The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN-DH) in Mexico this Friday reiterated its call to comprehensive repair of victims and the recovery of the environment after the fateful toxic spill in the Sonora and Bacanuchi rivers, occurred in August 2014.
For the seventh anniversary of the accident, the agency issued a statement in which it asked to strengthen the comprehensive reparation processes for the victims and the undertaking of concrete actions for the recovery of the environment.
On August 6, 2014, a valve failure in a Grupo México mine generated the spill of 40,000 cubic meters of a solution loaded with copper and other metals processed with sulfuric acid that contaminated the Sonora and Bacanuchi rivers, leaving no water for human consumption and productive activities to more than 22,000 inhabitants of seven municipalities.
Jesús Peña Palacios, deputy representative of the UN-DH Mexico, recalled that before the arrival of a new administration in the northern state of Sonora “the responsibility of the State, at the state and federal level, includes ensuring transparent, participatory and accessible measures for all the affected communities, in line with international standards on the matter ”.
Likewise, it stated that the responsibility of companies to respect human rights “does not depend on the capacity or will of the State” and pointed out that they are also obliged to observe “due diligence in their processes and remedy their errors.”
He reiterated that it is essential to achieve adequate reparation and ensure non-repetition “to effectively guarantee the rights of the victims.”
According to a recent bulletin from the NGO Power, despite the environmental disaster, Grupo México has argued that it has already complied with the compensation for the damages to the victims of the spill, while the victims ask the current Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take measures about.
Last year, the Mexican government officially recognized that “wells that supply water to thousands of people contain metals in quantities that are dangerous to health” and established a deadline for an “environmental diagnosis”, which ends on October 4.