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Mexico

Background info

Mexico's ratification could not be carried out without the approval of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP), which justified itself by saying that an "economic impact analysis of the ratification" was needed. Being this the only missing signature to complete the process, Civil Society Organizations expressed their concern by writing a public letter, where they requested to accelerate this process, as well as the Senate publicly urged the Government to speed up this process in March this year. The pandemic represents another factor that has hindered this process, causing the text to be approved only at the beginning of the next legislative period in September (Bermúdez, 2020).
For Mexico, this treaty represented a reinforcement of the three aspects mainly addressed in it, which were already present in laws such as General Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information, and the Law for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists. Similarly, there is a precedent of 5 jurisprudence around these issues (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2020).

Environment

Devastation of the territory due to mega-projects
The sector that has aroused the most discontent regarding the development of mega-projects has been the energy sector, especially during 2015 and 2016, after the energy reform that allowed the privatization of oil and oil exploitation activities (CEMDA, 2019). However, there have also been mega-projects from the water sector, industry, urban development, tourism, mining and agriculture that are carried out without consulting the communities that inhabit the territories in question and therefore without their consent. Most of these injustices are committed in the central and southern regions of the republic, where most of the country's megadiverse areas are located, as well as communities of indigenous peoples (Latin American Summary, 2019).
Lack of transparency in access to environmental information
It is a recurrent situation that the above-mentioned mega-projects are approved without the due application of environmental impact studies and their subsequent publication to guarantee free access to information. In this way, permission is granted to build infrastructure and establish industries that overexploit natural resources and unjustly dispossess rural and indigenous communities of their territories (Environmental Portal, 2019). On the other hand, data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) regarding logging, reforestation, livestock, pollution and environmental service activities are not accessible to the population.

Defenders

Between 2012 and 2019, 499 attacks on environmental defenders were registered, which manifested themselves in threats, physical aggression, criminalization and in the worst case, murder, most of which have been classified as homicides. The states with the highest number of registered aggressions are Oaxaca, Sonora, State of Mexico and Puebla (CEMDA, 2019). Most cases go unpunished due to the inefficiency of the judicial system and corruption, a worrying situation given that an estimated 43 per cent of assaults come from government authorities (CEMDA, 2017).
The data collected in the report by CEMDA shows that although the general number of aggressions against defenders decreased in 2019, homicide continues to have the same numbers as 2017 and 2018 (when 16 murders were registered in each of the years); furthermore, it is placed as one of the most recurrent aggressions against defenders in Mexico, victims, people who decide to defend their communities from energy and agro-industrial mega-projects. Global Witness revealed that Mexico was the fourth most dangerous country for the defenders of the Earth in 2018 with 14 murders and in the 2019 report it was in sixth place with 14 homicides of environmentalists (INFOBAE, 2019). In 2020, so far in the Covid-19 health emergency, 10 activists have been killed in Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Sonora (Méndez, 2020).

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