Summary
In March 2023, the Indigenous Mayan organization Kanan Ts’ono’ot Collective (Guardians of the Cenotes) from the community of Homún in the Mexican state of Yucatán, filed an injunction in federal court to recognize the bodies of water known as the “Ring of Cenotes Geohydrological Reserve” as subjects of law with rights.
The injunction seeks determination of “cenotes as subject of rights and the members of the mayan community as their guardians, a situation that implies moving from a merely anthropocentric vision, where nature is at the service of human beings, to an ecocentric one, where the concept of dignity recognized to people must be extended to various natural elements.”
The appeal for protection follows over a year of requests by the community of Homún for the Mexican and Yucatán government to halt intensive large-scale infrastructure, real estate, agriculture, and other extractive mega-projects that have caused irreversible damage to the aquifer of the Yucatan peninsula, and “thus affecting the fundamental rights of the Mayan people and the equilibrium of the territories they inhabit.” These projects – including the highly controversial “Tren Maya” – have proceeded without Free Prior and Informed Consent, which is outlined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and which Mexico is a signatory of. Mexico also is a signatory of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (ILO Convention 169), and lists protections for Indigenous Peoples in its constitution. The injunction explains that these projects “generate negative socioecological impacts on the bicultural heritage represented by the [Ring of Centoes geological reserve]” and pose a threat to the Ring of Cenotes, as well as the Mayan communities that have “rights to the natural resources of the area [and] ancestral guardianship over the cenotes.”
In March 2023, the Fourth District Court of the Fourteenth Circuit admitted the appeal for protection, and on May 29, 2023, a federal judge determined that Yucatan authorities committed omissions and violated rights by authorizing the Environmental Impact Statement for the Homún mega pig farm and announced a Definitive Suspension of the megaprojects. While this does not mean that the legal petition has been won by the Guardians of the Cenotes, it does prevent the continuation of megaproject implementation in the Maya territory of Homun due to the irreparable risks they could pose to the environment and cultural rights.