Bacalar’s PNA propposal

Although, in 2014 Ramsar's proposal for Bacalar was momentarily stopped, and the lagoon already had an administrative instance (APIQROO), the actors of the triad did not take their finger off the line and returned in 2017 with another proposal. If we remember the 2014 Ramsar site proposal, called the Bacalar Coastal Transversal Corridor - Chetumal Bay, a polygon of 97,591 hectares, proposed unilaterally by Luisa Falcón and ECOSUR, was made up of three polygons: 1. An area of wetlands, in the center of the lagoon, of 5,499 hectares 2. An area of 87,092 hectares that was the state PNA Sanctuary of the Manatee, Chetumal Bay, and 3. An area of 5,000 hectares proposed by CONANP that was located on the body of water of the Bacalar lagoon Again the Institute of Ecology of the UNAM and ECOSUR, now with the support of the Secretariat of Environment of the State of Quintana Roo and the environmental organization Friends of Sian Ka'an, AC, who allied in turn with federal legislators of the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico and officials of SEMARNAT and CONANP, and again they attacked trying to justify a decree of a Protected Natural Area (PNA) competence of the Federation, which they called the Bacalar Flora and Fauna Protection Area (APFFB), which had an area of 219 thousand hectares that covered the municipalities of Bacalar and Othón P. Blanco in the territory of 12 ejidos and 18 localities. In the 2017 proposal, the same actors returned, some in different institutions, but with a more extensive and aggressive proposal. The 2017 PNA proposal affected territories of the ejidos of Bacalar, Aarón Merino Fernández, Laguna Guerrero, Calderitas, La Península, Úrsulo Galván, Santa Elena, Buenavista, Pedro A. Santos, who had areas of important forest reserves that reach approximately 11,800 hectares, most with records before SEMARNAT and SEMA, with an average of 13 Management Units for the Conservation of Wildlife (UMA) for the reproduction and use of regulated species of flora and fauna, ecotourism, most of the ejidos had a Community Territorial Planning, reforestation and forest health programs, environmental services, community brigades against forest fires, protection and conservation of mangroves, all of them supported with the assistance of CONAFOR,

SEMARNAT, SAGARPA, INAES (Instituto Nacional de Empresas Sociales) y el Gobierno del Estado.

Similarly, at that time there were 27 low-impact ecotourism and alternative tourism projects, some active and others suspended due to lack of support for their operation, more than 12 aquaculture projects, which from the update of the Local Ecological Management Program (POEL) of the municipality of Othón P. Blanco in 2015, had allowed this activity to have sustained growth in the region. The ejidos of Calderitas, Úrsula Galván, Laguna Guerrero, La Península, Tollocan, Calderas Barlovento, were already immersed in the state protected natural area, known as Chetumal Bay, with the category of area subject to ecological conservation Sanctuary of manatee with a total of 281,320 hectares located entirely in the Municipality of Othón P. Blanco, in which since its creation in 1999 it had plunged producers into the almost obligatory need for assistance given that more than 10,000 ha of their productive territories had been separated by the decree of the PNA as an untouchable core area. And that's without considering the private, national and in possession lands that remained within the polygon.

They were pretty much the same actors. At this time this group worked on the media strategy for public opinion to say that this initiative was part of requests from environmental groups and organized civil society. However, as she admitted in an interview in 2021, this initiative arose from the direct request of Luisa Falcón of the UNAM, as she regularly mentions in some press releases, with the support of Alfredo Arellano, then Secretary of Environment of Quintana Roo, former Regional Director of CONANP.

In the feasibility study for the establishment of the NAP, carried out by Friends of Sian Ka'an, it is mentioned that its elaboration was financed with resources from the Program for the Management of Protected Natural Areas (FMAN) of the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP), which manages the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature (FMCN), as mentioned above, those who on the CONANP page are informed were authorized $400,00.00 to carry out a previous study justifying the declaration of PNA (identified as RPC Bacalar), Land Tenure Study and with own funds of Friends of Sian Ka'an A.C., in collaboration with the Secretariat of Ecology

and Environment of the State of Quintana Roo (SEMA) that was in charge of Alfredo Arellano.

As alfredo Arellano Guillermo mentioned, the Secretary of Environment of Quintana Roo who promoted the PNA initiative had previously been Regional Director of CONANP in the North of Quintana Roo, so he was very familiar with the mechanisms for establishing protected natural areas, the financing and the benefits that could be obtained from them. He is a controversial character on whom many complaints of corruption hang. When the communities gathered to protest against this initiative it became clear that they had NOT been consulted or their opinions taken into account to include, in some cases, their entire territories within a Protected Natural Area.

Repetitively in all the proposals of the triad to impose the instruments of environmental policy, to justify actions such as the establishment of a Ramsar site or a NAPA, there are always four elements: 1. A count of natural resources or species that is "urgent" to save, with very general statements without justifying these statements with data. 2. One or more groups of actors that are criminalized and pointed out as a cause. 3. An imminent danger, and 4. The mention that the instrument is THE BEST SOLUTION.

They made their count of things that were urgent to save arguing that the 219,000 hectares were necessary because it allowed the presence of emblematic and protected species that were at risk of survival such as stromatolites, chivita snail snail, snail sparrowhawk, butterflies, reptiles and birds, as well as mammals and fish.

I emphasize the stromatolites because they are stones, what is alive and can be considered "species" are the microorganisms that inhabit the millimeter or two of microbial mat on its surface, and that not even the Chicxulub meteorite endangered, but build them a myth for their protection and urgency to save these stones built by accumulation of tartar, became a key piece in his media discourse.

They also argued that due to the tourist potential of the area and the development that was seen coming, in such a fragile environment they made a protected area urgent. But if we return to the presentation of the benefits of the Ramsar site for the triad presented by Luisa Falcón, there is the ability of cyanobacteria as a biotechnology base to process contaminants. It is very easy to evaluate and demonstrate how the triad discourse changes, depending on who nature is being sold to. They also argued that by joining the local ecological management program, the urban development plan, a strict and adequate program of collection and treatment of wastewater would make possible the sustainable development of the municipalities of Othón. P. Blanco, Bacalar and, in general, southern Quintana Roo. If we remove from the text the phrase: the protected natural area, everything else has been a request of the local population for many years. The triad put the NAP as the central axis of its call and linked it with the rest, arguing that the decree was going to be a mechanism to facilitate the institutional management of other processes for the preservation of the environmental values of the ecosystems, represented within the area, as an ideal legal instrument and ends with emotional blackmail its exposition: "... to protect a series of ecosystems that surround the Bacalar lagoon, a unique body of water in Mexico and in the world, for its extension, scenic beauty, biodiversity and connectivity with the Mayan jungle and the Mesoamerican reef, two ecosystems of continental and global relevance…” When discourses of this type are analyzed, it can be verified that they are repeated in decrees, applications and throughout the environmental marketing of NGOs, government environmental agencies and scientists, to convince public opinion that action is being taken to save nature, in a disinterested, altruistic and almost heroic way. That servility to academic degrees and government positions makes the population not ask questions and does not dare to question things like:

• How is the PNA going to do that? If we remove the NAP from the equation, the rest of the instruments, implemented correctly and for which they were created, on their own, would solve any type of negative impact that was being generated on the body of water.

• How does the NAP come into the equation that makes it key so that now what has not worked, works? From the answers emerge others such as, that the promoters do not take the trouble to explain.

• How are the authorities going to agree at different levels of government and different sectors, if they have not been able to agree before?

• How is another instrument of environmental policy, there are already three and two more coming (see below) going to be articulated to make a difference?

• How will it positively and negatively impact the population?

With indicators and projections, not with dreams and hopes. • How do they think the costs for protection/conservation (not only economic, but social, productive, technical, heritage, environmental) are going to be abided? • Who is going to bear the costs? How are we going to avoid corruption, as has happened in other NAPAs?

Public opinion continues to assume that the promoters of the triad have the answer, but this is rarely the case. Beyond a marketing statement of heroic dyes, the statements of researchers and ONGA affirm something that has not been demonstrated in a practical and concrete way with the PNA and other environmental policy instruments in the country in the last 44 years. To understand the model of NAPAs in Mexico, it would be necessary to talk about the origin of the model of protected natural areas in the nineteenth century, particularly in the United States; whose purpose was "to protect wilderness threatened by a growing expansion of urban-industrial civilization conceived as destructive of nature and how this concept of protected natural areas collided with the reality of the "third world" countries of Latin America, where the inhabitants not only live closely with nature, but also coexist with it, but we will deal with that later when we talk about the myth of the tourist load capacity, because they are linked. Ironically, many of the speeches of the promoters of these areas are based on a romantic idea of paradise in danger, as was the case with the naturalists of the nineteenth century, where the PNAs come from. Practically the same discourse of the naturalists and reservists of that time – two centuries ago –is handled: the only way to protect nature was to separate it from man, through islands from where "those who loved nature" could admire it. When one listens carefully to the justifications of the triad that involve spiritualoid concepts, new age, they are centennial discourses, from the colonialist vision