By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said Monday, May 2, said that he will bring legal action against the Mexican-Alabama joint venture mining corporation Calica Legacy Vulcán for extracting gravel for export, rather than for local consumption.

During his daily morning presser, López Obrador said that, from a flyover of Calica-Legacy Vulcan he made over the weekend, he had witnessed how the company is extracting materials and loading them on a ship for export.

“We already know these swindlers are not extracting minerals just for use is Xcaret (a nearby tourist attraction),” AMLO said.

“Vulcan, the largest construction company in the United States, which also has a bank here, is extracting gravel to be used on highways in the United States. The company received permits from the neoliberal governments (of the past) and the environmentalists never said anything. Now, this represents an unprecedented destruction of Mexican territory.”

AMLO went on to say that Vulcan, in its joint venture with Calica, a Quintana Roo-based quarry and port company, is continuing to mine gravel, despite its executives having told him that they had suspended the mining of rocks for export.

“I have instructed Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) Secretary (María Luisa Albores González) to proceed immediately with legal action against the company for violation of the law and the tremendous destruction of the environment (the gravel mining represents). The company has had the audacity to make fun of the authorities of our country by not putting a halt to this extraction,” he said.

López Obrador said that the mining company has already extracted materials deeper than what is allowed by law and presented projected images to “back up” his claims that it is “crooked,” although there is currently no pending legal complaint against Calica-Vulcan.

“For a company to be able to extract minerals, it must first obtain the corresponding permits,” he continued.

“This company received those permits from the administration of (former Mexican President Ernesto) Zedillo, and it had other permits from before. But it is breaking the law by extracting material at depths of deeper than five meters.”

Some critics of the president immediately responded that his claims against Calica-Volcan were intended to distract attention from the construction of his controversial Tren Maya tourist train, which ecologists have warned will destroy the Yucatan Peninsula’s fragile cenote underwater river system and annihilate over half the indigenous species of flora and fauna in the area.

Meanwhile, also on Monday, Semanart’s Albores González acknowledged that the construction of Tren Maya Section 5, which had been ordered halted by a federal judge due to the imminent and irreparable damage its posed for that region’s cenotes, is continuing — without any corresponding environmental permits — as planned, as a result of a “presidential degree. “