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With squiggle of a pen, the president will have upheld Semarnat representative Sergio Sanchez' promise in February that the oft-delayed measure would be on the books within a month. More importantly, he will have responded to efforts of the environmental right-to-know (RTK) movement in all three North American countries over the past decade to bring Mexico's Pollution Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) up to par with those in the United States and Canada.

The registers are a fundamental imperative for monitoring and enforcement efforts to protect the environment and reverse natural resource degradation, as well as improve community health. What's more, the information they assure is a basic underpinning of participatory democracy.

The president's signature could make Mexico the first country in Latin America to require public disclosure of industrial chemical releases to air, water, and land on an annual, site-by-site, chemical-specific basis. The regulations will guarantee that Mexico lives up to its written commitments under the environmental side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as in the UN.

Since Mexico is a developing country on the verge of joining fully industrialized nations in maintaining a mandatory public register, environmentalists in other developing countries are looking closely at organized civil society's experience in promoting the Mexican PRTR. The environmental RTK movement in Thailand is using Mexico's example to help analyze its own situation and create effective strategies for achieving a register. In the Americas, Costa Rica recently hosted a representative from a Mexican nongovernmental organization (NGO) to speak on pollutant registers in Central America. The Chilean government and the UN also invited Mexican NGO members to a meeting with Southern Cone nonprofits designed to spur a mandatory public register in Chile.

Grassroots activists in Mexico,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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