Mexico peasants take up machetes against Acapulco dam
A two-hour Jeep ride inland from Acapulco, with its fast-food chains and high-rise seafront hotels, Gregorio Garcia’s family lives a simpler life in the tropical forest of southwestern Mexico.
A stream provides water, the soil bursts with squash and fruit trees and the forest provides fuel and medicinal leaves. Lunch is thick maize tortillas, salted deer meat, fresh chile sauce and coconut milk. Even the air smells sweet.
Yet this tiny paradise could soon be nearly 500 feet (150 m) underwater in the basin of a huge dam that will power new floodlit, air-conditioned hotels as Acapulco expands.
“They say the dam will bring benefits, but not for us. We will be completely under water,” Garcia said, his black eyes glistening with anger as he sat by his roomy adobe and wood home surrounded by pigs, goats and giggling children.
Due to be completed in 2012, La Parota will be one of Mexico’s biggest dams, flooding swathes of forest and subsistence farmland around the Papagayo River with a basin ten times the size of Acapulco’s famous bay.
More: alertnet.org
Mexico peasants take up machetes against Acapulco dam
A two-hour Jeep ride inland from Acapulco, with its fast-food chains and high-rise seafront hotels, Gregorio Garcia's family lives a simpler life in the tropical forest of southwestern Mexico.
A stream provides water, the soil bursts with squash and fruit trees and the forest provides fuel and medicinal leaves. Lunch is thick maize tortillas, salted deer meat, fresh chile sauce and coconut milk. Even the air smells sweet.
Yet this tiny paradise could soon be nearly 500 feet (150 m) underwater in the basin of a huge dam that will power new floodlit, air-conditioned hotels
Mexico City: Jan Magnussen race report
Jan Magnussen raced to victory number 11 in 2005
Danish racing driver Jan Magnussen, newly crowned Danish racing driver of the year, rounded of his racing season with a victory in the Pontiac GTO.R in Grand-Am GT in Mexico together with Paul Edwards.
The victory gave Jan Magnussen a total of 11 victories this season in four different cars. Jan Magnussens victories include victory in GT1 for Corvette Racing at Le Mans and Petit Le Mans, 5 victories in Team DBA Toyota Corolla in DTC, victory in Clio Cup guest drive and three victories in
Violence breaks out in parts of Mexico
Assailants lobbed a grenade at a hotel and a prison director and police chief barely survived separate attempts on their lives in an outbreak of violence in several parts of Mexico.
The grenade attack happened early Saturday in the resort city of Zihuatanejo, 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Acapulco. The grenade exploded about 4 a.m. (1000 GMT) in the parking lot of the Hotel Posada Colonial, shattering windows and injuring a person who was hit in the leg by a fragment of the weapon, Preventive Police official Miguel Garcia said.
The incident marked the third
Grenade attack injures 2 police officials in Mexico
A grenade lobbed from a movingcar at a police post injured two officials in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco, Mexico, on Sunday.
The attack took place at a police barricade outside Tres Vidas,where conflict between a private hotel and farming interest has sparked a series of conflict.
Farmers who originally lived in the area claimed that they never agreed to sell their territory. Groups of peasants stormed the area in and around Tres Vidas in recent days, seizing land they claim was stolen
Using machetes, poachers killed some 80 protected Olive Ridley sea turtles on Escobilla beach in Oaxaca, Mexico last weekend. The poachers were believed to be after turtle eggs, thought to be an aphrodisiac among locals. The discovery of the massacre was accouned by Profepa, the government's environmental protection agency.
"They killed them with blows to the head and machetes. It is very brutal, the beach would have been covered in blood," said leading environmental campaigner Homero Aridjis in a report from Reuters.
The poachers wasted some 1,800 pounds (800 kg) of valuable turtle flesh which was found on the sand and
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