Catholic Church launches environment network for Mesoamerica

MEXICO CITY – The Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and six Central American countries have launched a network to co-ordinate efforts to benefit the environment and indigenous people in the region.

The Vatican’s information service says that “like the Amazon, the Mesoamerican biological corridor is a devastated territory and threatened by state concessions to transnational corporations.”

It warned that large extractive projects, mono-cultivation and climate change threaten land, the environment, culture and self-determination.

Gustavo Rodríguez Vega is archbishop in Mexico’s Yucatan and head of the new Ecclesiastical Ecological Network of Mesoamerica. He said Friday that church representatives discussed the needs of each country and indigenous people, “who tend to be the most susceptible and those who suffer more from all the ravages of industries that go to their regions to deforest or excavate.”