Tour Shows the Horrors of Pollution in State of Jalisco Agencia EFE
go to original July 17, 2017

Created in collaboration with award winning documentary film-maker Eugenio Pogolvsky, "Un Salto de Vida" focuses on a family living in El Salto, a city on one of Mexico's most heavily polluted rivers: the Rio Santiago. (GreenpeaceVideo)

A group of activists has created what they call a Horror Tour of the Mexican municipality of El Salto, in order to raise awareness of the pollution in the Santiago River, which has caused countless deaths over the past few decades.

The tour travels through that area in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, where industries and the municipal garbage dump pour their toxic waste into the river, and the El Ahogado treatment plant, which is supposed to clean the water that will be consumed by local inhabitants, emits a putrid foamy stream.

Alan Carmona, a member of the Un Salto de Vida (Waterfall of Life) association, which is behind this project, told EFE that the tour is offered to schools, university students, civil organizations and even local inhabitants who are unaware of the dangers surrounding them.

“It’s not just to raise awareness; it is, above all, so people can visualize their place within this problem,” the activist said during a tour of the municipality, some 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco.

The tour reaches one of its worst features at Juanacatlan Falls, which divides Juanacatlan from El Salto, and which was once considered the “Mexican Niagara” for the vast volume and breathtaking beauty of its waters.

Today it is a waterfall of immense contamination with a smell that makes visitors scarcely able to breathe. The water carries the waste of 250 Mexican and foreign companies located in the El Salto area, and of more than 650 located along the river.

The waterfall has become a symbol of how companies in the region created jobs but exterminated the flora and fauna of the surrounding area, and harmed the locals physically, Carmona said.

Read the rest at Latin American Herald Tribune

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