A Roman Catholic priest who has been awarded an environmental prize for his work to achieve reforms in the forestry industry said Monday he will use the money to build an ecological center where he can continue his work.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — A Roman Catholic priest who has been awarded an environmental prize for his work to achieve reforms in the forestry industry said Monday he will use the money to build an ecological center where he can continue his work.
Jose Andres Tamayo Cortez, 47, said he also would use part of the US$125,000 (euro96,400) Goldman Environmental Prize to buy a car to "fulfill my daily duties under better conditions."
"I feel satisfied for inspiring many people with my work," Tamayo said in a news release issued Monday, a day after he was one of six activists named in San Francisco to receive the award, granted to grass-roots activists who are deemed international environmental heroes. Recipients are nominated by environmental organizations and experts.
Tamayo, 47, a Salvadoran native who has lived in Honduras for 22 years, has worked intensely to protect pine forests in the extensive province of Olancho, in eastern Honduras on the Nicaraguan border.
In 2003 and 2004, Tamayo led large protests to preserve the forests that involved numerous other activists from within the Catholic Church, as well as secular human rights activists, students and teachers.
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Tamayo is one of two prize winners chosen from Latin America this year.
The other is Isidro Baldenegro Lopez, a Mexican farmer who fought for land rights and forest protection in the Tarahumara mountains of northern Chihuahua state, home to some of northern Mexico's last old-growth forests.
Baldenegro, a Tarahumara Indian, said Monday he will continue his struggle, after he spent more than a year in jail on charges he and a fellow activist were carrying assault rifles and marijuana seeds.
"This is incredible, I never expected to be in a place like this ... or win an award like this," Baldenegro said in a a telephone interview from San Francisco, where the award ceremony was to take place Monday.
"I'm going to keep fighting, no matter how many more years it takes," he said, adding "there is no possibility of reconciliation" with local logging interests whom Baldenegro blames for the death of his father, Julio Baldenegro, an Indian leader who also opposed logging and who was murdered in 1987.
Baldenegro has now formed his own environmental group, The Commission for Community Conscience, and while internal power struggles in his home community of Coloradas de la Virgen have prevented him from returning there permanently, he pledged to continue organizing anti-logging and land struggles.
Baldenegro's plight became a cause celebre in environmental circles, with Amnesty International declaring him a "prisoner of conscience."
The farmer-turned-activist long maintained he was innocent of the drug and weapons charges, but Baldenegro's case came to a head last May when an investigation by Chihuahua state prosecutors concluded that four state policemen had abused their authority in arresting.
Baldenegro organized a group of neighbors -- mainly women -- to block logging roads to prevent non-Indian loggers from cutting old-growth pine, and to protect Indian communal property rights.
The Tarahumara mountains, located about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of the Texas border, also are home to endangered species including the military macaw and thick-billed parrot, as well as the Mexican golden trout.
The four other prize winners named Sunday hail from Congo, Kazakhstan, Romania and Haiti.
Source: Associataed Press
