The Coastal Town Will No Longer Be Able To Grow Its Housing Developments Because It Has Already Reached The Limit Of The Land Reserve.
MÉRIDA, Yucatán.- Celestún became the first municipality in Yucatán that will not be able to grow more in its housing developments because it has already reached the limit of the territorial reserve, announced the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (Conanmp).
The director of the Ría de Celestún Biosphere Reserve, which depends on Conanmp, René Humberto Kantún Palma, declared that the municipality “has already reached the limit of its growth in the urban area, and if this situation continues, the urban area will expand to zones that are under conservation programs”.
He also stated that it is necessary to determine alternatives for the establishment of housing buildings, but within the current urban area.
The federal official specified that the Celestún natural reserve has 81 thousand hectares that cover Yucatan and Campeche, 50 percent of the aforementioned reserve is located in this entity.
He added that this natural area encompasses two populations, the first of which is Celestún and the other Isla Arena, which belongs to the municipality of Calkiní, Campeche.
He recalled that in the municipality there is a proposal to establish a legal fund, however, it does not foresee that it is viable because it is considered for the limits of the territorial reserve.
“There is a proposal for a legal fund, it does not exist as such, but it is established particularly with environmental terms, although where it is intended to develop it is practically at the limits, we do not have the percentages, we would have to analyze, within the community of Celestún. There are areas where salt ponds were established decades ago, which remained within the area, and it is where people particularly try to settle and those are the places that are not conducive for housing due to the ways in which people build their homes ”.
Kantún Palma explained that the aforementioned salt ponds were built based on solid waste and garbage, so they do not allow adequate filtering of water discharges.
“We would have to find other suitable spaces for human habitation that would have to be outside the community. These are issues that we have on our radar, but first do it in an orderly and coordinated manner with the other government instances, ” said the interviewee
Celestun history of illegal nature preserve construction land theft and fraud
The inhabitants of Celestún showed, once again, that they are not submissive, but to take up arms, that they are determined because for the second consecutive night they concentrated in the Palace and shouted demanded the two-time mayor Leonel Rosado Mena (PRI) to report the land that he appropriated by dispossessing neighbors and, above all, a 50,000-square-meter beach lot located near the house of Rosado Mena himself and that, according to the mayor, his predecessor, also the PRI Rosa Alba Acosta Narváez, gave to the company Uredi, based in Mérida.
After some 200 Celestuneans came to ask the mayor for an account on Thursday night, on Friday several hundred gathered, about a thousand according to some and, according to anonymous videos disseminated on social networks, the enraged neighbors went from shouting to drinking Leonel Rosado from the shirt because, it is said, he dared to attack a woman who was reproaching him for the spoils of the land.
Leonel Rosado ended up with just the torn shirt (his collaborators did the role of bodyguards well) and shortly after, agents of the Yucatan Public Security Secretariat (SSP) arrived, in several patrols, and fired tear gas to “rescue” the man. mayor, who was taken from the port, where the version runs that he was taken to Mérida for an “urgent meeting” at the Government Palace.
Shortly after, according to more videos that circulate on the internet, a convoy of SSP patrols entered Celestún at full speed, which crossed the main avenue and parked next to the others on one side of the Palace, where the crowd of neighbors continued occupying the corridor and part of the esplanade, despite the first tear gas. When they saw the riot police arrive, several women with children in their hands withdrew from the basement of the Palace and numerous neighbors took up positions in front of the policemen and began to throw bicycles and stones at them. They even capsized patrols.
They protest in Celestún
The SSP then resorted to chemical weapons, tear gas grenades, to repress people fired up by the dispossession of land, the monopoly of government support attributed to the mayor and his relatives, and the lack of benefit works for the community.
The videos show police officers beating Celestuneans in a playground and also neighbors retreating behind walls and throwing objects at the only entrance to avoid the passage of the agents.
Celestunenses users of social networks, when writing comments on the videos, assured that the policemen even fired firearms, that “there are deaths” and that they were detained – and beaten – including minors.
With the repression, the SSP once again dented its controversial Escudo Yucatán program, presented with great fanfare on March 30, 2016, to dispose of 1,500 million that the State collected in advance and will no longer receive for 12 years.
Although there were not only detainees but also injuries, neither in the morning nor on Saturday, May 20, the SSP did not report the events that occurred in Celestún since the night of Friday 19… at least on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
In the new land conflict, Uredi appears, the same construction company that in April 2017 was accused by residents of Dzilam de Bravo of selling beach land that, as in Celestún, it received as a “free donation”.
In Dzilam, the modus operandi was the same as in Celestún, as the neighbors denounced that the mayor 2012-2015, the also PRI member Pedro Castillo Reyes, stripped inhabitants of the port and then gave the land, claiming that they are lands of legal estate, to Uredi, which in turn sold them.
In that port, the conflict broke out on April 9 when an individual began to fence Gregorio Córdova’s beach property because he said, he bought it for $ 250,000 from Uredi. Fearful that their lands will also be fenced off, about 100 residents gathered outside the Palace on April 11 and reproached the mayor 2015-2018, also the PRI member Julio Abraham Villanueva Rivero, who a day later stopped the construction of the fence in the land, 20 meters of beach, at the exit of Dzilam towards San Crisanto.
In Yucatán, complaints about land dispossession are multiplying everywhere. Complaints from ejidatarios of Chocholá, Hunucmá, Kinchil … and inhabitants of ports reach the media, prosecutors and the Agrarian Attorney, but from there they do not pass.
This year, the reports gained strength in the media that a mafia of PRI government officials, notaries and notaries operates in Yucatan that traffics land that takes people away and legalizes and consumes the spoils in the Public Property Registry. . It is said to be a federal crime case of organized crime.
In the case of Celestún, a port of 6,831 inhabitants according to Inegi, on Thursday the mayor showed dissatisfied neighbors a “deed” that his predecessor Rosa Acosta went to make before a notary public in Ucú in 2014 to donate the 50,000 square meter lot to the seashore to Uredi.
But the Celestunenses returned to the Palace on Friday and in greater numbers to ask the mayor to account and the spirits were overflowing.
It is not the first time that Celestunenses have exercised their right to demonstrate and demand accountability. For example, in June 2016 they blocked the port’s entrance bridge for four hours to demand the expulsion of folksy fishermen who preyed on octopus and sea cucumbers and threw chlorine and acid into the caves to destroy even the octopuses. On that occasion, Mayor Leonel Rosado was required to comply with the agreement to expel foreign predators.
The boatmen who offer tours to tourists have also blocked the entrance to Celestún demanding that Cultur support them. After several protests, in the end, they managed to get their motorboat debt forgiven and, in addition, to deliver new ones.
Now it remains to be seen how the conflict over land plunder will end.
Source: Sipse.com
