Cross Border Effort Clears Tons of Garbage from Mopan River  

A cross-border cleanup effort on the Mopan River is sending a message that environmental responsibility knows no boundaries. The mayor of Benque Viejo del Carmen teamed up with representatives from the neighboring Guatemalan municipality of Melchor de Mencos this week, pulling together nearly forty volunteers, two canoes, and a determination to tackle what has become a concerning issue along one of the region’s most vital waterways. The joint team collected ninety-five bags of garbage, weighing an estimated two tons, all from the riverbank just meters from the Belize-Guatemala border. The mayor says the initiative came together quickly after videos of the pollution circulated on social media. He sat down with us to talk about what drove the effort.

 

Jorge Rosales, Mayor, Benque Viejo Town

“Things like this, they don’t wait. Because if there’s a rain coming or a heavy rain, all this garbage will go directly down the river and end up in the ocean at Belize City.  The garbage is directly right on the line, on the adjacent line from where the OAS is and the border and everything is right directly across there, where all this garbage was. Because we cleaned everything and you could see the pictures on Facebook. Where we went and we collected 2.35 tons of garbage. That’s about 95 bags of garbage. We picked up of 50 pounds, so that’s a 2.35 tons of garbage that we picked up, and it was much easier to carry it to the side of Guatemala than bringing it to Belize because from the river, from the road on the border is a little farther, so it’s just maybe about a hundred feet from the road on Guatemala. So we took all the garbage out to the Guatemala side. But throwing garbage to the river is not healthy. And I would say it in Spanish, just this little piece: “El agua es vida.” “And we need to appreciate what we have because God gave us the water.”

 

The mayor thanked community members who pitched in to help with the simple message that rivers are our source of life.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

Watch the full newscast here: