The “rush” for mining concessions has stopped: López Obrador

Mexico City. In his sixth and final State of the Union address, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador stressed that his administration had halted the “rush of granting mining concessions to national and foreign companies and had not granted any permits to exploit minerals in the open air.”

He also said that the importation of genetically modified corn for human consumption was not continued, the drilling of gas and crude oil wells using fracking was prohibited, and a campaign was launched to recover archaeological pieces and historical documents from the country that were illegally removed and remained abroad.

“In total, we have recovered 14,047 archaeological, historical, ethnographic and documentary assets. I would like to thank my wife Beatriz Gutiérrez for helping us and also for participating in a group of writers and cultural promoters who carried out the National Reading Strategy and the Rehabilitation of Historical Archives throughout the country, including the modernization of the National Archives.”

He said: “We are proud to have found and transferred to our country, after 129 years, the remains of the revolutionary Catarino Erasmo Garza Rodríguez from Bocas del Toro, Panama, to his native Matamoros, where we will deliver these remains and erect a monument, a sculpture.”

He said that “we also fulfilled the wish of General Felipe Ángeles that his wife Clara Krause be buried next to him. Likewise, the remains of General José María Dionisio Melo y Ortiz, the only indigenous president of Colombia, who fought during the reform movement here in Mexico, together with General Ángel Albino Corzo and under the orders of President Benito Juárez, are being searched for in La Trinitaria, Chiapas, for which he was assassinated in 1860 by a gang of conservatives operating in our territory. General Melo had been secretary to Simón Bolívar.”

López Obrador said that “we have not failed to commemorate a single historical date, especially those linked to our Independence, the Reform Movement and the 1910 Revolution.”

He recalled that 2019 was dedicated to Emiliano Zapata; 2020, to Leona Vicario; 2021, to Independence; 2022, in honor of Ricardo Flores Magón; 2023, to Francisco Villa and this year, to Felipe Carrillo Puerto.”

These days, “we are going to inaugurate the Muralism Museum in the beautiful building of the Ministry of Public Education. The renovation of the house where President Benito Juárez García lived in Veracruz and the Cultural Center where the historic Reform Laws were issued in 1860 have been completed.”

He also indicated that in the old Scop Center, affected by the 2017 earthquake, the murals by the artists José Chávez Morado, Juan O’Gorman, Francisco Zúñiga, Guillermo Monroo, José Gordillo, Jorge Best Berganzo, Arturo Estrada Hernández, Luis García Robledo and Rosendo Soto, as well as the sculpture Cuauhtémoc, by Rodrigo Arenas Betancour, were carefully dismantled.

“A new project is about to begin to display them again in a park that will be created on the same site, here in Mexico City. 44 protected natural areas were decreed, and our government is the one that has executed the most resolutions of this kind in history.” He said that the second was the government of General Lázaro Cárdenas del Río.