The battle between the residents of San Francisco, Nayarit, and the developers of Punta Paraíso, Carlos Lemus and Francis Bast, reached the streets yesterday with almost a thousand people demonstrated against what they believe is a dispossession of the public beach.
The population of San Pancho, “has been organized to publicly, openly and peacefully express its total repudiation of the dispossession of at least 1,200 square meters of beach, a direct consequence of the progress of the project,” the organizers of the protest warned.
The work, according to the data of the complainants, “intends to build forty-four condominiums in front of the beach, and was approved through an Environmental Impact Statement (MIA) by Semarnat Nayarit”; the neighbors point out that in the resolution there are “serious irregularities, such as denying that the area has received nesting of sea turtles in the last five years, which is totally false.”
The demonstrators who closed the work “in a citizen and peaceful way”, and demanded that the authorities intervene and “stop the controversial project until the dispossession that San Pancho has suffered on its public beach is corrected and returned to the town in its whole”.
If not reversed, “about 30 percent of the beach could be irretrievably lost, putting the integrity of all its inhabitants at risk by reducing the coastal dune and modifying its natural dynamics, as has been done in other destinations such as Barra de Navidad, Jalisco. ”
In a week, the visit of President Enrique Peña Nieto to Nayarit is expected. Residents of San Pancho hope to address it or at least make their demands visible, in what they estimate is a case of “influence peddling” by developers.
