Calica Protected Area Plan Delayed to 2026

Cancún, Quintana Roo — The management plan for the recently created Felipe Carrillo Puerto Protected Natural Area (ANP) will not be ready until the first or second quarter of 2026, due to the implications this document will have on the international litigation between the Mexican government and the American transnational company Vulcan Materials, owner of the Calica mine located within this reserve.

The document was supposed to be ready by mid-2025, as announced by Alicia Bárcena, head of the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources, but it is now known that authorities are being extremely careful with its implications to avoid new lawsuits with the North American mining company.

The management plan will determine the use that can be given to the lands this company owns within the ANP, which is why its publication has been delayed.

Juan Carlos Romero Gil, director of the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (Conanp) in the Yucatán Peninsula and Caribbean Sea, stated that although there is significant progress, consultations are still being conducted with ejidatarios and especially with private landowners to prevent legal injunctions (amparos) from being filed once the document is published.

“We are already in the final phase of the document. I insist, all these processes involve a consultation process to avoid injunctions and regressive legal proceedings. So, everything is under consultation for the program,” Romero Gil said.

The decree creating this ANP was published on September 24, 2024, just a few days before the end of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government, after it failed to purchase the Calica mine and the rest of the lands owned by the American firm in Playa del Carmen, from where it extracted limestone for export to the United States.

The litigation stemming from this disagreement is being resolved before the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), where Vulcan Materials filed a lawsuit for $1.9 billion against the Mexican government for preventing it from continuing to extract stone material from the subsoil of Playa del Carmen.

The Felipe Carrillo Puerto natural area has a total surface area of 53,227 hectares, of which 4.4% corresponds to the 2,387 hectares divided into four properties belonging to the transnational Vulcan Materials, owner of Calizas Industriales del Carmen (Calica) and the Punta Venado dock, from where, until last year, the stone material extracted from the Mexican subsoil was shipped for export to the United States.

The justification for including Vulcan’s lands in the new ANP states that the impact of extractive activities at the Calica mine has reached such a degree that “nine bodies of water have been exposed following the removal of vegetation and limestone.”

However, once Claudia Sheinbaum’s government took office, it was announced that they are again seeking a purchase-sale agreement with the company that would also settle the international litigation being resolved before the CIAT.