In the town of Sitilpech, Yucatán, with 1,799 inhabitants, there is a pig farm with 48,000 pigs operated by the company Productos Pecuarios para Consumo, which supplies Keken, the largest pig production group in Mexico.
Industrial pig production arrived in the community 4 years ago, without public consultation, say villagers who oppose the project, who have resorted to legal means to stop it.
Last May, an application for amparo was filed with the First District Court based in Yucatán, integrated into file 887/2021, which resulted in a definitive suspension of the farm pending resolution of the case.
However, the company involved, Consumer Livestock Products, filed a complaint in which it argued that the application for amparo should not have been admitted by the Judiciary. With this remedy, it was possible for the company to bring down a lawsuit initiated in the neighboring town of Chapab de las Flores.
The remedy of complaint, as provided for in the Amparo Act, is the counterparty's opportunity to be unhappy with a judge's decision to admit a lawsuit that they consider to be inappropriate.
“What the Collegiate Court did was agree with the company and thus eliminated all the judgment, saying that it should never have been accepted,” said Janet Medina Puig, lawyer for Kanan Human Rights, a group that accompanies communities.
For this reason, on July 5, 700 residents signed an application to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), in which they request that it attract the appeal filed by the pig company, a power that allows the Court to hear cases even if they have previously passed through courts or tribunals.
With this, they seek to set a positive precedent for the admission of amparo lawsuits concerning the rights of the country's indigenous peoples and the environment.
At a press conference this Wednesday, July 20, accompanied by the environmental organization Greenpeace, representatives of the community and the Kanan Human Rights collective reported that the company argues that the amparo is “notoriously inappropriate”, due to the temporality in which it was filed.
The community's legal defense pointed out that this is contrary to environmental protection. The complainants maintain that it has contaminated the water, air and soil of the Sitilpech territory without any authority having carried out its work related to the prevention and precaution of environmental damage.
Roberto Sánchez, also a lawyer for Kanan Human Rights, stated that there is demand for the omission of the authorities to protect local ecosystems and the violation of the right to a healthy environment.
For its part, Greenpeace Mexico delivered a technical letter to the Supreme Court in which it highlights the environmental and social impacts that mega-pig farms, such as the one operating in Sitilpech, cause to the environment.
According to the report “The Meat That the Planet Is Eating”, published by Greenpeace in 2020, deforestation in the Yucatan Peninsula due to pig farms is potentially 10,997 hectares of jungle.
Comentarios (0)