
Despite the fact that the most important project from the Mexican federal administration began in December 2018, there are other developments from private industries that alter the environment and social relationship in the Yucatan peninsula.
Those projects aren’t separated. Instead, they intend to create a business model for the whole Yucatan peninsula.
The tourism, clean energy, and agricultural industries have encroached on Yucatan peninsula’s territories. The map lets the user combine the layers of the projects to cross-check the information and make an analysis of the dynamics that are changing the region and the links between the deforestation or the loss of the communities land with the presence of the arriving industries.
The real estate “tsunami,” as they call it, especially in Cancun and Maya Riviera, in Quintana Roo, and in Merida, the capital of Yucatan, is also part of the problems impacting environment, and is taking the lands of the Maya people.
Geocomunes continues to provide a tool for organizations and communities to learn and participate in urban development discussions, and keep them informed of the changes happening in their environment. Because it’s a free and accessible tool, these innovations begins to narrow the data gap and broaden the knowledge of many.
