President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been criticized for his ambivalent attitude toward protecting Mexico’s rich natural environment—the Mayan tourist train project, for example, will seriously disrupt the ecological balance of many areas that it passes through, multiple activists say.
A decree issued on January 8 designating 20 new biosphere reserves in Mexico may sweep aside some of this negativity, at least temporarily.
Totaling more than three million hectares, the new Áreas Natural Protegidos (natural protected zones) are located the length and breadth of Mexico’s territory, in the states of Guerrero, Durango, Colima, Chiapas, Yucatán, Zacatecas, Campeche, Veracruz, Puebla, Nayarit and Jalisco, as well as in maritime zones of the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico.
One of the designations, the Sierra de Vallejo-Río Ameca, covers more than 225,000 hectares in Jalisco and Nayarit - one-third located in the municipalities of Bahía de Banderas and Compostela in Nayarit and the remainder in Mascota, Mixtlán, San Sebastián del Oeste and Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco.
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