Mexico City – Mexico is creating an environmental reserve about 30 feet wide and 600 miles long on the Texas border, a “green wall” to protect the Rio Grande from the roads and staging areas that smugglers use to ferry drugs and migrants across the frontier.
Much of this border zone is remote and inhospitable – generally too rough to hike through unless you’re a black bear or a pronghorn, species that have flourished in the area’s deserts and mountains.
And that’s the way Mexico wants to keep it.
While the proposed Rio Bravo del Norte Natural Monument is only about 30 feet wide, it will connect two large protected areas south of the river. When another nature reserve, known as Ocampo, is created this year, the protected areas in Mexico will form a “wall” of millions of acres of wilderness, matching Texas’ Big Bend parks foot by foot along the border.
“This stretch of border is the safest one we have. It’s safe because it has wilderness on both sides,” said Carlos Manterrola, who heads the environmental group Unidos Para la Conservacion.
Big Bend National Park has had some problems with migrant and drug trafficking, but Superintendent John King says extending protected areas on either side of the border will most likely keep the problem from getting worse. “When you have a roadless area, you make it more difficult for these activities to happen,” King said.
The strip protects a much longer stretch of riverbank, from just downstream of the Texas border town of Presidio to the outskirts of Laredo, Texas, raising the possibility of still larger reserves that will serve as biological corridors, encouraging four-footed traffic but making it exceedingly difficult for humans to pass.
In other border areas where U.S. reserves aren’t fully matched in Mexico – such as Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument – primitive roads and ramshackle hamlets have sprung up on the Mexican side to provide supplies and staging areas to illegal border crossers. They have then overrun U.S. wilderness areas.
Mexican ranchers and environmentalists applauded the Rio Bravo del Norte proposal, which was published Monday, starting a 30-day comment period.
