Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex has defied a government order by cutting down protected mangrove trees on the site where president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has ordered the construction of an oil refinery, according to sources familiar with the project. Satellite images show a landscape razed presumably to accommodate the controversial $8 billion project.
The populist president has made the Dos Bocas refinery project, located in his home state of Tabasco, central to his bid (paywall) to revive Pemex from its current dysfunction. Now Latin America’s second-biggest company by revenue, Pemex drove the Mexican economy in the 1960s and 1970s but lost $35 billion last year. Critics say the refinery isn’t economically viable.
So far, the project has come at the cost of a forest of mangroves, a tree treasured by conservationists and important in combating climate change. The trees create complex ecosystems that provide almost 6% of Mexico’s GDP, according to the University of San Diego. Swaths of jungle, including a few dozen hectares of mangrove, were cut down by a third-party company shortly after then-president-elect Lopez Obrador announced the project in July 2018. The permit to begin work wasn’t issued until the next year. In January 2019, Mexico’s environmental regulator ASEA fined the third-party that caused the destruction $700,000. When ASEA finally gave Pemex a conditional building permit in August 2019, it barred the company from interfering with the remaining area of mangroves.
However, since that order, more mangroves and other vegetation have been cut down in several areas on the site and there are multiple paths seemingly created to provide vehicle access where mangroves previously lived, satellite images show. In private meetings, ASEA had denied requests made by Pemex over several months last year to chop down more mangroves in order to build a bridge out of the swampy area, two sources familiar with the project told Quartz. Several smaller areas were also cleared in the period between ASEA handing down the fine in January and issuing the permit in August.
Pemex and president Lopez Obrador’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment on this story. ASEA declined to comment until it had seen the published article.
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