Environment

Mexico City marches for climate action

Mexico City, Mar 25 (EFE).- Some 500 environmentalists and activists took part in a Fridays for Future march in Mexico City to demand the government and relevant authorities to get to work in the fight against the climate crisis.

Friday’s demonstration, which began at the Angel of Independence on the central Reforma Avenue and ended in the capital’s Zócalo, took place peacefully ahead of Saturday’s World Climate Day and Earth Hour.

“This is the tenth Climate Strike globally [and] this is the first climate strike where we took to the streets openly after the pandemic and also in which our movement has organized together with other campaigns that our movement did not dare to organize before,” activist Náme Villa del Ángel told Efe.

The Mexican is part of the Fridays for Future movement started by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who on a Friday in August 2018 started the school strikes that returned on Friday with thousands of participants around the world, including in Mexico City

Villa del Ángel explained that the movement calls for climate and social justice and collaborates with different social movements such as indigenous, feminist and anti-racism groups.

“The climate struggle is a social struggle. It is a class struggle in the sense that the systems that created the climate breakdown and are driving it. They are the same ones that built the systems of oppression that are reproducing in the climate crisis,” he said.

He added that the climate crisis has made people “who were already vulnerable, now more so in this collapsing system.”

The young Mexican activist criticized the current government, headed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has promoted the construction of the Mayan Train in the southeast of the country that is feared to create great ecological damage.

“They have absolutely no understanding of the climate crisis, nor of climate change. And in addition to not understanding, they are destroying ecosystems and taking away (resources) from communities. In Mexico they continue to use energy sources (such as coal) that destroy the planet,” he said.

“(The government) is not understanding anything. And when they think they understand, they still don’t understand – the systems have to change completely,” Villa del Ángel added.

World Climate Day, declared in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in 1992, is commemorated on Mar. 26 to raise awareness of the importance and influence of the climate, as well as the impact of climate change. EFE

jmrg/tw

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