- In June 2022, the northwest Mexican state of Sonora’s Congress unanimously voted to create the country’s first easement system to protect privately owned wilderness spaces from development.
- For more than two years, the law was not published in the state’s legal register, so it never came into effect. In that time, at least two private conservation areas with the highest existing level of protection have been threatened by development.
- The law was finally published earlier this month, possibly with up to another year before the government publishes guidelines and the first easement is declared. At least two reserves plan to apply, and advocates hope their example will encourage other Mexican states to legislate easement designations.
SAHUARIPA, Mexico — Where saguaro cacti give way to palm trees, some 130 miles south of the U.S. border, a small ranching town is quietly obsessed with jaguars (Panthera onca). Jaguar murals adorn walls, and local ranchers, usually demure and mustachioed, treasure their printouts of big cats caught on camera traps.
Sahuaripa is the nearest town to the Northern Jaguar Reserve, 22,600 hectares (56,000 acres) of protected, privately owned land, where trail cameras have captured more than a dozen jaguars padding through the very northernmost reach of their range at any one time. The reserve itself is still several hours’ cross-country drive away from Sahuaripa, part of what struck conservation manager Miguel Gómez Ramírez when he arrived there 16 years ago. “From the start, this seemed like nowhere I had been before, especially because of how far away the reserve is, how difficult it is to get there — the road, the time.”
Recently, however, the reserve has captured a different type of attention. On a trip in April 2024, Gómez Ramírez pulls to the side of a dirt track halfway between Sahuaripa and the first campground and points to a dead palm trunk surrounded by slightly sulfurous mounds of earth. “Everything yellow is lithium,” mixed with clay, he says. Just 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the edge of the jaguar reserve, this deposit is now part of the Mexican government’s first lithium mining zone, as per a decree issued in February 2023. Across Mexico, the state lithium company expects to begin production within the next four years.
On June 7, 2022, the State of Sonora Congress unanimously passed a law allowing privately owned conservation areas like the Northern Jaguar Reserve to apply for legal protections against industry and development. It was designed to function like an easement: Landowners could enter into a protection agreement and be rewarded with a municipal tax break. Weeks turned to months waiting for the law to be published in the state’s official register, a requirement for it to come into force.
After more than two years of uncertainty, the law was finally published in the state’s official register July 1. But the first designation cannot de declared until authorities publish guidelines for using it, which could take as long as a year, according to the text of the bill. Meanwhile, industrial development continues across the state at breakneck speed. Since the bill passed, not only has the jaguar reserve seen the declaration of the state lithium reserve nearby, at least two other privately owned conservation areas with the highest existing level of state protection have been targeted by industry.
Wildlands Network, a Utah-based conservation charity that advocated to create the designation, initially celebrated the 2022 vote as a historic win. “It felt surreal. It felt like we were onto something,” says Juan Carlos Bravo, Wildlands Network’s conservation programs director and former manager of the Northern Jaguar Reserve. “When we heard it passed unanimously, we threw a party,” Bravo laughs. “We were getting ready to do something about it.”
Sitting at the meeting point of temperate and tropical climates, Sonora is remarkably biodiverse, ranging from ancient, high-altitude pine forests to coastal mangroves and whale breeding grounds, with bushy desert in between.
The designation, called a “real right of conservation,” was passed as an amendment to Sonora’s 1996 foundational environmental law. The easement doesn’t affect landowners’ legal rights to their properties but restricts indefinitely the types of land uses allowed. The law allows for certain uses, such as grazing, tourism and some sustainable hunting, to be agreed in individual designations. Roads, railways, urban or industrial development and intensive agriculture would all be indefinitely banned.
The law represents the first perpetual easement designation for individual tracts of land in the country. It was inspired by an existing system under the same name in Chile and piloted by five other states across the country in 2017, under a public policy loan from the French Development Agency. While Sonora was not part of that original trial, it is the only state so far to have passed a bill creating the designation in Mexico. Now Bravo hopes those pilot states — Oaxaca, Puebla, Hidalgo, Jalisco and Chiapas — might follow suit and legislate their own protections.
At least two private nature reserves now plan to apply for the designation: the Northern Jaguar Reserve and La Colorada Park, a 112-hectare (280-acre) tropical deciduous forest in Alamo, near the state’s southern border. Both drew up contracts after the bill passed two years ago but now have to wait until Sonora’s Congress publishes guidelines for the designation. The official text gives the state environmental department a year to draft those guidelines, but Bravo hopes with the current momentum, Sonora’s first easement may be in place at either reserve before the end of the year.
But it should never have taken this long in the first place, even according to state officials. Most bills are published within weeks of passing, Erich Moncada Cota, the Sonoran Congress’ director of social communications, tells Mongabay. For two years, officials have offered various explanations for the law’s apparent disappearance.
In June, just weeks before its publication, officials from the Congress’ environmental committee told Bravo that the bill was stuck with the governor’s legal counsel. The same week, Moncada Cota told Mongabay the bill was “in the freezer” until Sonora’s finance secretary wrote a budget impact statement outlining how the law would affect the state’s coffers. Because the protection only comes with a tax break at the municipal level, however, it is not clear how the bill will affect the state budget at all.
Days after its publication, Moncada Cota said he suspected the bill was delayed partly because it was forgotten after the congressperson who initially sponsored it declined to stand for reelection in 2022. Before its publication, the governor’s chief spokesperson, Sergio Pacillas Espinosa, said he could not find any relevant information about the bill; he did not respond to Mongabay after its publication.
“We kept asking and we kept getting told that it’s with the right office, or it’s just about to be published,” Bravo says. “After about six months, it was like, ok, it’s not just somebody waiting for the right photo op.” It’s publication after two years is good news — Bravo drove to the registry office for a paper copy of the law before he believed the news — but he still worries the wait is an indictment of the state’s legislative process and land use priorities.
“The best possible scenario is they forgot the bill passed,” Bravo says. Worst case: “The fact that they were able to stall for that long does imply a kind of veto power. … As long as there’s nobody pushing for it, they can just sit on a law and not publish it, which is appalling,” Bravo says.
Protected areas face development
Some protections for private land already exist at the state and national level, but recent history has called their efficacy into question. La Colorada Park, for example, is already federally protected as a voluntary conservation area (ADVC). Landowners who apply for an ADVC designation should, on approval, be subject to the same protections as a publicly owned national park or protected area.
At least two ADVCs have been threatened by industrial development since the law was initially approved. In October 2023, El Bajío, a community-owned town on the Gulf of California near Puerto Peñasco, was granted ADVC status to protect against a gold mine that community leaders say infringed on their land. Despite the protection, locals say a subsidiary of FTSE-traded Fresnillo mining has continued to remove gold, while challenging the designation in court.
Meanwhile, in Ímuris, 257 kilometers (160 miles) east of El Bajío, construction of a new railway began under Army supervision in early 2023. According to leaked government maps, the secrecy-shrouded project would cut through Aribabi Ranch, an ADVC since 2011 where camera traps have captured both black bears (Ursus americanus) and jaguars.
If existing designations are already being abused, Bravo says, there is no guarantee the real right of conservation alone will stand up to future development. Wildland Network’s policy is to layer protections in the hope of dissuading developers. “Everything we do in our line of work is trying to protect what’s left,” he says. “The dice are loaded [so] you have to provide whatever protections you can get. That’s the reality in Mexico.”
Just over a tenth of Sonora is currently set aside for nature, compared with 19.5% nationally. The total includes both ADVCs already in the path of development. While Mexico’s federal environmental department has declared more new protected areas than any previous administration, experts have questioned whether all of them are adequately funded. Officials announced plans for nine more national protected areas in June, as part of an attempt to meet Mexico’s commitment to protect 30% of its land by 2030, under the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework.
For Bravo, Sonora isn’t short of things worth protecting. “The diversity of this place is phenomenal,” he says. “Because it’s a transitional zone, you end up with an assortment of species that is kind of odd.” Camera traps have captured jaguars pawing through the snow in front of hibernating black bears, for example. “The bald eagle, emblem of the United States, sharing the sky with the military macaw (Ara militaris),” a species found all the way down to Bolivia, Bravo says. “It’s definitely not just a desert.”
But running the reserve is expensive, and Gómez Ramírez now hopes to eventually use the designation’s tax break for staffing, equipment and a new truck. Most importantly, he says it might still be the difference between keeping the reserve wild and a future radically changed by lithium extraction.
Neither state officials nor Mexico’s state lithium company replied to a request for comment as to whether they would respect a real right of conservation designation if applied within the lithium reserve.
“It depends on the interests at stake, right? The mines, the gas pipelines, the trains …” Gómez Ramírez trails off, surrounded with drawings, paintings, pictures of big cats back in the reserve’s Sahuaripa office. He remains hopeful but expects mining interests to begin converging soon. He shrugs. “The government says there are works that need to be done and they have to be done for the development of the state.”
Banner image: Photo by Daniel Shailer for Mongabay.
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